The Daily Mail reports on an outrageous demonstration of Islamic insolence in London yesterday.

Islamic protesters sparked fury today after they burned a model of a poppy and deliberately broke the silence at Armistice Day commemorations in central London.

As millions of Britons fell silent to remember those who have died in war, members of a group called Muslims Against Crusades clashed with police during an ‘emergency demonstration’ in Kensington, west London.

As the clock struck 11am, the Islamic protesters burned a model of a poppy and chanted ‘British soldiers burn in hell’.

They held banners which read ‘Islam will dominate’ and ‘Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell’. ...

The protest, in Exhibition Road, near Hyde Park, involved about 50 people while about another 50 counter-demonstrators had to be kept apart from the group by a line of police.

Three men were arrested at the scene – two for public order offences and one for assaulting a police officer. ...

It is thought Muslims Against Crusades is a splinter group of Islam4UK, founded by Anjem Choudary.

Freedom of speech has never traditionally included the right of the foreign enemy to propagandize and insult a country’s war dead in its capital in time of war.

A responsible government would round up these demonstrators and deport them back to their native homelands. The privilege of residency ought to be considered to entail minimal obligations of loyalty and civility. There is an element of real insanity in the manner in which government officials transatlantically have become so hypnotized by extravagant and politically correct interpretations of liberal rights theory that even more basic moral obligations have become obscure to them.

Any government which asks its citizens to fight and die on its behalf has a primal obligation to uphold and vindicate the cause for which they fight and to honor their service and sacrifice.

• The right of citizenship by birth on a country’s soil.

Well, the government class is up in arms over Senator Grahamnesty’s suggestion that we amend the 14th Amendment to end the practice of so-called “anchor babies” and automatic birthright citizenship for non-citizens. But perhaps the problem with the senator’s suggestion is that it doesn’t go far enough. One of Don Rumsfeld’s pearls of wisdom was that when a problem seemed unsolvable, the solution could be to enlarge it. Perhaps it’s time to rethink not just birthright citizenship, but citizenship in general, and what it means. ...

In the science fiction novel Starship Troopers, the late great Robert Heinlein put forth a different notion of citizenship — not one of a birthright, but an earned status. In this view, more republican (and in better keeping with the intent of the Founders), he made a useful distinction between being a citizen and being a civilian. He made citizenship a separate issue from whether or not one is entitled to live and work in the country, or even receive its benefits (even including welfare). Perhaps to be a citizen should be defined as being able to partake in the running of the country, and those unwilling to do the things necessary to become one will have to accept the decisions of those who have done so, or find another nation in which to reside, one perhaps more congenial to their lack of civic responsibility. That is, citizens would be eligible to vote and run for or be appointed to public office — civilians would not.

In Heinlein’s formulation, two years of government service — sometimes, but not invariably, military service — was a requirement of citizenship. Some have mistakenly declared his notion fascist, but that is nonsense, as fascism is much more than militarism (assuming that one even accepts that Heinlein’s society was militaristic — I don’t necessarily).

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

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Top favorites:

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Unmarried ladies with attitude: Jane Austen’s Fight Club 3:22 video

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Ilya Shapiro offers up an illustrative example of why we would do a lot better to drastically reform our immigration system rather than enforce it.

And now another story about the inanities of our immigration non-system. Two Britons, Dean and Laura Franks, have run a restaurant in Maine for nearly ten years. Fine, upstanding people who contribute to the economy and whose business is apparently much beloved in their town.

The problem is that the economic downturn decreased the restaurant’s profits, to a level where the “investment” they’re making in the country is too “marginal” to warrant renewal of their E-2 visa (one of the few immigration statuses I have not had). Yes, that’s right, the business is making a profit, employing people, creating wealth, nobody’s a drag on the welfare state or law enforcement, but… not enough. The feds say shut it down.

The United States had no restrictions on immigration of any kind before 1875, when they prohibited immigration from China. There were no quotas on any kind of non-Asian immigration before 1921. (History of US Immigration Laws link)

Today’s complicated, occult and bizarre system of economic and national quotas negotiated behind closed doors represents a weird evolution of a momentary legislative triumph of nativism (1921) in response to post-WWI fears of the arrival of a flood of Bolshevik radicals.

The racial, eugenicist, and anti-Bolshevik phobias that created the current law are all totally out-dated and passé. We have plenty of bolsheviks of our own and theories of the desirability of preserving any kind of specific national ethnic character are in complete disrepute.

If history teaches anything, it teaches us that the massive wave of typically poor, ill-educated and culturally exotic immigration around the turn of the last century from Eastern and Southern Europe was a blessing. Those immigrants proved totally assimilable and and their descendants made tremendous economic and cultural contributions to the the United States.

The United States rose to its current position of international leadership precisely because of the turn of the century wave of immigration. All that immigration made it possible for the United States to become the greatest industrial power in the world, and it was the children of those 1900-era immigrants who filled the enlisted ranks of the US Armed Forces that won the victory in the Second World War.

It is not a proper function of the government of the United States to come between persons who want to participate in voluntary exchanges of payment for labor. Immigrants arrive here seeking opportunity because there are Americans who want to hire them. The American economy needs more of both low skilled and high skilled labor. Government should get out of the way of the free market.

Conservatives like Barack Obama.

Alex Nowrasteh, in the Detroit Weekly News, explains that there is no need to elect a anti-immigration Republican, we already have a president hostile to immigration.

Barack Obama is the most anti-immigrant president since Eisenhower.

The Obama administration is setting deportation records. Almost 300,000 illegal immigrants were deported in 2009, a record, and a 5 percent increase over 2008. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo last February lamented that deportations for 2010 would not reach the yearly quota of 400,000 unless strategies were changed. That President Obama is presiding over a deportation quota, and that his immigration enforcement service was trying to increase the pace of deportations, was a rude shock to many immigrant supporters of the president.

Obama’s Department of Labor (DOL) has put in place new regulations that will make it more difficult for American farmers to temporarily hire foreign workers. The regulations will raise the minimum wage for foreign farm workers and transfer all compliance costs to employers. This will likely have the unintended cost of pushing more foreigners and farmers into the black market.

Obama’s administration is also mulling increasing the fees for permanent residence cards by $75, applications for naturalization certificates by $140, and applications for status as a temporary resident by $420. These hikes would raise unsubstantial sums for the government but dash the hopes of many poor potential immigrants. The administration is trying to make hiring foreigners more difficult to help American workers. Making the hiring of foreigners more bureaucratic will funnel many of them into the illegal market. But farmers can always hire people off the books if the cost of hiring legal foreign workers or Americans becomes too high. Thanks to these and other regulations, there will be plenty of willing illegal immigrants ready to snap up new job opportunities.

The Obama administration is also expanding workplace immigration raids. There are more than 25,000 random workplace H1-B visa inspections scheduled next year—a fivefold increase over last year! The H1-B is a company-sponsored temporary work visa for highly skilled and educated foreigners. Limited to 85,000 for private corporations (there is no quota for nonprofit research institutions), 25,000 inspections could well cover the majority of firms employing H-1Bs.Workplace inspections are very destructive interventions. When government agents inspect businesses, work can grind to a halt for days on end as they take their time checking paperwork, interviewing people, and comparing the acquired information with their files.

President Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to Arizona recently and is seeking an additional $500 million for border security. Add that to more than 90,000 employees in the federal immigration services and more than $20 billion devoted to enforcing immigration laws, and it’s clear that Obama is doing more to combat illegal immigration than any president in living history.

Michael Gerson discusses how Republicans are committing political suicide, attempting to apply the precise same strategy that cost the GOP its political competitiveness in California nationally.

According to a 2008 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 49 percent of Hispanics said that Democrats had more concern for people of their background; 7 percent believed this was true of Republicans. Since the Arizona controversy, this gap can only have grown. In a matter of months, Hispanic voters in Arizona have gone from being among the most pro-GOP in the nation to being among the most hostile.

Immigration issues are emotional and complex. But this must be recognized for what it is: political suicide. Consider that Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K-12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico. Whatever temporary gains Republicans might make feeding resentment of this demographic shift, the party identified with that resentment will eventually be voted into singularity. In a matter of decades, the Republican Party could cease to be a national party.

Even describing this reality invites scorn from those who regard immigration as a matter of principle instead of politics. But this represents a deep misunderstanding of politics itself. In America, political ideals are carried by parties. Republicans who are pro-business and pro-life, support a strong national defense and oppose deficit spending depend on one another to achieve influence. Each of these convictions alienates someone—pro-choice voters, economic liberals, pacifists. But Republican activists who alienate not an issue-group but an influential, growing ethnic group are a threat to every other constituency. The vocal faction of anti-immigrant Republicans is not merely part of a coalition; it will eventually make it impossible for anyone else in that coalition to succeed at the national level.

The good news for Republicans is that Hispanics tend to be entrepreneurial and socially conservative. While the general image Hispanics hold of the GOP is poor, individual Republican candidates can make significant inroads. In presidential elections, Hispanic support can swing widely. In 1996, Bill Clinton got 72 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2004, John Kerry’s support was in the 50s. And Republicans do not need to win a majority of the Latino vote to compete nationally, just a competitive minority of that vote.

But even this modest goal is impossible if Hispanic voters feel targeted rather than courted.

The history of the left in this country is a history of division. Whatever conflict was current—labor vs. management, class vs. class, race vs. race—there you’d find the left, stirring things up in order to derive as much political benefit as possible. A workable democratic system demands a willingness to seek consensus and engage in compromise. The left prefers Balkanization and permanent conflict.

For some years now, it has appeared that the Leftist formula had reached the end of its string. The corrupt and crime-ridden unions were on their last legs, hemorrhaging members even as they drove jobs overseas. Blacks were steadily moving into the middle class and becoming less susceptible to separatist rhetoric. An attempt to transform the university student body into a permanent revolutionary phalanx on the Peronist model had only partial success—students were willing to play while actually on campus, but after graduation they went on to more interesting pursuits.

So how to keep the pot boiling? The answer was to go find a new millet—or rather, to take advantage of the one next door, of the desperate people fleeing a serial kleptocracy, an uneducated, ignorant, and frightened mass open to all forms of manipulation.

This explains why illegal immigration is so important to the left. It explains why efforts to halt illegal border-crossings, a problem that wouldn’t challenge a six-year-old, are executed so half-heartedly and so often left unfinished (see the recent “virtual fence”). It explains the irrational response to Arizona’s effort to tighten up existing immigration law (not create new law—Arizona’s statute is no more than a reinforcement of existing federal law). It explains the insistence that any solution to the immigration problem provide for amnesty and citizenship for the millions of illegals already living within our borders. It has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with fairness, or practicality, or any of the other reasons offered by “reform” advocates. As is almost always the case where the American left is involved, what it has to do with is power.

The left wishes to use the illegals as a battering ram against the American polity, the same as they used labor, and blacks, and every other group they ever encountered. Illegals will become a new protected class, with privileges and entitlements denied the rest of the populace (including, ironically, current members of previous such classes). They will be discouraged from learning English, as occurs today under the doctrine of “bilingualism”, to assure that they remain a separate presence. A vast bureaucracy will arise to “assist” the new citizenry, funded with billions—oh hell, make that trillions, this is the Obama era—and staffed with sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists, and other disciplines unimagined today. All will be of the same political persuasion. A permanent crisis atmosphere will be generated around the new class. The “Amnestee” question will lead to endless problems and ramifications and act as a permanent indictment of the country and its policies. The native population (not to mention legal immigrants) will grow increasingly embittered and angered. The former illegals will be rendered even more miserable than they are today.

The solution is obvious. There must be no amnesty. Such an action would simply drop a permanent inassimilable presence in the midst of American society. Current law must be executed to the fullest, and where necessary (as in all the border states) reinforced with new state laws. Illegals now in the country must be encouraged to regularize themselves according to recognized procedure. They must not be allowed, for their sakes and ours, to become clients of the left-wing establishment. The immigrant problem must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, according to individual circumstances. The notion that there is an acceptable mass solution is pure fantasy.

While this may involve some hardship—and will certainly give rise to cries of “unfairness”—it is in the long run the best solution for all concerned. Even the illegals will be better off. Becoming a member of a left-wing client class may not be the worst possible fate, but it’s not far from the bottom either, as generations of welfare families can attest. American leftists did nothing for this country’s workers once the union vote-getting machines were established. The same can be said of blacks in the inner cities once the political machines were in action there. The goal of power is simply to perpetuate itself. Actually solving problems might interfere with that process.

When Republicans are doing bad things, you can count on democrats to offer to go them one better.

The Hill:

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal. ...

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who has worked on the proposal and helped unveil it at a press conference Thursday, predicted the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.

“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification.

“People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin added. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”

Ezra Klein offers details of the democrat plan, and actually identifies the important irony. Note that all this does not give the ephebe Ezra any particular problem personally.

The Democrats’ immigration-reform proposal (pdf) is 26 pages long. Pages 8 through 18 are devoted to “ending illegal employment through biometric employment verification.” I don’t think the Democrats are going to like me calling this a biometric national ID card, as they go to great lengths to say that it is not a national ID card, and make it “unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.”

But it’s still a biometric national ID card. It’s handed out by the Social Security Administration and employers are required to check it when hiring new employees. Essentially, if you want to participate in the American economy, you need this card. “Within five (5) years of the date of enactment, the fraud-proof social security card will serve as the sole acceptable document to be produced by an employee to an employer for employment verification purposes,” the bill says. “This requirement will exist even if the employer does not yet possess the capability to electronically verify the employee by scanning the card through a card reader.”

The theory here is simple: Illegal immigration is a problem because illegal immigrants can get jobs. As the bill says, “in order to prevent future waves of illegal immigration, this proposal recognizes that no matter what we do on the border, our ports of entry, and in the interior, we will not be completely effective unless we can prevent the hiring, recruitment, or referral of unauthorized aliens in America’s workplaces. Jobs are what draw illegal immigrants to the United States.” ...

The oddity of this strategy, of course, is that anti-immigration sentiments run highest among the same communities that are most opposed to national ID cards. Now, it’s also the case that if you’re going to support citizenship searches for people with Hispanic-looking shoes, it’s a bit odd to worry about an ID card to verify employment. But even so, without Republicans on the bill to give this strategy cover, it’ll be interesting to see whether the anti-immigrant right embraces the ID card as a way of staunching the flow of illegal immigrants or assails Democrats for trying to create a biometric police state.

ABC15:

An Arizona sheriff is the latest person to speak out about the state’s new immigration legislation, saying he does not plan to enforce the divisive law.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik calls Senate Bill 1070 a “stupid law” that will force officers to start profiling. He is one of the first local law enforcement officials to rebel against the law.

“We don’t need to enforce it. It would be irresponsible in my opinion to put people in the Pima County Jail at the taxpayers expense when i can give them to the Border Patrol,” Dupnik said.

The Sheriff admits he could get sued for failing to obey the law, but says that’s a risk he’s willing to take.

The controversial bill was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer last Friday.

Sheriff Dupnik’s stance is undoubtedly good politics in Tucson, the home of the state university and Arizona’s most prominent liberal community of fashion, but he is making a point that persons familiar with law enforcement already know.

Illegal immigration is just another victimless crime, a violation of arbitrary current regulations not an intrinsically evil act. Police always have real crimes involving genuine evil and victims who have sustained injury to deal with, and crimes with victims always have priority over victimless crimes. Only a cop with time on his hands and nothing useful to do is going to stop people looking for green cards.

In border locations like Pima County, a casual trans-border culture has existed since the time of the Gadsden Purchase. People cross the border casually all the time to visit relatives, to shop, or for recreational activities. Attempting to investigate everyone guilty of looking Hispanic in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood would be insanity.

Rassmussen finds that a comfortable majority of Americans think this kind of thing is just fine.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer last week signed a new law into effect that authorizes local police to stop and verify the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 60% of voters nationwide favor such a law, while 31% are opposed.

It’s true that Arizona does have serious crime problems associated with illegal border activities.

In Arizona’s case, the public safety threat obviously comes from smuggling connected to the illegal drug trade. Arizona is the unhappy victim of the confluence of two forms of irrational law making, both of which Americans commonly support and both of which Americans also commonly ignore.

We have an unfortunate tendency toward statutory overreach, and are prone to pass laws expressing moral sentiments, wishes, and aspirations which, at the same time, we have every intention of personally ignoring. That is how we got Alcohol and Drug Prohibition. That is how we got a 55 mph speed limit. And that is why we have immigration quotas that make the existence on American soil of the large pool of cheap labor we require illegal.

No one wants to see Latino gang members on the streets, and no one wants day laborer flop housing anywhere near them, but everyone wants his produce picked, his meat processed, his table bused, his lawn mowed, and every other kind of low skill labor available and affordable.

If the 21st century equivalent of Ellis Island were open and in operation, and people desiring to come to America to do work Americans need done for wages Americans can afford to pay were able to enter freely and legally, you would not have coyotes leading desperate people across the Sonoran desert over the Arizona border.

If we had intelligence enough to end our futile policy of drug prohibition, we could eliminate the enormous profits associated with trafficking and smuggling and all the warfare over drug-sales turf. There would be no drug cartels, no drug gangs, and no smugglers murdering Arizona ranchers like Robert Krentz.

It was Mr. Krentz’s shooting last month that produced the wave of indignation that caused the controversial bill to pass the Arizona legislature.

Arizona Republicans took the politically expedient course and pandered to an angry public by passing the draconian immigration bill. Making illegal immigration into a crime, like all victimless crime laws, will produce only random and selective enforcement, accompanied by increased official corruption. The new law will not cure Arizona’s crime problems, but it will poison Arizona’s, and the nation’s, politics.

Reality is strange. The draconian immigration law passed in Arizona is bad for Republicans in the long run, but even the worst blunders can sometimes have a silver lining.

Arizona’s passage of an anti-illegals bill is precipitating a democrat party Congressional response. Democrats want to defy current majority opinion one more time by taking up (with customary partisanship) immigration reform.

The democrat grab for the Hispanic bloc will anger many centrists, and it had incidentally the amusing effect of flushing Lindsey Graham out of a (shudder!) bipartisan environmentalist coalition with John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman that was getting ready to introduce tomorrow a major climate change bill.

Instead of reaching across the aisle to destroy further the American economy and empower the federal government to regulate and tax some more, Graham petulantly withdrew his support from the absolutely marvelous bill which he assures us would have gone a long way toward making America energy independent while preserving our environment pristine and unspoiled and instead he denounced the democrats change of priorities as “a cynical political ploy.”

I’d rather see the immigration debate conducted rationally and responsibly but, hey! what issue in American politics ever is?

If immigration is going to be a stupid and divisive issue, at least this time it seems to have put a spoke in a very deserving wheel, the looming “climate change bill.” Let’s fight over immigration some more instead.

They look smaller and they dress differently from the American functionary, but one of these funny-looking little guys could be grandfather of a conservative Supreme Court justice. I have photographs of my immigrant ancestors in which they look sinister and exotic, too.

The democrat party in Congress defied the will of the American majority and enacted socialism. The democrat administration quadrupled the deficit and deepened the economic disaster. Our political adversaries seem to be doomed, but they do have one key remaining opportunity to revive their political position. They can turn their attention to immigration reform, take substantive action to open a legal path to citizenship for millions of people already in this country overwhelmingly performing hard work at low pay, and secure a firm grip on the loyalty of a voting bloc they do not deserve.

As this Las Vegas Sun article describes, Hispanic voters, just like the rest of us, are not thrilled by what democrats have done to the country and their support for the party of leftism is fading.

The long-term affiliation of a hardworking, typically Roman Catholic bloc of voter with strong family values will determine the results of elections in this country for the next couple of generations. Hispanics are natural Republicans. We just need to recognize that obvious fact and start addressing their key issue and welcoming Hispanics to the GOP.

Republicans need to abandon nativism and cheap law-and-order sloganeering on immigration.

People entering the country to find work and make a better life is the fundamental story of the United States. That this is happening contrary to existing laws reflects unfortunately on our sclerotic politics and our national neuroses, not upon people voluntarily exchanging labor for money or on the natural desire of people less well off to make a better life.

The older laboring classes in this country, as has happened before, have improved their condition, acquired education, and moved up and out of the ranks of low-skilled labor. But demand for labor continues to exist. No country can operate on the basis of a universally white collar population. The world requires Indians as well as chiefs.

It is in the national interest and it is a fundamental part of the American tradition to welcome strangers willing to work, to offer to new arrivals the same kind of fair shake this country once offered our own ancestors.

We are never going to kick in doors, check identity papers everywhere, invade every business, search every home repair project and and arrest everyone running a lawnmower. We are never going to arrest and deport millions of people already here and already doing the most disagreeable and laborious jobs at the lowest wages.

What we need to do is reform the laws, remove perverse incentives, create a useable open door and make illegals into citizens and into rock-ribbed Republicans.

I will describe later a simple Republican-style of Immigration reform, which I think it will be impossible to contend is unprecedented or unfair.

A bent to conservatism and family makes Hispanics a promising pool of votes for Republicans, but the party’s targeting of illegal immigrants has withered its attraction.

Regardless, Gov. Rick Perry has fared relatively well, perhaps because of his anti-Washington rhetoric and his careful immigration stance, a recent poll indicates.

It shows more than half of Texas Hispanics call themselves conservative, and a surprising 23 percent say they might participate in Tuesday’s GOP primary.

Emphasizing punishing illegal aliens, trafficking in slurs associating immigration with welfare and emergency room medical care, noisy advocacy of border closing and rigid enforcement of impractical and inflexible immigration regulations are popular vices of conservatives expressive of unattractive emotional impulses and representative of unsound political reasoning.

America is currently still in the process of receiving a major wave of largely Hispanic immigration arriving here to meet domestic labor needs which would be otherwise unfilled. We are again in a period of history in which our respectable native born laboring class has moved up and out. The residuum of unskilled native residents have attitudes, expectations, and alternative options making hard work at low pay unattractive to them. Yet the country’s labor needs to be done, and needs to be done affordably.

We should be congratulating ourselves that the people volunteering are Hispanic Catholics, generally hard-working, of conservative disposition, and possessing strong family values. In Europe, the same kind of immigration wave is made up of Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East.

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Phil Jones admits no significant Global Warming since 1995. His reference to the unknowability of the world-wide extent of Medieval Warming Period implicitly concedes that the science cannot possibly be regarded as settled.
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Bad habit. University of Alabama faculty shooter also fatally shot 18 year old brother in 1986. Better not make her angry.

Congressman Delahunt was the DA that did not press charges.

Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and other Labour panjandrums, revealed recently, in a column in the Evening Standard defending Labour immigration policies, that Labour ministers encouraged massive Third World immigration out of a desire to change the character of the British nation, as well as in order to insult the political right while enlarging its own constituency. Labour’s policy was deliberately concealed from its own supporters, because it was recognized that many core Labour voters would not approve.

SkyNews:

Labour ministers deliberately encouraged mass immigration to diversify Britain over the past decade, a former Downing Street adviser has claimed.

Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters.

He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural, at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

Mr Neather worked as a speechwriter for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

“Mass migration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural,” he wrote in in the London Evening Standard.

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if it wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

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It is difficult to read all this, which is obviously perfectly true, and grasp that changes in fashionable opinion mysteriously came to pass resulting in our living in a time in which it is only too probable that the people able to rise to the top leadership positions in Western societies are highly likely to have a deeply negative view of their own country’s history and institutions, and even of their own people. So negative a view that they would be committed not to the preservation of their own country’s values, institutions, and character, but to their elimination.

Paul Marshall reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West in the Wall Street Journal.

In his reflections on Europe’s slide into a sort of secular suicide, Mr. Caldwell notes the key role played by that most religious impulse: guilt. He argues that the dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was “repentance for two historical misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.” Over the decades, guilt has festered into “a sense of moral illegitimacy” and a “self-directed xenophobia” that now shapes the continent’s response to immigration.

Originally, the reasons given for encouraging mass immigration to Europe were economic—a means of remedying Europe’s purported labor shortage and, eventually, of bolstering economies obliged to fund generous pension plans. Immigrants “would emerge from the desiccated and starving hamlets of the Third World and ride to the rescue of the retirement checks and second homes, the wine tastings and snorkeling vacations, of the most pampered workforce in the history of the planet,” Mr. Caldwell writes. Such economic rationales proved to be chimeras, though. Nowadays, with majorities in many countries consistently opposed to immigration, a new justification has had to be found: the flat assertion that immigration and asylum policies are “nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on,” or perhaps even discuss.

Except that there is nothing “purported” about a domestic labor shortage in modern Western countries.

Free education and social mobility afforded the respectable portions of the former working classes a ready path to white collar employment. Egalitarianism and the doctrines of the left supplied excuses to avoid manual labor for the ineducable, and generous social welfare policies assured that those who would not work would still have color televisions.

The consequence has been everywhere in Europe and America a drastic shortage of manual labor of domestic origin, and massive Third World immigration to fill the gap.

We are much luckier in America. We get Roman Catholic Hispanic immigrants, who are highly assimilable. Europe is getting hostile Muslims.

Congressional Republicans (1, 2) and democrats are raising serious questions about Barack Obama’s plans to release terrorist detainees from the US holding facility in Guantanamo Bay into the United States, pointing to already existing statutes barring entry to recipients of terrorist training and introducing further legislation to block the president’s plans.

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, thinks Obama has painted himself into a corner on this one, and is going to incur serious political costs whichever way he decides in the end to proceed.

So what does the president do now? To go back on his promise to close Guantanamo would mean incurring the wrath of not only the Left in the U.S., but of the fawning European leaders and public who praised his decision to shut the place down. And it would, of course, be a humiliating admission that his initial pronouncement — made even before Eric Holder visited Guantanamo — was ill-conceived. He can try to fudge the issue or delay, but ultimately he has to do one or the other: proceed to close Guantanamo and begin releasing the detainees, or admit error and adhere to the Bush policy of housing dangerous terrorists there. It is not “a false choice,” but a very real one. We’ll see which audience, American or European, he is willing to offend.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the Netherlands had lived through something akin to a populist revolt against accommodating Islamic immigrants led by Pim Fortuyn, who was later murdered; the assassination of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim killer; and the bitter departure from the Netherlands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who became a member of Parliament before being marked for death for her criticism of radical Islam.

Now something fairly remarkable is happening again. ...

Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.” ...

The paper said: “The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance.”

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of “loss and estrangement” felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid “self-designated victimization.”

She asserted, “the grip of the homeland has to disappear” for these immigrants who, news reports indicate, also retain their original nationality at a rate of about 80 percent once becoming Dutch citizens.

Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be “bringing our values into confrontation with people who think otherwise.”

There was more: punishment for trouble-making young people has to become so effective such that when they emerge from jail they are not automatically big shots, Ploumen said.

For Ploumen, talking to the local media, “The street is mine, too. I don’t want to walk away if they’re standing in my path.

“Without a strategy to deal with these issues, all discussion about creating opportunities and acceptance of diversity will be blocked by suspicion and negative experience.” ...

For the Netherlands’ Arab and Turkish population (about 6 percent of a total of 16 million) it refers to jobs and educational opportunities as “machines of emancipation.” Yet it also suggests that employment and advancement will not come in full measure until there is a consciousness engagement in Dutch life by immigrants that goes far beyond the present level.

Indeed, Ploumen says, “Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally.” Immigrants must “take responsibility for this country” and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.

Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, “The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.

“We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society.”

1. It is not the responsibility of your fellow citizens to buy health insurance for you and your family. They have enough of a burden paying their own bills. ...

2. “Diversity is our strength” has become a dangerous mantra. Diversity will destroy us unless we start insisting that those who come here to take advantage of our prosperity also assimilate to our culture. ...

The only way the United States can protect itself from such inevitable chaos is to severely limit immigration from Muslim countries — and withstand the caterwauling about bigotry. Western democratic values are fundamentally incompatible with some of the tenets of Islamic law. Muslims who do not believe in the equality of men and women, secular government, or freedom of speech are never going to embrace American values, and their presence can only weaken our culture.

3. There is no relationship between the amount of money spent on schools and the quality of education. For example, Washington, D.C., ranks third in per-pupil expenditure yet has one of the worst school systems in the country. The crucial determinant of student achievement is the competence of teachers, and paying higher salaries to bad teachers doesn’t solve the problem. ...

4. As economist Robert Samuelson recently pointed out, the United States faces a crisis that will become a catastrophe if we don’t take immediate steps. By 2050, one fifth of the population will be older than 65, and while the entire U.S. population may exceed 430 million, about four-fifths of that increase will reflect immigrants, their children and their grandchildren. “The potential for conflict is obvious,” Samuelson said. “Older retirees and younger and poorer immigrants — heavily Hispanic — will compete for government social services and benefits. Squeezed in between will be middle-class and middle-age workers, facing higher taxes.” ...

5. It is not the government’s responsibility to take care of you from cradle to grave.

She’ll have to vote for Bob Barr. John McCain isn’t likely to become a domestic conservative.

Via the News Junkie and McQ.

Legrain has served as special adviser to the director-general of the World Trade Organization and worked as the trade and economics correspondent for the Economist. His new book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, has been nominated for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Q: You argue that immigration is a good thing, under almost any circumstances. Why? Are there any circumstances in which it isn’t good?
A: I think freedom of movement is one of the most basic human rights, as anyone who is denied it can confirm. It is abhorrent that the rich and the educated are allowed to circulate around the world more or less freely, while the poor are not — causing, in effect, a form of global apartheid. So I think the burden of proof lies with supporters of immigration controls to justify why they think letting people move freely would have such catastrophic consequences. And, frankly, I don’t think they can.

The economic case for open borders is as compelling as the moral one. No government, except perhaps North Korea’s, would dream of trying to ban the movement of goods and services across borders; trying to ban the movement of most people who produce goods and services is equally self-defeating. When it comes to the domestic economy, politicians and policymakers are forever urging people to be more mobile, and to move to where the jobs are. But if it is a good thing for people to move from Kentucky to California in search of a better job, why is it so terrible for people to move from Mexico to the U.S. to work? ...

From a global perspective, freer migration could bring huge economic gains. When workers from poor countries move to rich ones, they can make use of the advanced economies’ superior capital, technologies, and institutions, making these economies much more productive. Economists calculate that removing immigration controls could more than double the size of the world economy. Even a small relaxation of immigration controls would yield disproportionately big gains.

Read the whole thing.

Personally, I think Legrain is perfectly correct, with the exception of his ultra-libertarian perspective on Islamic immigration. I suppose it’s just the case that I believe that extremist views and hostility to the West are more common among individual Muslims than Legrain does.

Islam is not simply another religious denomination. Islam features even more intransigent claims to authority than the most authoritarian forms of Christianity extant today, and subscribing to a fundamentalist form of Islam is very likely to involve religious obligations to support violence against Western governments and/or non-Muslim inhabitants of Western countries.

Admitting Islamic immigrants at the present time would be a great deal like having an open borders policy for Germans or Japanese during WWII.

The bill represented an incoherent compromise between the political forces seeking to close the gap between reality and our currently unenforceable immigration laws, and the forces seeking to raise barriers and “secure the border.” I don’t think that bill effectively embodied any compelling logical solution, and it would have made partisans of neither side on the issue happy.

I think the country needs to think about all this some more, conduct a serious debate on the subject, and then craft a better solution. The Immigration Bill was an unholy mess, and I think we’re better off giving that one a miss, and trying again another year.

But the Senate vote obviously did manifest some discernible response to the groundswell of anti-immigration popular emotion successfully drummed up by certain segments of the political right. Our nativist law-and-order simpletons won one, and they ought to have been feeling good, but unhappily some members of the right blogosphere’s reaction to their own success at the far-from-difficult feat of evoking a little political cowardice on Capitol Hill was less than attractive.

Rather than celebrating winning a small skirmish in what will undoubtedly be a long war (one in which they are ultimately going to get their butts kicked), a number of bloggers on the right were name calling and demonstrating their own lack of familiarity with how the Wall Street Journal really works. link

Many of our fellow conservative friends are just wrong on this one.

It isn’t difficult to enforce laws against real crimes, against things like murder and robbery which everyone knows are wrong. The laws which are hard to enforce are the laws against things which are not intrinsically wrong, the kinds of laws which ordinary decent people are willing to violate, and which decent law enforcement officers are not eager to enforce. When existing laws prove unenforceable, the right answer is not to redouble efforts at enforcement. The right answer is to change the law to bring the law’s content into better conformity with Americans’ legitimate desires.

Conservatives ought to recognize that when spontaneous, voluntary, mutually beneficial economic transactions between human beings occur, that is a good thing, not a bad thing, and government should get out of the way, and not try to interfere on the basis of anybody’s theory of what the country ought to look like.

6:43 video

Becky Akers and Donald J. Boudreaux, in the Christian Science Monitor of all places, supply the right answers: no restrictions on immigration, no welfare for immigrants.

The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to control immigration. Nor does it say anything about illegal aliens. We looked for a clause with directions for ranking immigrants on a points system – another feature of the Senate’s reform bill – but we couldn’t find one.

Sadly, lawmakers have repeatedly interpreted this silence as license for ill-conceived legislation. Congress began barring entry to the nation in 1875 with prostitutes and convicts. Soon, all sorts of people fell short of congressional glory: ex-convicts in 1882, along with Chinese citizens, lunatics, and idiots. Paupers, polygamists, and people suffering from infectious diseases or insanity made the list in 1891, while the illiterate were banned in 1917. ...

Given the talk about point systems, guest-worker programs, and fenced borders, you’d think immigration endangers America’s cultural and economic wealth. But just as the unhampered flow of goods and services – free trade – blesses participants, the easy flow of workers – free labor markets – also brings unprecedented prosperity.

By contrast, schemes to control immigrants hurt everyone, native or newcomer, and not just economically. Customs agents often abuse immigrants at the borders, but they also interrogate, search, and fine returning Americans.

Immigrants must produce the proper papers for bureaucrats’ inspection, but so do their American employers and landlords. And let’s not even think about the scary implications of the draconian Real ID Act.

As technology and globalization continue shrinking the world, people and ideas move more quickly and freely. Political borders become increasingly irrelevant. But that’s fine because the qualities that define Americans don’t depend on geography. Rather, it’s their history of liberty, pluck, ingenuity, optimism, and the pursuit of happiness. Culture is a matter of mind and spirit. Why entrust it to politicians, border guards, and green cards?

The ideal immigration policy for this smaller world would harmonize with both the Constitution and common decency. It wouldn’t deny anyone the inalienable right to come and go. ...

If Congress seriously wants reform, it might begin by returning decisions on immigration to the individuals involved, in obedience to the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments.

But Congress will need to go further. Requiring taxpayers to subsidize immigrants’ healthcare, education, food, shelter, or anything else breeds resentment.

Plenty of private charities will extend a hand to newcomers, not to mention friends and families eager to help their countrymen adjust to American life. ...

What do we do about the 12 million illegal immigrants already here? Apologizing for their poor welcome is a start. Then we can hire them, patronize their businesses, become friends. So long as we don’t control them, and they don’t expect our taxes to support them, goodwill should prevail on both sides. ...

Quota-wielding bureaucrats should not define the country’s demographic destiny. It’s time to let the free choices of millions of individuals determine America’s complexion.

Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy quotes Reagan’s 1989 Farewell Address:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. (emphasis added)

and concludes himself:

Reagan’s positive attitude towards immigration was not just an isolated issue position, but was integrally linked to his generally optimistic and open vision of America. I would add that it also drew on his understanding that America is not a zero-sum game between immigrants and natives – just as he also recognized that it is not a zero-sum game between the rich and the poor. Immigration could promote prosperity and advancement for both groups in much the same way that free trade benefits both Americans and foreigners. Reagan probably did not have a detailed understanding of the economics of comparative advantage which underpins this conclusion. But he surely understood it intuitively. Those who reject Reagan’s position on immigration must, if they are to be consistent, also reject much of the rest of his approach to economic and social policy. Today’s conservatives can argue for immigration restrictions if they so choose. But they should not claim the mantle of Reagan in doing so.

I’d rather pay higher prices for tomatos, then the taxes I’ll pay when 12 million people, AND thier little bambinos go on welfare, and we pay 50% taxes, on top of all the other tax we pay. They will not bring a net gain to the tax base. They will be a net loss. Who will take it in the teeth?

This precise point was addressed yesterday by the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial:

The immigration debate is roaring again, and we’re happy to join the fun. One place to start is a myth that has become a key talking point among restrictionists on the right—to wit, that immigrants come to the U.S. for a life of ease on the public dole.

Leading this charge is the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, who argues in a new study that “the average lifetime costs to the taxpayer will be $1.1 million” for each low-skilled immigrant household. Hispanic immigrants and their families are a net national drain, he says, because they “assimilate into welfare.”

Mr. Rector and Heritage have done some good social science research in the past, but this time they have the story backward: In most cases immigrants will pay at least as much in lifetime federal taxes as they receive in benefits.

One basic flaw in the Heritage analysis is that, as a study by the Immigration Policy Center points out: “The vast majority of immigrants are not eligible to receive any of these [welfare] benefits for many years after their arrival in the United States. . . . Legal permanent residents cannot receive SSI [Supplemental Security Income], which is available only to U.S. citizens, and are not eligible for means-tested public benefits until 5 years after receiving their green cards.”

Illegal immigrants are also ineligible for any kind of federal welfare benefits—with the exception of emergency health care. Many of the Congressional proposals to legalize this population would not allow these workers to collect welfare until waiting up to eight years for a green card and five years after that.

The “welfare” charge is also refuted by the experience of the federal welfare reform passed 11 years ago. That law reduced the welfare eligibility of new immigrants on the sensible grounds that the magnet for America should be work, not a government handout. Ron Haskins, an architect of that reform and the author of a 2006 book on its consequences, concludes that “the use of welfare by noncitizens has declined rapidly” in the wake of that law.

Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of immigrant households collecting traditional cash welfare payments, supplemental security income, and food stamps fell by about half. The decline in welfare use was more rapid for immigrants than for native-born Americans. The exception has been Medicaid, thanks to states that have increased immigrant eligibility for the state-federal program in recent years.

However, immigrants have a positive financial impact on the most expensive federal entitlements: Medicare and Social Security. This is because immigrants generally come when they are young and working. Seventy percent of immigrants are in the prime working ages of 20-54, compared to only half of the native-born American population. Only 2% of immigrants are over 65 when they arrive compared to 12% of natives.

As a result, most immigrants contribute payroll taxes for decades before they collect Social Security or Medicare benefits. The Social Security actuaries recently calculated that over the next 75 years immigrant workers will pay some $5 trillion more in payroll taxes than they will receive in Social Security benefits. These surplus payments more than offset the costs of use of other welfare benefits received by most immigrant groups.

There’s no doubt that immigrants draw on public resources, like the roads and the schools. The latter is mandated by a Supreme Court decision, Plyer v. Doe, and in any event would our society rather have these children in school, or wandering the streets? Even immigrants who don’t own homes, and thus don’t pay property taxes, finance public schools indirectly through rents paid to landlords. As for health care and roads, immigrants who receive paychecks have their income taxes withheld, and they also pay sales tax and other levies like everyone else.

Perhaps most important, immigrant earnings and tax payments rise the longer they are here. According to Census data for 2005, immigrants who have just arrived have median household earnings of $31,930, or about 30% below the U.S. average of $44,389. But those in the U.S. for an average of 10 years have earnings of $38,395; for those here at least 25 years, the figure is more than $50,000. Those earnings wouldn’t be increasing if most immigrants were going on the dole. They are instead assimilating into the work force, growing their incomes as their skills increase.

As Congress debates immigration policy, the Members should keep in mind that the melting pot is still working; that taxes by immigrants cover their use of public services; and that finding a way to let immigrants work in the U.S. legally is the humane and pro-growth solution to the illegal immigration problem.

Ed Morrissey rightly observes:

Proverbially, a compromise succeeds best when it leaves all sides unsatisfied. However, the compromise which everyone hates usually fails, and that appears to be the case with the new immigration reform package—and that spells trouble for any hopes of reaching a compromise at all. While immigration hardliners have found enough devils in the details to populate an entire plane of Dante’s Inferno, immigration advocates apparently dislike the bill at least as much.

The New York Times quotes Robert P. Hoffman, an Oracle vice president and co-chairman of Compete America, a coalition of high-tech companies.

Under the current system,” Mr. Hoffman said, “you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand. You can’t hire a chemical engineer to do the work of a software engineer.”

David Isaacs, director of federal affairs at the Hewlett-Packard Company, said in a letter to the Senate that “a ‘merit-based system’ would take the hiring decision out of our hands and place it squarely in the hands of the federal government.”

Employers of lower-skilled workers voiced another concern.

“The point system would be skewed in favor of more highly skilled and educated workers,” said Laura Foote Reiff, co-chairwoman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, whose members employ millions of workers in hotels, restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals and the construction industry.

Denyse Sabagh, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said, “This bill does not give employers what they need, and some are pretty upset about it.”

NZ Bear has an easy-to-comment-on version of the bill on-line.
————————————————————————
I think the Blogosphere is reaching the right conclusions: there are too many things wrong with this bill (from both sides’ perspectives) for it to be passed. And those of us who do support an amnesty for illegals shouldn’t get our way without winning an open and extensive public debate.

We need to avoid the traditional liberal methodology of imposing our more enlightened opinions on everybody else de haute en bas by some kind of legislative coup.

This Illegal Immigration mess demonstrates beautifully the difficulties Americans have conducting serious, rational debates on emotionally-charged, ideologically-driven issues of national policy.

If conservatives can make a meaningful difference by substituting genuine and substantive debate for emotionalism and blind ideological war on this one, we would be effectuating a reform even more basic.

Conservatives are still raving today over the proposed Immigration Bill.

Legalizing the status of (an estimated) 12 million illegal aliens in the United States is being looked upon by people like Mark Steyn as a capitulation.

If so, it’s a capitulation to reality.

Illegal aliens are here, because Americans want to hire them. because the US economy needs them.

They snuck over the Rio Grande in many cases, rather than arriving on steamships at Ellis Island and doing the appropriate paperwork, because Ellis Island is closed, and legal admission to the US via airports and bus stations was not an option.

I think quite of lot of my conservative compatriots have lost their marbles on this particular issue. How would you get rid of the 12 million+ people here, even if you wanted to? House to house searches? A new system of commissars inspecting every American farm, construction site, restaurant, assembly plant, and front lawn to catch people violating the law… by working?

Suppose all this was even possible. You waved your magic wand, and all those Hispanics were instantly gone.

Who’s going to harvest American crops you buy at the supermarket? Whose going to fill the shelves?

When you eat out, who’s going to bus the tables and wash the dishes?

When you want a house, who’s going to frame it and nail up the sheetrock?

Who’s going to mow your lawn and mine?

I’ve heard the answer from voices on the right: If you pay enough, you can attract native-born American labor.

Regional conditions vary, of course, but in a lot of places I’ve lived you’d have to pay high school dropouts like investment bankers to get them to work at all, and they’d still do lousy jobs.

If you eliminated cheap immigrant labor, the economic impact would be devastating to this country. The price of everything you buy would skyrocket. Produce, processing, and delivery costs would go right through the roof. Restaurant prices would multiply. Every little thing you buy in a retail store would go up dramatically in price, so that native-born stock boys and counter clerks could make big bucks. Prices of new homes would rise enormously, and their size and amenities would shrink.

How would you like $50 movie tickets? $35 supermarket tomatoes? $50 McDonald’s Happy Meals? And you’d be mowing your own lawn.

Of course, not all pay scales would rise. You’d just transfer a lot more manufacturing, assembly, and food processing jobs permanently out of the country.

Conservatives ought to be working on the issue of assimilation, and looking to welcome to the Republican Party a major new constituency of Roman Catholic, family-oriented, hard-working people. Those Hispanics will pay taxes, and be just as annoyed as the rest us of us by liberal elitist busybodies trying to tell them how to live.

AP:

The proposed agreement would allow illegal immigrants to come forward and obtain a “Z visa” and – after paying fees and a $5,000 fine – ultimately get on track for permanent residency, which could take between eight and 13 years. Heads of households would have to return to their home countries first.

They could come forward right away to claim a probationary card that would let them live and work legally in the U.S., but could not begin the path to permanent residency or citizenship until border security improvements and the high-tech worker identification program were completed.

A new crop of low-skilled guest workers would have to return home after stints of two years. They could renew their visas twice, but would be required to leave for a year in between each time. If they wanted to stay in the U.S. permanently, they would have to apply under the point system for a limited pool of green cards. ...

In perhaps the most hotly debated change, the proposed plan would shift from an immigration system primarily weighted toward family ties toward one with preferences for people with advanced degrees and sophisticated skills. Republicans have long sought such revisions, which they say are needed to end “chain migration” that harms the economy.

Family connections alone would no longer be enough to qualify for a green card – except for spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. Strict new limits would apply to U.S. citizens seeking to bring foreign-born parents into the country.

The anti-immigration element of the right is howling with rage.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) complains:

This rewards people who broke the law with permanent legal status, and puts them ahead of millions of law-abiding immigrants waiting to come to America. I don’t care how you try to spin it, this is amnesty.”

Nation Review Online is editorializing against it.

As bad as the status quo on immigration policy is, it is preferable to this bill. Recent improvements in border security have apparently reduced the number of illegal crossings, and well-publicized raids on workplaces can be expected to have a chilling effect on employers who are in violation of immigration laws. But we suspect that this increased enforcement was largely designed to win passage for amnesty and a guest-worker program, and will end once this goal is achieved. We urge senators to cast protest votes against this bill, and House members to do their best to defeat.

And Michelle Malkin is on the warpath.
————————————————
The ravings against “amnesty” are, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, just plain nuts.

Conservatives imagining that the federal government is going to conduct house-to-house searches all over the country to round up and deport every single illegal alien are just as goofy as liberals yearning for house-to-house searches to find and confiscate every firearm in the land.

This sort of thing is just not on.

The kind of draconian measures required to eliminate private gun ownershio, or to deport every illegal alien, are fundamentally inimical to our Constitution, laws, and culture. Those federal agents would run into armed resistance before long in either enforcement project.

What kind of country would we be if we kicked in doors in order to deport poor people who have for the most part come here to do the humble and unpleasant jobs that you can’t find a native-born American to do?

Back before WWII, where I grew up in Pennsylvania, high school kids living in the small towns used to work for the farmers during the harvest to earn pocket money. Does anybody really think that today’s American kids are going to go out and dig potatoes?

America is a nation of immigrants. We have a lot of illegal immigrants today, not because those immigrants are bad people, but because our immigration system and laws have been drastically at odds with economic reality. Americans need, and want, low-priced labor not otherwise available, but Americans (not uncharacteristically) lacked the realism and political will to modify our laws in order to make legal immigration of laborers possible.

I think reforming the system to make it much easier for technically skilled, highly educated people to come here to work is extremely desirable, but we need more unskilled labor than we produce at home, too.

I’m in favor of legalizing illegal aliens, and I don’t have a problem with making them learn to taken an oath in English, and pass a simple test on American civics. On the other hand, the idea of the federal government charging poor laborers $5000 to become citizens is downright nasty, and making those people jump through pointless hoops (like returning to their country of origin) as a mere ritualized procedure is just a sop to the nativist yahoos (Sorry, Victor & Michelle!), which ought to be eliminated.

In general, laws need to reflect reality. When our immigration laws, like our current drug laws or Prohibition in the old days, conflict with the heart’s desires of Americans, those laws will always be found to be less than universally enforceable. Laws which can be only randomly and selectively enforced make a mockery of the rule of law and always lead to widespread law-breaking and to the corruption of law enforcement.

Three Yale University students have been arrested on charges of setting fire to an American flag hanging from the porch of a private home.

The three were arrested early yesterday after police on patrol spotted the burning flag and tore it from pole where it was mounted to the house on Chapel Street, police said.

Said Hyder Akbar, 23, Nikolaos Angelopoulos, 19, and Farhad Anklesaria, also 19, were arrested on charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson.

“Though the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated flag-desecration statutes in 1989 and 1990 on First Amendment grounds, that does not mean that individuals can burn flags and face no criminal charges,” said First Amendment scholar David Hudson of the First Amendment Center.

“There are generally applicable criminal laws, such as laws against vandalism, for which there is no free-speech defense,” Hudson said. “Justice Scalia alluded to this fact in his opinion in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) — a case involving a juvenile who burned a cross in a neighbor’s yard — when he said the city of St. Paul had ‘sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.’ Presumably, the authorities in this (New Haven) case have ‘sufficient means’ to prohibit such threatening conduct.”

Angelopoulos and Anklesaria, who are freshmen, are both foreign citizens. Anklesaria is British and Angelopoulos is Greek.

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan, according to police, but is a U.S. citizen. Both Anklesaria and Angelopoulos had to hand over their passports

Akbar, a senior, was born in Pakistan but is a U.S. citizen, police said. He worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, ‘’Come Back to Afghanistan,’’ based on his experiences, the Yale Daily News reported Wednesday.

At the arraignment in Superior Court a few hours after the arrests, bond was kept at $25,000 for Angelopoulos and Akbar, but was reduced to $15,000 for Anklesaria. They remained jailed last night.

Police said the students had two encounters with officers. Officers Stephanija Van Wilgen and Diane Gonzalez were responding to an unrelated call Haven at about 3 a.m. and were flagged down by the students who asked for directions. A short time later, the two officers returned to Chapel Street to see if the students had found their way home and spotted the burning flag.

“There was a glow in front of the house which they identified as a flag mounted on a pole to the house and it was engulfed in flames,” police spokeswoman Bonnie Posick said.

Van Wilgen pulled down the burning flag to prevent the fire from spreading to the house and Gonzalez tracked down the three men.

A century ago, people, like both my grandfathers, came to this country from Europe to take humble jobs performing hard labor in the coal mines where fatal accidents were common and where the occupational disease of anthrasilicosis shortened every miner’s life, and they were still grateful all their lives that America had taken them in and provided as much opportunity as that.

Today, Ivy League Universities give scholarships to hairy primitives from exotic strongholds of barbarism hostile to our country and our civilization, who are so grateful for being here that they set American flags on fire.

They should revoke that one ungrateful wretch’s citizenship, and deport all three of them so fast their heads spin.
——————-
On second thought:

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that they are all very young, after all. And there is the significant difference that my Lithuanian grandfathers settled in America in respectable communities possessed of decent values, where patriotism, gratitude, courtesy, and common sense were valued and part of expected conduct.

These little wetback arsonists get their values and attitudes from centers of contemporary anti-American elitism, like California’s East Bay and Yale University. Is it any wonder they have no sense of gratitude or appreciation toward the United States? They are obviously loyal enough to the treasonous community of fashion they currently inhabit.

Rather than deport the kids, we should probably be deporting the President of Yale and its administration and faculty.
——————-
More details

Oldest College Daily:

Three Yale students, including the son of a former governor of an Afghan province, were arrested early Tuesday morning after burning an American flag attached to a home on Chapel Street.

Hyder Akbar ’07, Nikolaos Angelopoulos ’10 and Farhad Anklesaria ’10 were arrested for charges including first-degree reckless endangerment, third-degree criminal mischief, second-degree arson, breach of peace and conspiracy to commit second-degree arson, the New Haven Register reports today. The two freshmen are both foreign citizens, and Akbar is a United States citizen, though he was born in Pakistan. Akbar worked as an informal translator for U.S. forces during the invasion of Afghanistan and later published a memoir, “Come Back to Afghanistan,” based on his experiences there.

According to the police report, as reported in the Register, the students were arrested after police found the burning flag, which had hung off 512 Chapel St. The arresting officers had previously assisted the students by giving them directions back to campus from Chapel Street in Fair Haven and later found the students a few blocks away from the burning flag. The three students admitted to police that they lit the fire, according to the report. The New Haven Police Department was not available for comment Tuesday evening.

The students were set to spend Tuesday night in jail after a Superior Court judge refused to release the men without bail, the Register reports. The bail for Akbar and Angelopoulos was set at $25,000 and was $15,000 for Anklesaria.

At that time we were only able to find a video of the song. We could not find the text anywhere on the Net, and our own modest abilities were insufficient to enable us to produce an accurate transcription.

One of our readers was kind enough to send us a link to a site which did publish the text.

On pense que ça commence à faire lÃ
On pense qu’on a assez ri de nous autres lÃ
Pis pour ceux qui n’seraient pas contents
Crissez-moi votre camp

On veut bien accepter les ethnies
Mais non pas à n’importe quel prix
Si tu veux te joindre à notre beau pays
Tu devras faire certains compromis

Lorsque accueilli dans une place
Il faut se fondre à la masse
Parce qu’on peut dire qu’ici tu es bien
Plus que d’où tu d’viens!

On peut maintenant porter le kirpan
Parce que nous autres on est tolérant
Changer les règles du YMCA
Pis un coup parti du CLSC

Nous sommes-nous fracturé la raison?
Pour les caprices de chaque religion
Vos accommodements raisonnables
On est pu capable!

Y’est maintenant temps qu’on soit entendu
Quand notre culture se fait cracher dessus
Si tu n’es pas content de ton sort
Y’existe un endroit qu’est l’aéroport

Toi ma minorité ethnique
Arrête un peu ta musique
Sinon dans ce cas-là tu devras
Retourner chez toi
Retourner chez toi

(roughly translated by JDZ)

We think that enough is enough;
We’ve had enough of being ridiculed by strangers.
Too bad for the malcontents;
Do us a favor, and decamp.

We are happy to accept ethnic immigrants,
But not at absolutely any price.
If you want to be part of our beautiful country
You ought to compromise a bit.

When you are welcomed to a place,
You ought to try to fit in.
Because, after all, you’re better off here
Than you were where you came from.

You can now carry your kirpan
Because we’re tolerant of others,
Change the rules of the YMCA,
Stage a coup against the CLSC.

Have we lost our reason?
Over the whims of each Religion,
Of your reasonable accomodations
We are now less capable.

Now is the time for us to be heard,
When our culture has been spat upon,
If you are not content with your lot,
You can try the option of the airport.

All you ethnic minorities
Should stop playing your own tune for a bit,
And, if you won’t, you will have to
Go back where you came from.
Go back where you came from.

Special thanks to Nelle Chan and Dominique R. Poirier, and thanks to Dominique R. Poirier again for some corrections.

Last night, the Republican-majority Senate voted 80-19 to build a 700 mile double-layer fence along the US border with Mexico. Since the House has already passed the same measure, and President Bush is on the record as supporting it, it looks like a done deal.

I suppose the indulgence of Congress and the Administration in this symbolic gesture is an inevitable sop to the growing Republican constituency opposed to illegal immigration, but I’m afraid I personally just detest this sort of nonsense.

Building a wall is an ugly symbolic gesture. Our adversary in the Cold War built walls to keep people in, and now we’re going to build a similar wall to keep people out. This is bad art. It contradicts our values and our image of ourselves. 700 miles of brute negativity can never be compatible with what America is all about.

Any federal project on such a scale will always cost far, far more than initially projected. As the Washington Post observes, this wall is going to have to cross a lot of extremely difficult terrain, and cost overruns are going to skyrocket.

The fence, of course, will not work. Anywhere a guard with a gun is not standing next to it, people will find ways to dig under it or climb over it. Since we will have already invested a staggering amount of money in the project, efforts to make it work will inevitably proceed to more drastic and extreme measures, at further costs, both monetary and otherwise. Bad policy of this kind never stops at a single step. Folly will be piled upon folly as the desired goal continually recedes unrealized.

We are a fundamentally decent, liberal and humane society. A wall is only going to work if it features mines, electrified wire, watch-towers, guard dogs, and machine guns. We’re only just starting this policy with the initial wall. And exactly how far down that road do we really want to go? Are we going to shoot pregnant women trying to sneak over the border to clean our houses?

There are also other, perhaps minor, but unattractive considerations.

The fence will intrude on the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona, interfering futher than previously with that people’s free movement within its own traditional trans-border Sonoran desert homeland.

It will be bad news for Southwestern wildlife, which also has a habit of ignoring borders. The jaguar has been verifiably sited again in Southern Arizona recently for the first time in many years. A large predator of this kind, particularly in so difficult an environment, can only exist if it has access to an enormous range of territory. It needs to travel from far-separated canyon “islands” in the desert containing water over great distances. Is this fence worth removing the jaguar from the list of American species?

The proposed fence is really just a confession that we have a habit in this country of passing laws (immigration laws and drug laws) which we really don’t want enforced. Politicians vote for them, seeing strong opinion poll majorities in favor of restricted immigration and drug prohibition. But the same American public smokes the pot, snorts the coke, and gets its lawn mowed, its car washed, and a lot of its hard labor done by illegal aliens.

We could have been enforcing existing immigration laws all along, if we really and truly wanted them enforced. Federal agencies have tried and given up, because enforcement efforts have always provoked strong protests to congressional representatives, who time and again have intervened to put a stop to them.

The only positive thing I can say about all this is that it is just a sop. The fence represents only an expensive and symbolically ugly federal pretense at “securing our borders,” intended to appease those incensed about illegal immigration. Expensive, futile, and ugly as it is, it will obviously be less injurious to American life than the far worse alternative: a regime of identity cards (Paperien, bitte! – “Your papers, please!”), workplace inspections, and massive deportations of people who are (in overwhelming majority of cases) just here to do work we don’t want to do ourselves at prices we are willing to pay.