The United Kingdom’s decision to put right wing talk radio host Michael Savage on their persona non grata travel ban list has elicited a storm of media attention. A google news search of “UK and ‘Michael Savage” turns up well over a thousand stories. Even the Council on American-Islamic Relations defended his right to free speech.

In 2007, CAIR led a campaign to boycott Savage because he called the Koran a “book of hate” and said “I don’t wanna hear anymore about Islam. I don’t wanna hear one more word about Islam. Take your religion and shove it up your behind. I’m sick of you.”

Of course I don’t think those words warrant a boycott. But they seem no harsher than calling Islam a “wicked, vicious, faith”. And in 2005 British National Party Chair Nick Griffin was charged with incitement of religious hatred - a crime that held a penalty of up to seven years in prison in Britain - for saying those three words.

Shameful as the travel ban is, it’s far less totalitarian than jailing your own citizens.

The prosecution of Griffin and many other anti-immigration and anti-Islam politicians such as Frank Vanhecke, and Susanne Winter received scant attention in the American media and even less criticism. In fact I often hear conservatives repeat the “neo-fascist” smears against the populist right in Europee using the charges of hate crimes as proof. I’ve always responded that if they were in Europe, half of America’s talk radio hosts would be in jail.

Maybe the Savage affair will help open the Respectable Right’s eyes - preferably before Sen. Teddy Kennedy’s Hate Crime Bill sneaks into law.

At the age of 10, before I thought about immigration, I still questioned whether newcomers would still maintain their old allegiances. When Redskins hired Norv Turner who had been offensive coordinator of our arch-rival Dallas Cowboys in 1994, he inherited a dismal team with no quarterback and the number three draft pick. He shocked sports fans when he chose Heath Shuler from Tennessee to fill the spot as opposed to Trent Dilfer from Fresno State who was widely considered to be the stronger pick.

My first thought was that Turner was still loyal to Dallas and he intentionally went with the inferior Shuler. Whether I was right about Turner’s motives, Shuler was a huge disappointment. During his three years with the Redskins he started in only 13 games, winning only 9. Trent Dilfer became a Pro-Bowler and Super Bowl Champion. Shuler is considered by many to be the Redskins worst draft pick in history.

When now Democratic Congressman Heath Shuler spoke to the group Progressives for Immigration Reform yesterday, a woman—apparently not aware of his days as a quarterback—said she followed his career. He responded by apologizing to her for his days with the Redskins to much laughter.

Shuler is the hero of many patriotic immigration reformers for being the most vocal Democrat in favor of serious immigration enforcement. With mass immigration unpopular across the spectrum and a Republican Party led by George Bush and John McCain until recently, it’s encouraging to see some take the lead on the issue.

Shuler’s speech focused primarily on the SAVE Act and E-Verify pounding the importance of making sure that American Jobs go to American Workers. I had actually never seen Shuler speak before and he struck me as very intelligent and charismatic.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed by a few points in his speech. When asked about anchor babies, he said that birthright citizenship was in the constitution (which it’s not) so there’s no point discussing it. Also, I left with the impression that he was much more concerned with implementing E-Verify than stopping amnesty.

If Shuler were a Republican, he’d be seen as a pretty solid on the issue, but not as a hero. Often forgotten is that he was elected by defeating Charles Taylor who had an A+ lifetime rating from Numbers USA and was stronger than Shuler on anchor babies.

With a solid Democratic majority and an increasingly unified Republican Party, the fate of immigration reform lies with the ability of Democrats like Shuler.

Unless he successfully leads other Democrats to stand strong for enforcement and against amnesty, his election in 2006 was nothing but someone good on immigration beating someone who is even better.
Let’s wish him the best.

Bakari Kitwana writes on the legacy of African-American Duke Law professor John Hope Franklin at the Huffington Post. Franklin, who died March 25,  was given practically every single honor imaginable to a professor–being named president of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians, as well as receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Kitwana complains that not enough attention is given to Franklin ’s pro-reparations stance in his death. This is the typical bait and switch, as Franklin would not have become as well regarded if he had been promoting reparations and the like in his lifetime, but now that he’s so respected we must support his radical agenda.

The piece was titled: “Did John Hope Franklin Want $100 Trillion for Blacks?” Franklin actually didn’t argue for that level himself, but the idea of giving $100 trillion dollars–that’s 100,000,000,000,000– shows the absurdity of the Reparations movement.

This would be 2.5 million dollars for every African American in the country. It’s twice the net worth of all US households, over 7 years worth of the GDP, and 28 years of Obama’s record breaking budget!

Literally, they’d have to confiscate the wealth of All Americans, confiscate 100% of their assets for four to five years, and that’s assuming there’s no diseconomic effects to this scheme!

The Daily News’s Dolores Prida sent me an e-mail acknowledging her error in her February 11 smear against me, but says it pales in comparison to the “hate speech” VDARE readers sent her.  She asked me how she could have a “dialogue” with my “followers”

A number of VDARE readers copied me thoughtful e-mails they sent Ms. Prida, but the ones she sent me used less than temperate language. I implore our readers not to use profanities when e-mailing our antagonists.

That said, The few foul mouthed VDARE readers who upset her do not write for us, much less a newspaper with a circulation exceeding 600,000.

But neither Ms. Prida, nor her friends at La Raza, the SPLC, and the New York Times are not trying to avoid a dialogue with my “followers.” They are trying to avoid a dialogue with me and even my more moderate friends at groups like Numbers USA and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Some of the e-mails that were forwarded to me were quite mean, maybe even “hateful.” But this becomes a case of la muchacha que gritó El Lobo when she calls using the terms “blanket amnesty” and “open borders” hate speech in her column attacking me.

Working for organizations associated with Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, I get plenty of hate e-mail and occasionally even death threats. One “anti-racist” website accompanies their profanity laced screed against me with my home address.

But I don’t complain about them, because they are just a few nut jobs who don’t have any power in influencing policy or the wider debate on immigration. My hands are more than full dealing with the lies and slurs directed at me from nut jobs who unfortunately have a lot of power like the SPLC and New York Times.

So once again, I ask VDARE readers to be respectful when e-mailing our opponents, lest it give drama queens like Ms. Prida to use it as another excuse to try to shut us up.

As James Fulford noted, after much fanfare the New York Daily News finally posted a correction of the falsehoods in their smear of me.

Initially the piece by Dolores Prida (email her) claimed.

“Driving immigrants out and sealing the border are the best arguments to win future elections among the “more important” white voters, according to a report issued by the group American Cause and authored by Marcus Epstein.

These “more important” voters get, in large numbers, their world view from conservative talk radio and Internet publications, where hate-mongering thrives, unchecked and unchallenged.

Taking the terms “white vote” out of context deceptive, but changing it to “white voters” is completely false. Furthermore, nowhere in my report do I actually discuss “white voters,” “white votes” or anything to do with electoral politics. They got this bright idea from the press release that stated:

In addition to discussing this study, panelists will argue

* Despite years of pandering, the GOP never won the Hispanic Vote;and past success was overstated
* More Hispanic voters oppose amnesty and support border controlthan vote for pro-amnesty candidates like John McCain
* Immigration is not a major factor for Hispanic voters
* Whatever gains, if any, pandering to Hispanics gives is greatly
outweighed by loss of the White Vote, which is more important.
* The Demographic changes made by mass immigration have been disastrous to Republicans and fatal if not halted.
* Support for border security, national sovereignty, and immigration control rallies the GOP and brings Reagan Democrats back into the GOP

The “in addition to this study” prepositional phrase should be a pretty clear sign that these statement are not in the study.

Below is my letter to the editor, which will most likely not get printed.

Dolores Prida’s column, “Assimilate This” attacks me because my report “Immigration and the 2008 Republican Defeat” supposedly claimed that white voters are “more important.” This is simply untrue. My report does not even cover voters, it discusses the views of candidates. The word ‘important’ does not even appear in the report, nor does the word “white” except when it is someone’s last name. When I have written ethnic voting patters in the past, I stated, “a white vote is just as important as a Hispanic vote.”

After spending much of her column attacking me for something I didn’t write, she then says I am guilty of “ignorant speech” if not “hate speech” for failing to “assimilate” that “There’s no one American ‘dominant’ culture. There never has been.”

This would be news to our Founders.

In the Federalist Papers #2 “Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence” John Jay wrote, “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs…”

Ms. Prida is entitled to her views on immigration and assimilation. In the future, though, I suggest she reads what I’ve written before she attacks me, and learn a little American History before telling me what our country “never has been.”

Although the New York Times acknowledged that their editorial slamming VDARE.com, myself, and others as “nativists“ received “a lot of mail,” they have yet to print any letters critical of their editorial. (They normally do not print letters more than a week after a piece, so it unlikely that they will.) They did, however, publish this doozie by Hilary Hinzmann [Email him]

The nativists have already lost — irrevocably. The unparalleled diversity of the United States — and the increasing economic, political and social significance of Latino Americans — is assured by current demographics.

The immigration issue today is not ethnicity but numbers. How much immigration will there be, how diluted will the labor market become, how large a percentage of the population will be poor, and how wide will be the gap between rich and poor? These are the questions that progressive liberal critics of high rates of immigration have asked from Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh to Barbara Jordan.

The nativists are a failed sideshow to those critical questions.

Roy Beck and Numbers USA make it very explicit that their policy is based on Mr. Hinzmann’s guidelines:  reducing total numbers, not  bashing immigrants or making ethnic claims. This did not stop the NY Times editorial board from regurgitating the SPLC’s slur that Numbers USA was part of the “Nativist Lobby.”

I agree with Mr. Hinzmann that progressives have many reasons to support immigration reform for completely non-ethnic reasons. VDARE publishes writers like Randall Burns who make this point.

But I am still waiting for any progressives to actually do anything about immigration. Since Barbara Jordan, I cannot think of a single African American leader or politician of any significance to actually argue in favor of serious immigration control. Nor can I think of a single progressive organization, politician, or leader, who really makes any arguments for immigration reduction in terms of numbers.

We “nativists” aren’t a sideshow, we are the only show. When People for the American Way, The Center for American Progress, and the NAACP start advocating reducing immigration numbers, I’ll be happy to cede the issue to them. Until then, Mr. Hinzmann should come to grips with the fact that to the SPLC and other open borders advocates, he is still a “nativist” for supporting immigration reduction, no matter how “progressive” his motives.

I was shocked and saddened to hear the news that English First executive director Jim Boulet died of cancer last week.

For the last decade, Jim headed English First. That position allowed Jim to work both with patriotic immigration reformers along with “Assimilationist” amnesty supporters. Unlike some English advocates, Jim was a firm supporter of immigration control, and was able to use his organization to push the issue whenever possible. The last few amnesty bills, for example had provisions that undermined Official English, so English First opposed them on those grounds. Boulet also led fights against the EEOC, Puerto Rican Statehood, and Hispandering.

I can think of more than a couple of occasions where I went to an utterly asinine conservative conference where Jim served both as the photographer as well as one of the few people I with whom I could have a sane conversation.

Jim was always willing to lend a helping hand. When I brought candidates to D.C. to meet with the movement, he would eagerly set up meetings with key leaders who wouldn’t give me the time of day.

Two years ago, I spoke at an English First press conference against Mel Martinez as the Chairman of the RNC. The American Cause is organizing a similar press conference to coincide with the upcoming RNC election, and I called Jim on his cell phone two weeks ago asking for advice. After about 10 seconds the call broke up. I left a few messages over the next week, and wondered why he hadn’t called back. I found the tragic explanation this morning when I saw Kathryn Jean Lopez make a note about his service at National Review Online.

May he rest in peace.

On Thursday, conservative activist Paul Weyrich died at age 66. Weyrich is best known for creating the Heritage Foundation and coining the term “Moral Majority.” Yet I believe Weyrich’s greatest contribution to the conservative movement was to force it to address issues that actually had a constituency besides journalists and intellectuals. The New Right of the late 1970s and early 1980s focused on homosexuality, busing, feminism, gun control, the Panama Canal, and other issues that galvanized Middle America; but the establishment conservative movement would rather ignore.

Of course if there is one populist issue that pits Middle America against the establishment, it’s immigration. For the last four years that I’ve been active in the conservative movement; Weyrich has always been one of the more forceful and hard hitting voices against amnesty, and increasing legal permanent and temporary immigration.

Weyrich did not keep his opposition to mass immigration in “safe” terms. He defended European Nationalist parties like the Vlaams Belang, and made it clear that immigration poses demographic concerns,

Many of our United States, especially in the West and Southwest, today are overrun with illegal immigrants, mostly from Latin America. Yet anyone calling for true immigration reform or the actual enforcement of laws already on the books frequently is labeled a racist. Suggesting that it might not be a good idea that the vast majority of public school children in Texas and California are Hispanic and that their parents may or may not be legal immigrants is intolerant and even cruel according to the left-wingers.

Dozens of obligatory tributes to the man have come out of the official organs of conservatism. Hopefully some of them will remember his commitment to patriotic immigration reform.

On Saturday, Barack Obama announced that he hoped to sign a bill to create the biggest expenditure on infrastructure and public works since Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System. Obama did not give an exact figure on the costs, but estimates are in 700 billion dollar range to spend on roads, bridges, broadband access, school buildings, and rewiring public buildings to make them more energy efficient.

While Obama says these are necessary investments, the main purpose of this bill is not so much what gets built, but the fact that the expenditures will create jobs. Leaving the economics of this aside, if the government needs to spend money to employ jobs building stuff, why not start with the border fence? After all Obama voted for the Secure Fence Act to construct the fence, but then voted against Jeff Sessions’ resolution to fund it, because he thought it was too expensive.

Now that we are looking to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for the purpose of “job creation,” even if it costs the 49 billion dollars its critics claim, there’s no reason not to build it, since it is, after all, necessary for border protection.

Yet strangely, the refrain from the Left is that we can’t afford to build the fence. A group of Democratic Texas politicians sent an open letter to Obama calling the fence an “irresponsible expense while the country is in the midst of a recession.” I hope Obama will write them back to say that its construction will help create jobs for Americans…which brings me to my next question.

Will these jobs actually go to Americans? One of the few proactive things Bush did in office was to sign Executive Order 12989 requiring all federal contractors to use E-Verify to ensure that no illegal aliens get hired. Unless his stimulus plan is to create “jobs that Americans won’t do,” I hope Obama will honor Bush’s executive order and make sure that E-Verify is reauthorized in March with no strings attached.

In January when it looked like McCain was about to win the GOP Nomination, I wrote:

I’m not good at forecasting elections, but I am confident in my prediction of how it will be spun.

If John McCain gets the GOP nomination, he will still lose the Hispanic vote by a large margin.

If he wins, the chattering classes will compare how he well he did among Hispanics compared to the GOP’s performance in the 2006 midterms, proving that the Hispanic vote won him the election.

If he loses, they will compare his low numbers to George Bush’s phony success among Hispanics in 2004. His defeat will be attributed to his toned down his support for open borders and/or the xenophobia of other Republicans.

Maybe I’m clairvoyant, because no sooner had the polls closed were we treated to articles like “A Major Swing by Latino Voters Back to the Democratic Fold” in US News and World Report, “Hispanic vote grows, shifts to Democrats” in USA Today, “Big Turnout of Latino Voters Boosted Obama” in the Wall Street Journal, and “In Big Shift, Latino Vote Was Heavily for Obama” in the New York Times

Every single one of these articles cites the long debunked 44% Bush received among Hispanics in 2004, and claims that the Hispanic vote helped win the election, and blames Republican stands on immigration for the shift.

Here’s a few highlights:
From US News and World Report:

“Bush was the pro-Latino Republican in the ’90s,” says Gonzalez.” And who was at his side? His brother Jeb—and John McCain. They said, ‘We’re pro-Hispanic; we’re for affirmative action; we’re for quotas; we love Mexico.” But instead, both Bush and McCain deserted Latinos, Gonzalez says. Partly as a result, a recent Pew study shows that 55 percent of Hispanic voters say the Democratic Party has more concern for their community, opposed to 6 percent who say the same of Republicans

From USA Today:

Making matters worse was the Republican stance on immigration. The issue hit headlines in 2006, with Republicans in Congress fighting against illegal immigration and for firm English-only policies. To some voters, that felt like a betrayal.

USA Today misleadingly compared Obama’s showing among Hispanics to Bush’s in 2004; so they could say “He won 67% of the Hispanic vote — 23 percentage points higher than President Bush’s showing in 2004.”

From the Guardian: .

It is a signal about the kind of American political map that will take shape later in the 21st century, as Hispanic voters come to outnumber all others. It is very bad long-term news for the Republicans, whose immigration policies are costing them dear.

From the San Diego Union Tribune:

In spite of Bush and McCain advocating reforms that called for guest workers and a path to legalization, some of the loudest proponents of restrictions have been Republicans, among them Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., and Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
McCain suffered from guilt by association, said Frank Sharry, director of the Washington, D.C., immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice.

A quick reality check: John McCain lost the Hispanic Vote by 66-32%. This was better than the 29% the GOP received in 2006, and worse than 38% (not 44%) Bush got in 2004. As usual, it fluctuated around 15-20% below the white vote. Bush got 58% of the white vote in 2004, and McCain got 55% this year, so the Latino vote did fall three percentage points more than the the white vote. My guess is this had more to do with the prospect of a non-white president rather than immigration.

While Latinos showed up in record numbers, they still only made up 8% of the electorate. So this relative 3% drop among the numbers makes a grand total of 0.24% of the vote from Hispanics. I’m sure the number of white and African American voters who stayed home or didn’t vote for McCain because of amnesty would more than make up for that infinitesimal number.