Now that Dreams From My Father, and Obama’s alienation have finally been mentioned in NRO,  it turns out to be in a syndicated column.

Mona Charen on Barack Obama on National Review Online
Obama’s America
He’s told us what he really thinks.

By Mona Charen

Barack Obama’s words are often attractive but oddly concealing. His speeches are all balm and mood. It’s all very well to seek, as Obama claims, to transcend old categories, to reject the “old politics.” But then what? This graceful rhetorician leaves you wondering: Who is he really? What does he want for himself and for his country?

In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the book contains some disquieting elements.

Obama is the product of a union between a white Kansan and a black Kenyan who met in Hawaii. I had assumed, before reading his memoir, that Obama viewed himself as a natural bridge between the races and that his message of unity sprang in part from his biology. That was wrong.[More, but why bother? If you read VDARE.com, you've heard it before.]

Really, this is incredible. The only other mention I could find of Dreams from My Father, on National Review’s website was in a blogpost by Jonah Goldberg, and the mention wasn’t by Jonah, but by one of his readers.

Steve Sailer has been writing about this for a year–long enough that people were trying to suppress him, and when he wasn’t suppressed, he was “condemned” by the George Soros/David Brock organization, Media Matters. There was a big denunciation of Sailer for repeating all this stuff (that Obama wrote himself) in the Washington Monthly.

By October of 2007, even the New York Times had picked up on it, enough to fact check some of what Obama had written about his time as a young man in New York,  and find that it was “somewhat misleading.”

The parts about how alienated he felt are unlikely to be misleading though. As the only black professional in a Manhattan office, he said he felt like “Like a spy behind enemy lines. ”

If he felt that way in a downtown office, how’s he going to feel in the White House?

But I digress. My point is that thanks to Steve Sailer, VDARE.com, and The American Conservative, this has all been available to be known to anyone with a computer and an internet connection for a whole year.

So when Mona Charen writes “I had assumed, before reading his memoir, that Obama viewed himself “ that Obama was a “Transcend Race”  kinda guy, she’s right to say “That was wrong.” Boy, is she ever!

Check out the intensive instruction new refugees get about American law and culture — a briefo chat over coffee and doughnuts.

It shows how little assimilation is valued among the multicultural immigration fanciers. The resettlement workers go through the motions, teaching need-to-know items that will keep Achmed out of the slammer.

You can’t smoke in most places. Bribes are a no-no. Car seats and kids’ bicycle helmets are the law.

And beating your wife will land you in jail — not to mention get you deported.

These are among the new rules and customs the world’s refugees face in California [...]

“In many cultures, it’s OK to beat your wife,” said Debbie Decker, resources director for the Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Service in Atwater Village. “That is not OK here; it is illegal. You will go to jail, and you will be deported. [...]

“We have to tell them the policeman is not a bad guy. Unlike in your country, they’re not out to get you,” she said. “If you’re pulled over, don’t try to bribe your way out of it like you do in most countries.
[For refugees, rules to live by, Los Angeles Daily News, March 8 2008]

Washington is welcoming thousands of similarly diverse peoples to communities around the country!

It’s easy money for the interfaith settlement workers of the Episcopal, Lutheran and assorted other church groups.

Of course, refugee importation is an activity mandated by the State Department and President, and if this bunch didn’t get paid to provide a Cliff-Notes guide to the USA, then someone else would.

On Jan 17 I attended a lecture in San Francisco given by Bangladeshi-born Muhammad Yunus. He is the economist who invented the idea of microlending to help desperately poor people around the world better their lives through developing small businesses. In 1983, he founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to put the concept into practice. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and remains a popular figure among anti-poverty activists.

The crowd must have been around 500, and I was therefore pleased when my immigration-related question was one of the handful chosen to be read.

When I wrote my article that included mention of the speech (Microlending: The Ticket to Staying Home), the audio file was not yet online so his exact words weren’t available. You can now listen to the whole talk online at this link.

Here is my transcription of the question and Yunus’ answer, with a little clean-up editing:

COMMONWEALTH CLUB: A member of the audience asks this question. With five billion people living in countries poorer than Mexico, don’t you think microlending is a better strategy for tackling poverty than massive immigration…

YUNUS: People seek their opportunities if you can attract people with microcredit, keep them in their places, of course they will love that.

It’s not fun to leave your home and struggle through all kinds of legal barriers, live like thieves and criminals in another country.

[Immigration] is no fun. They do it out of desperation because life is so difficult there, So if we can all make life better where people live, where they were born, where their forefathers lived, then nobody will leave their place.

That’s what we’re talking about. Wherever we are, we should be able to get a better life for ourselves. Desperation will push us to do desperate things even at the risk of our own lives.

There you have it. One of the foremost, most honored humanitarians on the planet agrees with me that microlending is a far better solution to alleviating worldwide poverty than immigration.

Furthermore, he alluded to the cultural dimension, that people would rather remain in their forefathers’ country than undergo the shock of adjustment to a different society, as long as they can make a decent living and have hope for their children.

The next time some shallow do-gooders whine that America must open itself up to unlimited poor immigrants because we have too much money (heh), you can quote Muhammad Yunus to them.

An op-ed in the Salt Lake City Tribune called Immigration enforcement threatens American liberties [By Kevin Van Horn, March 3, 2008] is largely about the threat to the liberties of illegal Mexicans, but it does contain the germ of a serious point, which is that interior enforcement does bother Americans in various ways. Of course massive illegal immigration is also a threat to American liberties, so just surrendering isn’t an option. If the borders were less porous, this would be less of a problem, since that kind of enforcement only bothers  illegal border crossers.

And of course, no story of illegals being deported can possibly be complete without  raising the specter of the possible deportation of an American citizen. But using this story doesn’t impress me:

And don’t suppose that American citizens need not fear deportation. Thomas Warziniack was imprisoned for weeks because officials thought he was an illegal Russian immigrant; not until a U.S. senator intervened was his family allowed to prove he was born in Minnesota.

Usually, for a citizen to be mistaken for an illegal, he has to be some kind of mental case. Warziniack is some kind of mental case, and was detained because he told officials he was an illegal Russian immigrant:

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine.[Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens
By Marisa Taylor,  McClatchy  News, January 24, 2008]

Warziniack, who has been doing heroin for eighteen years, claims he was in withdrawal when he said that, and can’t remember anything. Another case is a “mentally disabled” (i.e. retarded, rather than crazy) Hispanic whose relatives probably shouldn’t have been letting him wander around unsupervised,  and there was a similar case in Australia, where a woman called Cornelia Rau, a legal permanent resident, told police she was a German tourist because she didn’t want to tell them she was an escaped mental patient.She was detained, but not actually deported, but the case has caused a lot of heart-throbbing on the Australian left.

But here’s my original point–the more the border can be controlled, the less problem immigration enforcement will be to American citizens.