04/29/2007
At times when the nefarious, post-national forces arrayed against immigration sanity seem overwhelming, it’s cheering to realize that ordinary American citizens from sea to shining sea are, in large numbers, rising to the challenge.For example, some time in the last couple of weeks, the immigration-reduction organization NumbersUSA signed up its 300,000th faxer for our cause. That’s one out of every thousand Americans! If distributed uniformly across the 435 congressional districts, this would be 690 faxers per district, which is certainly a formidable number of educated constituents for hammering a congressional office on a single subject. (And for a state with more than about 20 congressional districts — California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida … — a U.S. senator’s office really takes it on the chin!)
But how uniform is the distribution of NumbersUSA faxers? Congressman (and former House Speaker) Dennis Hastert (R-IL) said last summer that "Every state is a border state," and certainly we're hearing news about illegal aliens' impacts from every corner of the map. Still, are Americans from every corner alarmed enough to be digging into their wallets?
Yes. A recently added feature at NumbersUSA’s site is their frequently-updated national map of current-month-to-date donations by grassroots members/faxers. The map is self-explanatory, but I'll point out that it’s organized by congressional district and that the color code giving number of donors per district is at the map’s bottom. (The map doesn’t provide total donation amounts per district.) Those living in large metro areas will likely be interested in the regional maps on the right margin. You can also scroll down to see the final map for the preceding month.
If you're registered with NumbersUSA and currently logged in, the map displays a headline giving the number of donations from your district so far this month. If you're not registered, or not logged in, you'll see "Put Your Congressional District On The Map In Fight Against Amnesty & Extreme Immigration" across the top of the map.
At 1:30 a.m. Mountain Time on Sunday, April 28, 2007, the map and the donations gage just below it on the left show that patriotic citizens from across the country have stepped up in sufficient numbers to keep the fight for the country’s survival humming this month. Though the distribution of donors per district is far from uniform, it’s clear that there are districts glowing green or "hotter" in every state except Hawaii, North Dakota, and Rhode Island.
A glance at the detailed metro maps shows many "cold" central cities abutting suburbs that are hot to red hot. (Surprise!)
Interestingly, northern Virginia, DC, and Maryland is a pretty hot area, donations-wise, suggesting that the area’s increasingly in-your-face diversity and metastasizing traffic gridlock are winning us converts among citizens well-located to shriek at Congress in person, if suitably mobilized.
I look at the map at least daily. I find it fascinating and, towards the end of the month (when there’s lots of green through red), heartening.
Of course I’m interested in how Montana is doing, since I live in Bozeman. This month it’s on the verge of red hot, the best yet. Since I’m actually logged in to the NumbersUSA site, I can also see that we're at 14 donations.
You might ask, "So all the congressional districts across Montana are about equally hot?" Well … all of Montana is a single district! It had two districts until after the 1990 census, when the (largely-immigration-driven) population growth in other states cost Montana its second congressional seat.
(Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Alaska are also single-district states. Because of this, their — and Montana’s — U.S. senators probably aren’t being pounded by enough faxers.)
What would impel citizens in remote Montana to be as concerned about mass immigration as they are, judging by their robust financial support for NumbersUSA? I’m not sure. Maybe the donors up here are primarily refugees from California, such as myself. On the other hand, news articles on immigration in Montana’s papers that permit online comments from readers typically attract swarms of such comments, heavily weighted toward getting tough on illegal aliens, their enablers, and their employers. For example, see a recent Billings Gazette article ("Immigration bills fail in legislature," scroll down for readers' comments) about the disappointing demise of state-level immigration bills in our legislature this year. It’s clear that a lot of these comments are from genuine Montana residents, as distinguished from kibitzers who live in other states.
The other state that especially interests me is Oregon, which consists of five congressional districts. The eastern 2/3 of Oregon (which may be one geographically-large district; I don’t know) has been red hot for at least these last three months. What’s going on there? Questions such as that may sometime become grist for master’s and PhD theses in history — if we save the republic — with these donation maps as a primary source.
So there are lots of us contributing money to the cause, all across the country. Many of us are carrying the burden.
However, these donations are just a means to our end, not a suitable arena for competition or boasting rights. I've had people tell me that they were reluctant to use NumbersUSA’s tools because they couldn’t afford to donate. But those of us who can afford to donate want as many patriots as possible using these tools, with no guilty feelings allowed!
As Tom Tancredo said at a November 2003 rally in LaCanada, California,
But we have no other choice, do we? No matter what it looks like, no matter how overwhelming. [Long-time newsman-broadcaster] George Putnam must have thought a million times in the years he’s been [talking about this crisis], that this is overwhelming. But he doesn’t stop, and you know why? He can’t stop. There is no alternative to doing everything we can do. I don’t care what your lot in life is. I don’t care what you’re doing or what your job is. You have a role to play with your neighbors, with your friends, with letters to the editor, with ways you can influence your constituency. I have the same role to play. We all have to do it, no matter what it takes and no matter how challenging.
[See Chapter Nine of Daniel Sheehy’s Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Battle to Save the Nation.]
p.s. If you're not yet active via NumbersUSA, you might be interested in an intro I've written that I can email to you. Please contact me if so.
p.p.s. Although this note may seem to be a puff-piece for NumbersUSA, that’s not my intent. I was spurred by their donations map and what it tells us about participation in our cause across the country. I encourage donations to all the national (CIS, Pro-English, CAPS, 911/FSA, FAIR … ) and local groups (CCIR, IFIRE, CAIR, Dustin Inman Society … ). And, of course, VDARE!
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.