This New York Times story is just foolish–McCain’s father was a naval aviator stationed in the Canal Zone when his son was born, but McCain is still a “natural-born” citizen of the United States, like Allan Wall’s sons, and like about two million other Americans.

McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out - New York Times

From left, LOWELL P. WEICKER JR., of Connecticut, born in Paris, was told he was eligible for the Oval Office. GEORGE ROMNEY, born in Mexico, ran for the presidency in 1968. BARRY GOLDWATER was born in the Arizona territory in 1909, before it became a state. CHESTER A. ARTHUR was born in Vermont, but rumors suggested it was Canada.
By CARL HULSE

New York Times
February 28, 2008

WASHINGTON — The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president? In the case of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming.

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.[More]

What we at VDARE.com keep pointing out is that just as McCain is still an American, though born abroad, the children of illegal immigrants are still foreign, although born illegally in America. See Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause, by Howard Sutherland, and Children Of An Invading Army, by me.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, has an article about why he’s supporting Hazleton in its appeal of a decision striking down their efforts to fight illegal immigration:

Hazelton: Immigration’s New Frontline

By Tom Fitton
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2/28/2008

You may recall that in July of 2007, a federal judge ruled against two City of Hazleton, PA, ordinances dealing with the employment and harboring of illegal aliens. But that was not the end of the story.  The lawsuit is now on appeal. And, on February 14, 2008, we filed an amicus curiae brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in support of Hazleton. (By the way, want to take a guess at which organization is leading the legal campaign against Hazleton? You guessed it. The American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU].)

Here’s our argument in a nutshell: “…The regulation of the landlord-tenant and employment relationships – are well within the traditional police and licensing powers of the City. Because the ordinances do not seek specifically to regulate immigration, they are not preempted by federal immigration law,” Judicial Watch argued in its brief. [PDF]“In fact, the ordinances work in harmony with federal law and are entirely consistent with purposes set forth by Congress in enacting legislation concerning immigration. They also fit comfortably within well-established case law authorizing local government actions.” (You can read the rest here.)

By way of review, Hazleton’s Ordinance 2006-13, otherwise known as the Rental Registration Ordinance, requires a person who intends to rent a “dwelling unit” in the City of Hazleton to submit an application and obtain an occupancy permit. (To obtain such a permit an applicant must provide “proper identification showing proof of legal citizenship and/or residency.”) Ordinance 2006-18, otherwise known as the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, prohibits any business entity in the City of Hazleton that holds a business permit from employing an illegal alien. This ordinance also prohibits any person or business entity owning a dwelling unit in Hazleton from harboring an illegal alien in that unit.[More]

Note to  copy-editors–the correct spelling is Haz-le-ton, not Haz-el-ton. And there’s only about an even chance that a journalist  will spell it right. In this case Fitton spells it right throughout the article, so I suppose the error in the headline was put in by an editor at Frontpagemag.com.

Here’s an excerpt from my new article in The American Conservative on relations between blacks and Hispanics:

The slugfest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in which only the most painstaking analyst can discern any disagreement over policy, highlights the ancient yet growing importance of ethnic identity in politics.

The race didn’t start out that way. The 2007 polls showed that blacks favored Senator Clinton, the wife of “America’s first black President,” over Senator Obama, the preppie from paradise. Yet, when the crunch came, four-fifths of black Democratic primary voters rallied to the yuppie technocrat’s banner.

Shaken by the defection of an ethnicity Hillary had assumed was hereditarily hers, the Clinton campaign then pointed to the Latino vote as their “firewall.” And in the important California primary, Hispanics did vote 67 percent to 32 percent for the former First Lady. Elsewhere, however, the vaunted Hispanic bloc once again didn’t quite live up to the hype. Indeed, Hillary responded to her post-Super Tuesday woes by firing her Hispanic campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and replacing her with Maggie Williams, who is black. As I write, Mrs. Clinton is left hoping that Latinos will bail her out in the upcoming Texas primary.

The multiracialization of American politics has barely begun. When it comes to identity politics, numbers count. And a new population projection from the Pew Research Center estimates that Hispanics will grow from 42 million in 2005 to a jaw-dropping 128 million in 2050. Meanwhile, African-Americans will increase from 38 million to 57 million (while Caucasians will barely creep over the 200 million mark, presumably on the strength of Middle Eastern immigration).

The relationship between blacks and Latinos will become increasingly central to American life. It’s a murky phenomenon, poorly understood by the white-dominated press. …

Americans just don’t pay much attention to Latinos, period. In American public discourse, Hispanics, especially Mexican-Americans (who now number about 30 million), remain what interstellar “dark matter” is to astrophysicists — a quantitatively significant, yet mysteriously featureless aspect of the universe.

This is not for a lack of motivation on the part of America’s corporate and political elites. Consultants have been trumpeting the growing numbers of Hispanics for a generation. Marketers have been lusting for the emergence of more Mexican-American celebrities to plug their products at least since Nancy Lopez’s record-setting 1978 LPGA rookie season made her the most popular lady golfer ever among advertisers.

Although the media constantly try to drum up interest in Hispanics by extolling them as “swing voters” living in “vibrant neighborhoods” and so forth and so on, the tedious reality is that the single word that best sums up Latino America is inertia. Things just sort of keep on keeping on in the general direction that they were already moving.

Here’s an interesting overview piece about polygamy taking hold in societies that supposedly have outlawed it. Governments from Britain to Minnesota find it easier to pretend the problem does not exist than to confront foreign cultures embedded in our midst which regard women as replaceable parts.

Individual cases often come to light unexpectedly through high-impact media events such as the Morton saga. Another example is the tragic Bronx house fire that killed ten people on March 7, 2007. Moussa Magassa, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Mali who lost five of his children in the blaze, was discovered to have two wives living a floor apart. A subsequent investigation by the New York Times found polygamy to be an open secret in his immigrant community, with agencies that serve it adhering to a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Lack of official curiosity is just one reason for the poor statistics. Practitioners also labor to avoid scrutiny. Two strategies are common. Some Muslim men with additional wives living abroad arrange for relatives to sponsor visas that can bring them to the West without raising red flags. Others find second, third, or even fourth wives locally, sealing the deal in a nikah ceremony conducted by an imam. Because such marriages are performed under the state’s radar and have no legal standing, the wives enjoy none of the rights guaranteed to spousal partners.

Concern about Islamic polygamy — whether in the West or East — has naturally been dismissed in some quarters as cultural imperialism. For example, Duke University professor Miriam Cooke argues that “polygamy can be liberating and empowering.” As Kay Hymowitz explains in City Journal, “Some women, [Cooke] continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won’t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn’t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? ‘I don’t know,’ Cooke answers, ‘I’m interested in discourse.’”

Two nations have apparently skipped the “discourse” and moved straight to capitulation. Following a yearlong review, the British government has ruled that husbands can claim benefits for multiple wives, as long as the marriages are legal in the countries where they were conducted. Specifically, guidelines issued by the Department for Work and Pensions regarding the jobseeker’s allowance state: “Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate (£92.80). The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65.”
[Take My Wives, Please: Polygamy Heads West, Pajamas Media, Feb 29, 2008]