Category Archives: IMMIGRATION

'Putting Americans Back To Work'

In October, I blogged Pat Buchanan’s timely call for a moratorium on immigration. Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM has timed his demand for such a logical move with the clueless Obama’s Job Summit. In an article for WorlNetDaily.com titled “Putting Americans Back To Work,” Peter exhorts:

“Incredibly, despite the recession, about 125,000 legal immigrants and “temporary” workers a month – as many as 1.5 million a year – are still entering the U.S.

And, with some 15 million Americans unemployed, there are still an estimated 8 million illegal aliens holding jobs here.

Indeed, the Obama Administration has repeatedly promised that it will try to amnesty these illegals next year. This would end any hope that they might eventually leave the American job market. In fact, because there’s usually a fair degree of back-and-forth across the border in the illegal-alien population, the administration’s repeated promises of amnesty are probably discouraging departures.

Democrats and Republicans have been bickering about whether the Obama administration’s stimulus package really created the claimed 650,000 jobs.

But during the same period, twice that number of legal immigrants and “temporary” workers entered the U.S. – easily swamping even the most optimistic estimate of jobs created. …

It’s literally a holy cause with them, and they react very nastily if you question it. You even sometimes find economists making easily refuted claims that immigration does not impact U.S. employment and incomes – in other words, that the laws of supply and demand have been repealed, uniquely, in the area of immigration.

In contrast, contrary to stereotype, critics of immigration policy are generally rational. What’s not rational about supply and demand?

But why don’t MSM journalists at least ask policymakers about the option of an immigration moratorium as a way of reducing unemployment?

There’s the usual liberal media bias, needless to say.

But my own theory (which will probably sound weird to anyone who hasn’t spent the years I have in establishment financial journalism!) is that it goes beyond bias. Journalists don’t ask about an immigration moratorium because nobody else has asked about it. The idea would just never occur to them on their own.

Call it intellectual inertia – if you want to be kind.”

[SNIP]

Peter is indeed too kind. I’ve tied this mindless ennui to the “Age of the Idiot.”

Lou Has Left The Building

Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism

I listened live to Lou Dobbs announce his departure from CNN after working there for 30 years. As Joseph Farah observed, this left “the network in a state of programming irrelevancy.”

For years there has been just one reason to tune in to CNN. His name was Lou Dobbs.

What makes Lou Dobbs so special is his independence and fearlessness. Dobbs clearly set his own agenda. He had no interest in the “conventional wisdom” of his industry. Dobbs thinks like a real American newsman – a throwback to an age when journalists actually believed they were watchdogs of government and asked tough questions in the interests of the people.

When virtually his entire profession and elites in all the other political and cultural institutions of our time were making excuses for allowing tens of millions of illegal aliens to occupy our country, Lou Dobbs was alone in his focus on the issue critical to America’s safety and security.

Here’s a bit more about the forces behind the purge:

Months ago, the president of CNN/U.S., Jonathan Klein, spelled out two options for Lou Dobbs, the network’s most outspoken anchor. Dobbs could vent his opinions on radio and anchor an objective newscast on television, or he could leave CNN altogether.

On Wednesday, Dobbs made his decision: He chose opinion.

Dobbs told viewers that he was resigning from his CNN job immediately. Sitting before an image of an American flag on his studio set, he said “some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day.”

He remained vague about how he would contribute “to the national conversation,” saying that he was considering “a number of options and directions.”

The synophobia, the protectionism, the populism—there was a lot to disagree about with Dobbs. But Mr. Farah is right; CNN is not much without him.

To get an idea of the kind of malicious attacks the man faced, read this drivel on the huffing post.

The drive to get rid of Dobbs, I predict, will miscarry.

Update II: Bangalore On The River Brent (Demographics? Diddlysquat!)

Britain, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, The West

What on earth is a representative of the British National Party (BNP) doing in what he says is Wembley (an area of north-west London), but looks like Calcutta, warbling in Welsh? Be gone with you, you rambling racial supremacist. Give it up. As the Virginia Postrel thesis goes, change is always good. Embrace it. Count your blessings: there is still one pukka British symbol on the streets of Wembley: the double-decker bus.

Update I: Surprisingly, most comments hereunder ignore the larger reality, preferring to concentrate on minutia: are the streets clean and orderly (how the fuck do they know?). Western liberals are like that.
By contrast, confronted with a take-over of swathes of their towns, Chinese, Indian or Pakistani men would be furious. This is to their credit.
Yet an out-migration of the indigenous English population from a section of the city they no longer recognize or feel comfortable in is dismissed by your average, non-nonchalant, liberal-minded westerner. How sophisticated! This is why I, with few exceptions, have little respect for western men and, like Tom Fleming, hold white liberal-minded men responsible for everything from affirmative action to racial set-asides to speech codes—and, in general, for most forms of cultural and legal foot-and-mouth. As Dr. Fleming put it:

“[W]e should not make the mistake of blaming black people for the suicide we continue to inflict on ourselves. We white males are the problem, not blacks, women, homosexuals, or Mexicans. We–at least the liberal part of “we”– turned away from our religion and our civilization; we made war on property and marriage; we rejected Haydn and Sophocles in favor of John Cage and Kate Chopin. We have emasculated ourselves, pithed our brains, destroyed our vision and hearing …”

I believe this is the very impulse evinced in the blog posts that dismiss the Wembley footage. It’s left-liberalism at its seeming suavest.

Update II (Nov. 5): DEMOGRAPHICS? DIDDLYSQUAT! It is a great shame that the Jacobinism of the Steyns of the world is mistaken for a coherent defense of the West, or for the good kind of nationhood, for that matter. A little reminder: When the barbarians of the banlieusard rioted through France in November of 2005, one neoconservative troika—Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Frederick Kempe—fingered French racism and snobbery in marginalizing its poor Maghrebis. France, in this unholy trinity’s assessment, fell short in offering its Third Worlders freebies and fraternité.

From “Get With The Global Program, Gaul”:

When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.
The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority [can you say Steyn?]. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity.
Taking the Frank out of the French hasn’t been as easy. As the famed (neoconservative) Francis Fukuyama has observed, in Europe “identity remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory.” How gauche.

Steyn, your “One-Man Global Content Provider,” is, predictably, wrong. Demographics are NOT destiny. Demographics are the excuse of statists (such as our neoconservative contingent) to persevere with immigration policies that destroy western civil society and shore up the western state. (I will incorporate these idea in a column.)

Did the now-waning West become great because it outbred the rest of the world? Ridiculous! The West was once great becasue of human capital—innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas, and the willingness to defend such a civilization.

Of course, if I spouted the silly Steyn line I’d be rich.

America: Long Lost To The Left

Government, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, The State

What motivates Middle America “to distrust its government, for it surely does”? Pat Buchanan packs a lot of pathos into the answer. I hope he is right, because not everyone agrees about what moves Middle—or is it “Meathead”?— America:

“…the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.”

“Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: ‘They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.'”

“Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.”

“In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.”

“They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.”

“They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.” [My emphasis]

“They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.”

“America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”