For example: last month’s massive "Día sin Latinos" [Day without Latinos] demonstration in the state capital of Madison received essentially no national publicity [A message to Wisconsin’s immigrant-bashers, by Michael Billeaux and Liam Manjon, Socialist Worker, February 2, 2016], perhaps because the 2011 demonstrations against Governor Scott Walker’s pruning of government union power proved such an embarrassing failure…or because similar demonstrations backfired against Amnesty in 2006.
But only about 6.5% of Wisconsin’s population was “Hispanic or Latino” in 2014 — up from 5.9% in 2010. How did the rest of Wisconsin feel?
Organized by the Leftist, rabble-rousing Voces de la Frontera (whose mission statement illogically boasts of defending low-wage workers) the demonstration closed many businesses — mostly restaurants — and drew 20,000 illegal aliens and their advocates to the state capitol to protest against what they say are two “anti-immigrant” bills.
AB 450 would have withheld funding of “Sanctuary Cities” that refused to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officials;
SB 533 bars local governments from issuing their own photo ID cards.
But the demonstrations — or something — had an effect. The Sanctuary City bill, which easily passed the GOP-controlled Assembly, was ignored by the politically correct GOP-controlled Senate until the current session ended on March 15. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said the legislation wasn’t a “top priority” for his gutless caucus and Governor Scott Walker “also indicated he was fine with the legislation not making it to his desk this session” [Nass blames ‘political correctness’ for blocking vote on sanctuary cities bill, by Andrew Beckett, Wisconsin Radio Network, March 14, 2016].
Wisconsin columnist Chris Rickert recently regurgitated dairy lobby propaganda, claiming playing by the rules would send the price of dairy products through the roof:
There might be more people clamoring to “work on these rural farms” — and thus more incentive to crack down on undocumented workers — if the hourly pay were significantly higher than the mid-teens range (dairy industry executive John) Holevoet mentioned on the radio the other day.
Bringing wages up to what they should be when you work out in the middle of nowhere, more or less chained to the lactation schedules of hundreds of cows, would obviously come with a pretty hefty spike in the cost of dairy products.
The Texas A&M study found that “eliminating immigrant labor would reduce the U.S. dairy herd by 2.1 million cows, milk production by 48.4 billion pounds and the number of farms by 7,011.
“Retail milk prices,” it continued, “would increase by an estimated 90.4 percent.”
Those kind of changes might be enough to take the “dairy” out of America’s Dairyland.
And I’m not sure even the most virulently anti-illegal immigration Wisconsinites want to pay nearly twice as much for their beloved cheese.
But the cost of curds should be the least of Wisconsinites’ concerns. Like other parts of the country that find themselves dealing with increasing
Financial costs. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Wisconsin’s estimated 95,000 illegal aliens are costing the state $697 million a year.[Immigration numbers in Wisconsin by Richard Moore, The Northwoods River News, March 02, 2016.]
Refugees. Areas like Wisconsin which have traditionally been mostly white, are targeted by refugee contractors, the State Department, and churches for resettlement of exotic refugees. (And have been for more than 20 years — see The Ordeal Of Immigration In Wausau, by Roy Beck, The Atlantic Monthly, April 1994. ) If you click on Refugee Resettlement Watch’s “Wisconsin” tag, you get headlines like this:
Needless to say, none of this makes the least difference to Wisconsin’s business community, which continues to press blindly for “immigration reform” a.k.a. Immigration Surge/ Open Borders uber alles e.g. Wisconsin Technology Council President Tom Still Tom Still: Immigration reform elusive in election year, but inevitable for economy, Wisconsin State Journal, February 16, 2016.
Nor has it made much difference to Wisconsin’s politicians — yet. VDARE.com’s Talk Radio Listener recently reported a clueless performance on the refugee scandal by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who is up for re-election this year.
Johnson is typical of a Republican Party that has not kept its promises to fight the Obama Administration’s agenda, especially the president’s executive amnesties for millions of illegal aliens. About a year ago at a Townhall meeting I tried to get him to acknowledge the impact of foreigners on American workers. Like all politicians he agreed that illegal immigration should not be tolerated, but he wouldn’t agree that reducing legal immigration was appropriate even during a period of very high unemployment. His response was simply that we are a "nation of immigrants." His record on reducing refugee and asylum fraud is a mixed bag that leaves me skeptical as to just how serious he is about America’s security and well-being.
If I had the opportunity to question them, I’d ask the following:
Why is nobody in or out of Congress, including an MSM that can’t spell Critical Thinking let aloneengage in it, demanding to know why, according to Pew Research, 7 million illegal aliens are being permitted to remain in their payroll jobs in construction, manufacturing, services and transportation while the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 15 million Americans are unable to find full-time work?
How can “Immigration Reform” — Amnesty— be “comprehensive” if millions of jobless citizens are deliberately excluded from the mix?
Dave Gorak, a retired Chicago journalist, is the executive director of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration. He and his wife abandoned the ant hill called Chicago in 2005 for the quieter environs of rural southwestern Wisconsin.
Although, as