06/04/2007
The about-to-be-renewed storm over S.1348, the Comprehensive Capitulation-to-Mexico Act of 2007, has stimulated a weeks-long burst of excellent analyses. Here I simply want to point VDARE readers to several that, so far as I know, haven’t previously been linked here. There’s a lot in these articles that we can use for making the patriotic case to those public officials whose brains are capable of grasping ideas more complicated than the "We're a nation of immigrants!" third-grade-level "argument."Ann Coulter seems to have decisively sworn off the Bush Kool-Aid in her recent "A Green Card in Every Pot." This is a brief piece that deals with big, non-politically-correct ideas. I'll treat you to three of her first four paragraphs …
"Americans ( … ) believe the natural state of the world is to have individual self-determination, human rights, the rule of law and a robust democratic economy. On this view, most of the existing world and almost all of world history is a freakish aberration."In fact, the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world.
[snip]
"At the precise moment in history when the U.S. has abandoned any attempt to transmit Anglo-Saxon virtues to its own citizens, much less to immigrants, George Bush wants to grant citizenship to hordes of immigrants who are here precisely because they are fleeing cultures that are utterly dysfunctional and ruinous for the humans who live in them."
… and urge you to read the rest! (In Coulter’s very first sentence above, I've omitted eight words that are excellent but that might distract from the larger idea in the passage.)
Columnist Jim Pinkerton, in "Poor immigrants end up being expensive," (Newsday, 5/29/07) says, "Bush bids to be remembered, not as the president who brought democratization to Iraq but rather as the president who brought Brazilification to the United States." I've heard others predict the same American destiny if immigration anarchy continues — a small plutocracy and a large peasantry, with essentially no middle class — and make the analogy to Brazil, but the word "Brazilification" strikes me as a useful invention.
John Fonte, a senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote a brief overview of S.1348, "Comprehensively Bad." He includes nine bulleted paragraphs on various aspects of S.1348’s awfulness and then a bit more discussion about his own specialty, patriotic assimilation. Here’s a sample paragraph on that topic:
"Title VII: Section 707 spells out the details. The term 'assimilation' disappears; the concept of 'Americanization' never appears; and the Euro-speak weasel word 'integration' enters the text. Thus, 100 million federal dollars will be given to states and cities to award grants to 'nonprofit organizations with experience working with immigrant communities' for 'effective integration of immigrants into American society.'”
(Note that one of Fonte’s bulleted points, "Tax amnesty," has been superseded, at least for now, by an amendment [SA 1190, passed by voice vote on 5/24] John McCain got tacked onto S.1348.)
The Hoover Institution’s Stanley Kurtz has been paying significant attention to the family-unification chicanery in S.1348. In his latest, "Look to Europe," he draws attention to Europe’s experience with the poisonous brew of multiculturalism/anti-assimilation and cousin marriage among Muslims. Here’s an astonishing paragraph from near the end of this fairly long piece:
"The [New York] Times says it found 'no evidence of wrongdoing' by the families it interviewed, but the lure of family reunification is famous for provoking 'wrongdoing.' Here’s the remarkable story of an Iraqi refugee who married his mother in an attempt to use marriage-unification laws to bring his family to Norway. An extreme case, to be sure, but also an indication of the ingenuity that goes into exploiting family unification."
That’s a teaser: Go to the Kurtz article and click on the link he provides at "Here’s" in the paragraph I quoted to be properly outraged by this life-imitates-Oedipus story. In "No Alien Left Behind," Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies concludes,
"Once an illegal alien gets legal status, no matter how 'temporary,' he’s here for good. Sponsors of the Senate’s amnesty bill know this full well."
It’s a brief article and worth reading for the ammunition (bitter experience) it provides.
I mentioned "Rx for Breakdown," an article by Kris Kobach, law professor and former counsel to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a blog entry a few days ago, but it seems worthwhile to point it out again. It’s a terrific summing up of the bureaucratic meltdown at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [UCSIS] that will result if S.1348’s amnesty is enacted. A quote:
"It’s a bureaucratic sweatshop. Adjudicators told the GAO [Government Accountability Office] that their managers were consumed with meeting 'production goals,' driving the workers to process applications too quickly and increasing the risk of undetected fraud. Cash rewards are even given to the adjudicators who can work the fastest."As a result, USCIS doesn’t even bother to do commonsense verification with outside agencies — for example, calling a state Department of Motor Vehicles to see if two people claiming to be married actually live at the same address. Such scrutiny would take too much time. Many managers actually discourage caseworkers from seeking more info from aliens who submit suspicious applications.
"If they won’t call an American DMV, how can we expect the agency to contact local officials in Colombia to check for a criminal record?"
Jim Boulet, executive director of English First, wrote "Hillary’s Immigration Dilemma," a couple of weeks ago. Despite the Hillary-focus in his title, Jim’s real theme was the destructive aspects of S.1348’s little-discussed language features. A sample:
"The 12 million or more illegal aliens who are to be given the immediate gift of amnesty thanks to the new Z visa would be expected, sometime during the next four years, merely to 'demonstrate an attempt to gain an understanding of the English language.'"This 'attempt' requires either taking the federal naturalization test, a test that a Washington Post editorial recently commended for its national pass rate of 84 percent, or enrolling in an English class, or simply being on a waiting list for an English class.
"The waiting-list exception will really annoy the electorate, considering how easy it is to get into an English class: church-sponsored English classes are free and gladly take all comers, while enrolling in a Berlitz or community college English class would cost only a small portion of the $20 billion remitted to Mexico in 2006.
"The Senate amnesty bill does ask that, after eight long years in the Z-visa program, illegal immigrants pass the naturalization test — after no more than three tries. If too many people should fail, there is always the 1996 Citizenship USA solution of dumbing down the test. Or allowing people take it in Spanish, thanks to E.O. 13166."
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.