Before the big Senate amnesty tanked due to unprecedented public outcry, illegal Irish were full of warm multicultural support for their compadres in sombreros. Now, not so much. In the previous situation, the Irish were happy to lobby for an amnesty for the tens of millions of lawbreakers in order to convenience themselves while incidentally trashing America. But that political solidarity with Mexicans et al has disappeared in the new non-amnesty climate.

Illegal Irish believe they are SPECIAL, and they now insist that they receive a separate amnesty on their own. So sorry, Mexicans! It’s every border-buster for himself these days!

President Bush is committed to dealing with the issue of illegal Irish immigrants in America, the US consul for Northern Ireland has said.

The failure of recent legislation which would have allowed illegal immigrants who had left the US to return means many are afraid to visit home.

US consul Dean Pittman said the president wanted to resolve the issue.
[Bush 'committed to illegal Irish' BBC 8/10/07]

Hey, does Mexico City know about Bush accepting a legally binding bowl of shamrocks (photo above) from Ireland PM Bertie Ahern? Where’s the diplomatic outrage on the part of el Presidente Calderon? He should respond with a sprig of Mexico’s similarly iconic plant.

On second thought, maybe not.

James Pinkerton and Eric Hanson obfuscate in the Houston Chronicle:

In a powerful sign of the region’s growing diversity, more Hispanics than Anglos now live in Harris County as it led the nation in growth of minority residents, according to Census Bureau estimates to be released today.

………

There were an estimated 1.48 million Hispanics in Harris County in July 2006, or 38.2 percent of the county’s total. That exceeded, for the first time, the county’s estimated 1.44 million Anglo residents, who make up 36.9 percent of the population.

That marks a significant reversal since 2000, when the Hispanic percentage in Harris was 33; for Anglos it was 42.

What happened here? Well Houston’s previous white and black populations were not edged out of Harris County. The number of non-Hispanic/non-whites stayed the same because there were a large number of refugees from the Katrina disaster-and some immigration from non-Hispanic parts of the world.

Mathematically, the diversity of Harris county is now starting to decrease. It is now simply becoming more Hispanic-and will likely soon start to become less black.

Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times has been going around asking Republicans if illegal aliens can get automatic citizenship for children born in the United States

Huckabee on citizenship rights

Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times Posted on August 9, 2007

Following on the Rudy Giuliani comment earlier this week that birthright citizenship is a constitutional guarantee, I had a chance to ask another candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, about his view of the issue.

“I would support changing that. I think there is reason to revisit that, just because a person, through sheer chance of geography, happened to be physically here at the point of birth, doesn’t necessarily constitute citizenship,” he said. “I think that’s a very reasonable thing to do, to revisit that.”

Which entirely reasonable. See, for example,Children of an Invading Army, (by me)

Consider the following hypothetical case:

Imagine that an invading army enters the United States, wearing uniforms and carrying arms, and behaving exactly like an army, but bringing their wives.

This is what the European armies of the early nineteenth century did, during the Napoleonic Wars, after all. Women frequently gave birth in foreign countries.

If this hypothetical invading army stayed long enough to have children, would the enemy soldiers’ sons and daughters be American citizens?

Would those children have the right to return to the US, years later, and sponsor their soldier fathers, who would presumably have been expelled in this hypothetical war?

The idea is ridiculous.

Dinan has a round-up of people he’s asked about this:

*Reps. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter are co-sponsors H.R.1940.
*Mitt Romney was still studying the issue late last month, according to ABC News’ Teddy Davis
*When asked earlier this year, Sen. Sam Brownback said he was going to “fudge” on what he called the “anchor baby proposal,” saying it was a constitutional question and out of his hands.
*Giuliani also says it’s a constitutional guarantee.
*Rather than letting the constitutional questions be an impediment, Rep. Ron Paul has introduced a constitutional amendment, H.J. RES. 46, to change the 14th Amendment.

I know Ron Paul has great respect for the Constitution, but if he feels that there needs to be an amendment to stop birthright citizenship, I think he’s wrong. See Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause By Howard Sutherland, August 31, 2001, for the Constitutional issues involved, with quotes and links to the Senate Debate for May 30, 1866, which shows the intent of the people who passed the bill.

Several months ago, after Mexicans booed Miss U.S.A. in Mexico City, I wrote this in a VDARE.COM article

“The administration of President Felipe Calderon wants us to amnesty illegal aliens, allow in more guest workers and finance economic development in Mexico. But neither he nor anyone in his government criticized the booing…Couldn’t Mrs. Calderon, who had dined with all the girls, have spoken out about it? Shouldn’t Miss Mexico, as the host country contestant, have spoken up more forcefully about it? Couldn’t some Mexican beauty pageant officials or some Mexican celebrity have spoken out about it?”

Well, finally, a Mexican official has apologized.

The apology came in the form of a letter written by Mexico’s tourism chief of staff, Gabriel Szekely, who expressed regret for the booing and wrote that

“We understand the concern of the people of the United States about the incorrect behavior of a small group that attended the event. We apologize for the inconvenience, and be sure that Miss Rachel Smith will always be welcome in Mexico.”

Well, thank you Mr. Szekely.

Interestingly, the letter, sent through the Los Angeles consulate, was actually addressed to activist Ted Hayes, after Hayes and fellow activist David Hernandez had complained to Mexican Consul Ruben Beltran. It was also forwarded to Miss USA, Rachel Smith.

After the giant illegal alien marches in the spring of 2006, the mainstream media confidently predicted that Hispanics would turn out in vast numbers at the polls last November. Well, the Census Bureau’s gold-standard estimate of the Hispanic share of the vote in the last election (based on its survey of 153,000 respondents) is now out, and the Latino fraction fell from 6.0% in 2004 to 5.8% in 2006.

As Peter Brimelow has been pointing out since 1997, simple arithmetic shows that the growth in Latino voters is bad for the GOP. (David Frum echoed Brimelow’s point recently, and was called a Ku Klux Klanner for his troubles.)

As I’ve been pointing out since 2001, however, the widespread belief among Establishment Republicans like Karl Rove that the growth in the Latino vote is so rapid that they already constitute a decisive bloc whose views on illegal immigration can’t be disobeyed is innumerate. There’s still time when it remains politically feasible to do something about immigration.

For example, GOP pundit Michael Barone wrote that the Hispanic vote would reach 8 or 9 percent in the 2004 election. I publicly offered to bet him $1,000 that the Census survey of 50,000 households right after the voting would find a figure closer to 6.1%. The actual result was 6.0%, but Barone didn’t take me up on my offer (which is too bad because I could use the money.)

The Hispanic share typically falls slightly from the more exciting Presidential election to the more ho-hum mid-term elections, because Hispanics aren’t as dutiful voters. For instance, it dropped from 5.4% in 2000 to 5.3% in 2002. So, versus the last midterm election, the Hispanic share was up half a percentage point from 2002 to 2006. This continues the long-term trend of the Hispanic share growing 0.012 to 0.016 percentage points per year.

The Pew Hispanic Center points out that the Latino Demographic Tsunami isn’t generating a similar Electoral Tsunami, as the graph shows. The Pew folks, who crunched the numbers off a Census Bureau data file, report:

” … the growth of the Latino vote continued to lag well behind the growth of the Latino population. This widening gap is driven by two key demographic trends: a high percentage of the new Hispanics in the population are either too young to vote or ineligible because they are not citizens.

As a result, while Latinos represented nearly half the total population growth in the U.S. between 2002 and 2006, the Latino share among all new eligible voters was just 20%. By comparison, whites accounted for 24% of the population growth and 47% of all eligible new voters.

About 5.6 million Hispanics voted in the 2006 mid-term election, which historically draws far fewer voters than the quadrennial race for president. Latinos accounted for 5.8% of all votes cast, up from 5.3% in 2002. That increase was largely a function of demographic growth.

Latinos historically lag behind whites and blacks in registration (percent among all eligible voters) and voting (percent of registered voters who actually cast ballots). In 2006, the pro-immigration rallies held in many cities raised expectations that political participation among Latinos would also increase.

Census data shows a marginal increase in registration and participation rates among Latinos between 2002 and 2006. Whites, however, also experienced a slight gain, so Latinos did not close the considerable gap. About 54% of Latino eligible voters registered in 2006, up from 53% in 2002. About 60% of these registered voters said they actually voted in 2006, up from 58% in 2002.

By contrast, 71% of white eligible voters registered in 2006, two percentage points higher than in 2002. About 72% of these registered voters said they voted in last year’s mid-term elections, one percentage point higher than in 2002. …

Hispanics accounted for 5.8% of the votes cast in 2006, up from 5.3% vote in 2002. In absolute numbers, an additional 800,000 Hispanics cast ballots in the 2006 election compared with the 2002 election.

Whites accounted for 81% of the votes in 2006, unchanged from 2002. In absolute numbers, an additional 5.6 million whites cast ballots in the 2006 election compared with the 2002 election. Blacks accounted for 10% of the votes in 2006, down from about 11% in 2002. The black vote increased by 400,000 in 2006.

The 5.6 million votes cast by Hispanics in 2006 represented 13% of the total Hispanic population. The 9.9 million votes cast by black represented 27% of the black population and the 78 million votes cast by whites represented 39% of the white population. [More]

So, non-Hispanic white residents of America voted in 2006 at three times the rate of Hispanic residents.

Overall, whites cast almost 12 ballots for every ballot cast by a Hispanic.

If Washington insiders weren’t so clueless about these numbers, they never would have tried to inflict their amnesty bill on us. But, because you aren’t supposed to talk about things like this (remember when my first voting analysis article in VDARE in 2000 got me banned for life from Free Republic? Hey, is that website still in business? You never hear about it anymore …), they were astonished when the citizenry overwhelmingly rose up and rejected the Kennedy-Bush-McCain bill.

Via Audacious Epigone.