Italian immigrants at Ellis Island, 1911

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.

This Dallas Morning News story demonstrates that Hispanic voters are a natural GOP constituency.

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.

Victor Davis Hanson finds that the wisdom of the commentariat has changed. Via the News Junkie.

—————————————-

Labour deliberately set out to alter the culture, character, ethnic composition, and consciousness of Britain. If they didn’t like it the way it was, couldn’t they just have moved?

—————————————-

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.

—————————————-

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 Telegraph:

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.

———————————-

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.

Coming soon to a city near you?

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.

Violence and social unrest have finally awoken the Dutch left from its Rousseau-ian dream. A new Labor Party policy paper calls for an end to the politics of victimhood and a quick dip in the melting pot for Holland’s Islamic new arrivals.

International Herald Tribune:

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.”

Melanie Scarborough thinks US presidential candidates should be running against socialism and stupidity, not using them as tools to manipulate voters.

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.

Freakonomics’ Mellisa Laffey interviews British economist Philippe Legrain.

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 failed cloture vote dooming the deeply-flawed Immigration Bill was not necessarily, practically-speaking, a bad thing.

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.

Even when Michelle is wrong, she’s cute.

6:43 video

The Immigration Bill didn’t really please anybody (except for George W. Bush, and who cares what he thinks?), and died a deserved death last night during a procedural vote in the Senate.

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.

————————

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.