Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow 
Recent News
Lamar Smith’s Legal Workforce Act: Far More Than E-Verify—And Worth Fighting FOR, Not OVER
Congressman Lamar Smith's breakthrough bill H.R.2885 is packed with features to expel illegal aliens from our labor force. It’s actually moving in Congress but the patriotic immigration reform community is internally conflicted and this opportunity may well be missed. At least that's how it looks to me.
I. The Dispute Among Friends
Some of our headliner heroes, especially Congressman Lou Barletta [R-PA], Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and former Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce, have given thumbs down to H.R.2885 because it will preempt two state enforcement tools against illegal immigration:
- State authorities' workplace raids based upon suspicion of hiring illegal aliens won't be permitted.
- Some of the few states that have mandated E-Verify for private employers, either universally (AL, AZ, MS, SC) or partially (GA, LA, MO, UT), will have to amend and re-pass those laws for compatibility with the new federal law. (See here for a map of E-Verify rules by state. In most cases, states have mandated E-Verify only for government entities and, sometimes, for contractors that want to do business with those entities.)
The critics of the bill includes some of my VDARE.com colleagues (e.g. here and here) and some of the grassroots leaders who generated the pressure that yielded the E-Verify bills on their states' books (e.g. here).
Given the Obama Administration's intransigence against immigration enforcement, and the systematic federal nonfeasance on enforcement going back to the 1986 amnesty (amnesty and subsequent enforcement promised, only amnesty delivered), our compatriots, whose devotion and enormous efforts have delivered critical results, have the right to be suspicious of any hobbling of the states.
But, much as I admire Barletta (to whose campaigns I've donated, including his 2012 re-election effort), Kobach (whom I know and to whose campaigns I've also contributed), Pearce, and all our dissident "local notables", I think they're making the wrong call on H.R.2885.
Considering the old adage "the perfect is the enemy of the pretty darn good," I hope they'll reconsider their opposition to the bill because, while losing those two tools (the second only temporarily), we get so much more in return.
The details follow.
II. The Bill, Its Status, and Its Prospects
On September 12, 2011, 13-term Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), currently Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a stalwart for the cause of immigration-in-the-national-interest since the early 1990s, introduced H.R.2885 [220-kB PDF], the "Legal Workforce Act." (For a splendid account of our three-decades-and-counting struggle, see historian Otis Graham's book Immigration Reform and America's Unchosen Future. Smith's early involvement is recounted on page 149.)
With Chairman Smith powering it, the Legal Workforce Act was marked up (i.e. amended) by the Judiciary Committee during September and sent on to the House Ways and Means Committee, which must deal with it before it can reach the House floor. The Judiciary Committee's mark-up was not without peril for the bill, and its future is decidedly uncertain—especially if too many of us who understand immigration's existential threat to America blow off our civic duty to coming generations because we're offended by H.R.2885's imperfections.
Rosemary Jenks, head of Government Relations for NumbersUSA, tells me that she's seeing some movement of the bill in Ways and Means but that the House Republican leadership needs to feel massive pressure from the grassroots if the bill is to come before the whole House. She explained:
The Achievements Of Russell Pearce—Arizona’s Patriotic Immigration Reform Champion is Down But Not Out!
[See also Is “Conservatism” Enough? Russell Pearce’s Defeat And The Future Of “The Movement” by James Kirkpatrick ]
There can be no doubt that the defeat of Russell Pearce in the Tuesday’s recall election was a huge blow to the patriotic immigration reform movement. We can point a lot of fingers about who is to blame for his defeat—James Kirkpatrick did a good job of it on VDARE.com yesterday. But it’s important not to get too wound up on the negatives. To pay tribute to this great man, and to keep things in perspective, I think it is also worth reflecting on what Russell Pearce has accomplished.
Apart from Tom Tancredo, no politician has been more effective in promoting the cause of patriotic immigration reform. In fact, Tancredo would likely acknowledge that in some ways Pearce achieved more. In Washington D.C., all patriot victories over the last decade have been defensive—preventing things from getting even worse. Bush’s amnesties were stopped in 2006 and 2007 and Obama’s DREAM Act in 2010. But immigration patriots have completely failed to get more enforcement against illegal immigration and, above all, cuts in legal immigration—let alone a moratorium.
This is why the progress made in Arizona in the last decade has been so inspiring. In 2004, patriotic immigration reform was near its low point. While 9-11 had temporarily halted George W. Bush’s amnesty proposals, most Republicans and conservatives were so loyal to Bush that few would challenge him on immigration. During that year’s presidential election, the Democrats didn’t even need to use euphemisms like “comprehensive immigration reform”. John Kerry frankly described his immigration proposals as amnesty.
But in 2004, State Rep. Russell Pearce spearheaded Protect Arizona Now or Prop 200 in Arizona. The law restricted benefits and voting fraud from illegal aliens.
There would have been absolutely no chance getting it through the legislature. Nor did Pearce find much help from national politicians. With the exception of Rep. Trent Franks, every single national politician in the state, even J.D. Hayworth, opposed the measure. So did the state’s Democratic Governor, and both the state Republican and Democratic parties. But, despite being outspent 3-1, the measure passed with 56% of the vote.
While Republicans talking heads were pushing George Bush’s phony 44% of the Hispanic vote after his reelection, Prop 200 put the political Establishment on notice that, when given the chance, Americans were serious about illegal immigration.
After Prop 200’s success, Pearce, Franks, and Tancredo toured the country to promote border security. This helped create the basis for the national grassroots effort that was ready when Bush promoted amnesty in 2006 and 2007.
In DC, the best immigration patriots could hope for was to stop Bush’s scheme. But in Arizona, Russell Pearce introduced the Legal Arizona Workers Act to mandate E-Verify for all employers. By then, state politicians knew that they would be looking for a new job if they voted against it; and it passed the legislature and Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano reluctantly signed it. Part of the reason: she knew Pearce would lead a push to get an even tougher bill via ballot initiative if she vetoed it.
In 2006 and 2008, Republicans—including newer converts to border security like J.D. Hayworth—lost in Congress. But under Pearce’s leadership, Arizona voters still passed tough ballot initiatives making English the official language, cracking down on human smuggling and denying bail to illegal aliens.
Then, with Obama in the White House, a strong Democratic majority in Congress, and Republican opposition faced solely on economic matters, immigration seemed to fall from the national spotlight again.
But Pearce’s SB 1070 brought immigration back to the forefront of national debate. Obama and Eric Holder’s contempt for the rule of law and democratic process in Arizona provoked a huge backlash across the country, as America rallied around Arizona.
Whereas a few years ago, pretty much every politician shied away from Prop 200, by 2010 Republicans were all fighting to outdo themselves over who supported the legislation the most. John McCain’s defeat of JD Hayworth in the 2010 U.S. Senate primary was disappointing, but the fact that this former La Raza Legislator of the Year winner was now at least pretending to support SB 1070 showed just
The Equality Racket
Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.
This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.
What action? The rich must pay ”their fair share.” Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.
Is “Conservatism” Enough? Russell Pearce’s Defeat And The Future Of “The Movement”
Conservatives, both Establishment and grassroots, lose because they don’t want to win.
Modern American Conservatism is unique among political movements in that it flinches from actively seeking victory. Partially
Memo From Middle America (Formerly Known As Memo From Mexico) | Republican Candidates Boycott Univision Debate For Wrong Reason—While Hispandering On Telemundo
English is the language of America, a critical component of our national identity. If we didn’t speak English we wouldn’t be the same country.
But the primacy of the English language today is threatened by the growth of Spanish in
Immigration Cartoon Of The Day
This daily cartoon contributed to VDare by Baloo. His site is HERE
Steve Jobs: Nature, Nurture, And Apricot Orchards In Silicon Valley
Slugger Yogi Berra liked to say, "You can observe a lot by watching." And you can observe a lot about what modern Americans actually value just by watching their heroes.
Nobody in recent memory earned more lavish obituaries than Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Inc. He was immediately beatified as a secular saint following his death on October 5th of cancer at age 56.
A middle-class white Baby Boomer, a child of the Sixties, Jobs vastly appealed to the middle-class white Baby Boomers who still dominate culturally.
Yes, I realize we Baby Boomers are insufferable. But you are going to miss us when we are gone. The “diverse” America of the future is going to be a lot less interesting.
For example, in an upcoming CNN documentary Black in America, scheduled to air November 13, Soledad O'Brien exposes the scandal that few blacks have been allowed to found their own successful high tech firms.
Blogger Michael Arrington has gotten himself in lots of trouble for admitting in an interview with O'Brien that he doesn't think this is caused by discrimination. Vivek Wadwha and Anil Dash piled on Arrington. (Of course, nobody mentioned the similar lack of Mexican-Americans in Silicon Valley.)
Ironically, in his new authorized but frank and judicious biography, Steve Jobs
"Even though there was a surface sameness to his top team—all were middle-aged white males—there was a range of styles."
Of course, it's hardly a surprise, at least to VDARE.com readers, that Apple
Why We Should Care If Whites Become A Minority
Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, "Russia for the Russians!" marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the Caucasus.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for "Western education is sacrilege," massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were bombed.
Sunday, The New York Times reported that Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are suffering "horrific abuse" following last year's pogrom.
Ethnic nationalism, what Albert Einstein dismissed as "the measles of mankind," and religious fanaticism are making headlines and history.
Welcome to the new world disorder.
What has this to do with us? Perhaps little, perhaps everything.
In three weeks of my radio-TV tour to promote The Suicide of a Superpower no question has occurred more often than one about the chapter "The End of White America." Invariably, the question boils down to this:
Why should we care if white Americans become a minority? America, interviewers remind me, assimilated the immigrants of a century ago–Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs–and we can do the same with peoples from the Third World.
And perhaps they are right. Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK.
Yet there are reasons to worry.
First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe. Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history.
We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.
We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no
Halloween In Georgetown: Africa In Our Midst?
[See also by Paul Kersey: Diversity Vs. Halloween—Can Your Neighborhood Pass The Trick-Or-Treat Test?]
I was in Washington D.C. on business on Halloween. My colleagues and I—all dressed as Patrick Bateman from the 2000 cult-film American Psycho—decided to venture out into Georgetown, the biggest SWPL retreat from the black undertow that exists in the District of Corruption. [VDARE.com note: The fictional Bateman was a white guy with a suit and tie—obviously a dangerous character.]
Wanting to take in the scene, we had our cab driver drop us off near the entrance of the Key Bridge at the foot of M Street, in the very heart of Georgetown.
What we experienced was something that we had only previously watched on crime reports on the nightly news.
What looked like the combined populations of Anacostia and Prince George’s County were wandering aimlessly through the streets of Georgetown. A heavy police presence was on the scene trying to maintain order. It felt like martial law had been declared.
“We need to get our cameras out, in case of a Flash Mob,” said a friend. “Mahogany Mob,” I corrected him, pointing out that the lethal spread of mob and rob attacks across the country this past summer (well, since Obama was elected) have all had one key common denominator: they were all composed of black people—just as the crowds in Georgetown were on this evening.
Jesting aside, we quickly made our way into one of the local watering holes where my friends and I imbibed spirits, enjoyed the festivities, and caroused with DC’s finest double Xs.
Suddenly a girl began pointing in hysterics across the road. In literally the same spot where my friends and I had been joking about the Mahogany Mob earlier, a gun fight had broken out between two people in the mob. One received a bullet in the head. [Halloween violence in DC leaves 6 injured, including juvenile shot in Georgetown, The Washington Post, November 1, 2011]
In total, six people in D.C. were shot that night.
We were not alone though. Grisly incidents like this transpired all across America on Halloween night—invariably involving black people.
In Macon GA Trick-or-Treating is fading away because the safety of residents is in question. In Cleveland Heights OH, where Mahogany Mobs have terrorized the business district forcing a strict curfew, trick-or-treating was forced to end at 6 p.m.; Marion Salmon Hedges, while purchasing candy for underprivileged kids at a Target shopping complex in East Harlem, had a shopping cart dropped on her head
The Bad/Good Old Days—In Some Ways, MAD MEN Tells A Lot Of Truth.
You have to hand it to the brains behind Mad Men. The creators of AMC’s highly rated television series about an advertising agency in the 1960s have committed a Kinsley Gaffe—defined as the accidental revelation of Politically Incorrect truth.
Example: An episode in Season 4, “The Suitcase,” treats as background material the second heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston in 1965, which Ali, of course, won. When lead character Don Draper asks his secretary, the aging Miss Blankenship, whether she will watch the fight, she answers: “If I wanted to see two Negroes fight, I'd throw a dollar bill out my window.”
Needless to say, the writers of the show intended to demonstrate the “casual racism” among whites back then, not reveal a truth about blacks; i.e., they are prone to violence, or about whites, many of whom lost interest in boxing after there stopped being white champions. Miss Blankenship unbosomed a Kinsley Gaffe.
While the alleged casual “racism” of the characters merely divulges the liberal biases of the program’s creators, they don’t likely know they are depicting a world that in many ways was better than the one we live in now. Or do they?
National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein | October Jobs: They’re Baaaack—Immigrant Displacement Of American Workers At Full Bore
The headline job story for this month is, well, the same old story. October payrolls rose by 80,000, which was slightly shy of the very modest expectations of most economists, but enough to push unemployment down by one-tenth of one percent, to 9.0%.
Of course, the Main Stream Media doesn’t tell you that those two factoids come from different surveys. Payrolls are from a survey of employers; the unemployment rate is calculated from a survey of households. The Household Survey records the race, ethnicity, and nativity (but not legal status) of its respondents. That might explain why it is so rarely vetted by the MSM.
Household Survey employment rose by 277,000 in October—more than three-times the payroll survey figure. That’s good news—until you drill down to the details.
'Arrivederci, Roma': Will Popular Democracy Bring Down The New World Order?
Will popular democracy bring down the New World Order?
A fair question. For Western peoples are growing increasingly reluctant to accept the sacrifices that the elites are imposing upon them to preserve that New World Order.
Political support for TARP, to rescue the financial system after the Lehman Brothers collapse, is being held against any Republican candidate who backed it. Germans and Northern Europeans are balking at any more bailouts of Club Med deadbeats.
Farah On Immigration And The Bible: Love Our Neighbor—Not Give Him Our Country
Joseph Farah, Editor of World Net Daily, writes powerfully and clearly about why those who cite the Bible as a justification of illegal immigration and a warrant for illegal alien amnesties are dead wrong—even sinfully so. [What the Bible says about illegal immigration, by Joseph Farah, World Net Daily, November 2, 2011]. His Biblical exegesis is concise and should be proclaimed far and wide.
Farah tactfully and tactically aims his reasonable message at Christians and Jews alike by, with two exceptions, confining his citations to the Pentateuch—Scripture equally sacred to both Christians and Jews. As a brief and powerful refutation of open-borders activists who cite the Bible for their own aims, his column is very good.
People pondering the National Question do well to remember what the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn—a man then living through Soviet Communism's leveling of Russia as a distinct nation—wrote in the Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970 that Soviet Communist party bosses forbade him to travel to Stockholm to deliver:
“It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the leveling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God's design.”
(VDARE.com note: links added to quotes throughout).
Solzhenitsyn implicitly and Farah explicitly refer to the hubris and sin of Nimrod and the fate of the Tower of Babel—a cautionary tale too closely reminiscent of the ambitions
Diversity Is Strength! It's Also The End Of Southern Civility… And The South
Food is the one benefit of “diversity”. Thanks to diversity, wherever you are in this country, you can now enjoy Indian, Chinese, Italian, Greek, Ethiopian, and Vietnamese food prepared at low prices by Mexicans of dubious legality.
Unfortunately, it also means the end of any authentic American regional or national cultures. It means getting a confused and hostile look from some Somali waiter when you ask for sweet tea in Virginia. And, beyond culinary idiosyncrasies, it also means the loss of the traditions and ways of life that define a place.
New York Times food critic Kim Severson just wrote on the decline of the civility and manners that once defined the American South. . [A Last Bastion of Civility, the South, Sees Manners Decline,2011 November ]
As an example, she cites the lawsuit filed by former NBA player Joe Barry Carroll and Joseph Shaw against the Tavern at Phipps in the Buckhead area of Atlanta.
Carroll and Shaw were asked to relinquish their seats to two white women, and refused, citing their own elevated status. As a result, the Tavern ejected them and they sued it for racism. In a verdict that will surely be as infamous as the Dred Scott decision, a jury ruled that they did not suffer racial discrimination. [Jury to former NBA star: No discrimination]
