Show Prep 071706: Are Republicans Stupid?

Source: cityjournal

Heather Mac Donald takes on the illegal loving conservatives in this piece...

Seeing Today’s Immigrants Straight
Heather Mac Donald

Advocates of “comprehensive immigration reform” let ideology blind them to the dispiriting facts on the ground.

The immigration debate has divided the conservative movement, with each side accusing the other of betraying core conservative principles. Amnesty proponents argue that America’s best traditions require legalizing the 11 to 12 million illegal aliens already here and opening the door wide to would-be migrants the world over. Illegal immigration, these conservative advocates say, is the inevitable and blameless consequence of misguided laws that foolishly—and vainly—seek to prevent willing workers and labor-hungry employers from finding each other. Hispanics—the vast majority of aliens and the real center of the immigration debate—bring much-needed family values and a work ethic to the American polity; refusing to grant them legal status would destroy Republican hopes for a large new voting bloc. Since popular opposition to large-scale Hispanic immigration stems from economic ignorance and nativist fear, policymakers should protect America from its own worst impulses and ignore the anti-immigration revolt.

Conservative opponents of amnesty and liberalized immigration respond that the rule of law is at stake. Rewarding large-scale lawbreaking with legal status and financial benefits will spark further violations.

she lays out several conservative principles that are being trampled by the illegal loving right...

Principle 1: Respect the law. This year’s illegal-alien demonstrators put forward a novel theory of entitlement: because we are here, we have a right to be here. Protesters in Santa Ana, California, shouted: “We are here and we’re not going anywhere,”

Protecting one form of lawbreaking may require protecting others as well. The city of Maywood in Los Angeles County declared itself a sanctuary zone for illegal aliens this year. Then it got rid of its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division entirely, so that illegals wouldn’t need to worry about having their cars towed for being unlicensed.

Principle 2: Protect sovereignty. Today’s international elites seek to dissolve “discriminatory” distinctions between citizens and noncitizens and to discredit border laws aiming to control the flow of migrants.

this year’s protesters spoke the language of the anti-sovereignty intelligentsia. This increasingly influential discourse was on display at a May conference of Latin American diplomats at the Library of Congress, which spun endless variations on the identical theme: migration is a fundamental human right. As Nicaragua’s minister of foreign affairs, Norman Caldera Cardenal, put it: “It is the responsibility of all nations to respect the dignity, integrity, and rights of all migrants.”

How can conservatives, and more specifically, republicans support illegal immigration? It should go against everything they believe in, it makes a mockery of our laws, hurts our most vulnerable citizens, and more than anything else, from a hard headed practical viewpoint it will destroy the republican majority for years to come.

Amnesty will be the death of the GOP

From Justin at the real teen

The GOP will never be able to rebound from another amnesty. That’s why the faithful Conservatives are siding with the House and the Enforcement Only Bill in the immigration debate. Simply put, the giant influx of immigrants into the United States from Central and South America would kill any hope of a GOP majority in the future.

let’s run a little bit of math. Assuming the Amnesty Bill only lets in 120 million new immigrants in the next 20 years (which is a very conservative estimate), and only half of them vote, and 44% of them still vote GOP, we still have a net loss of 7.2 million votes in favor of the Democrats. That would have been enough to hand John Kerry the Presidency in 2004. Run the real projections (which include numbers for chain immigration) and the future of the GOP looks even grimmer.

Yet, pro-illegal conservatives insist that enforcement won't work. There's nothing we can do, illegal immigrants are a force of nature like tornadoes, or hurricanes, or halitosis. Um, BS?

They Won't Self Deport?

Sheriff Jones (if you follow the link you can see his picture) took the simple step of actually enofrcing the law instead of giving illegals a pass, as my city does, and I'll wager, as your city does.

What was the result?

"I've heard about what is happening with the new laws and, honestly, I'm scared because we don't have our papers," says Alejandra, a Hispanic woman pushing her toddler son down the street in a stroller.

She has just come from collecting clothes at a church and looks as if she can't get home fast enough. As she speaks, her eyes dart all around. Alejandra says she tries to stay off the streets as much as possible these days. Her husband has a job in a factory, but they're so worried that they, too, might be arrested by the sheriff that they just might give up on life in the United States.

"In two, three months, we might go back to Mexico and not come back again," Alejandra says. "I even have a brother-in-law, his company has told him he has one more month and then there will be no more work for him. So we're going to have to go."

Hmmm, so maybe they will self deport? Which leads us directly to...

Principle 3: Support law enforcement. Come-and-get-it immigration advocates endlessly assert that immigration enforcement can’t work. This claim ignores the most important demonstration of conservative principles in the last 20 years.

Elite wisdom for decades held that the police cannot affect crime. The social forces pushing criminals to break the law—poverty, racism, addiction—were too powerful; policing could at best try to solve crimes after they happened. New York’s Mayor Giuliani and his first police chief, William Bratton, rejected that fatalism. They empowered the New York Police Department to enforce aggressively laws that had long lain moribund. The targets of the new public-order push complained bitterly that it was unfair to arrest them for marijuana sales and other crimes after years of de facto decriminalization. The NYPD continued its enforcement drive anyway and brought crime down 70 percent in a decade. It turns out that the well-founded fear of getting caught changes behavior.

Conservative open-borders advocates do not explain why policing brings domestic crime down but can have no effect on border crime. Nor can they point to any evidence to support their claim, since immigration laws have never been enforced in the interior of the country.

You know, when I was a kid growing up working in restaurants it was a standing joke that all you had to do was yell "immigration" through the back door and illegals would come pouring out, do you think that's still true? Would younger folks have any sense that this country has the legal right to enforce it's immigration laws in the interior?

Not only is the claim that enforcement doesn’t work based on no evidence whatsoever, but in fact what evidence there is runs in the opposite direction. The merest hint of enforcement leads employers and illegal aliens to make different calculations about the advantages of breaking the law. Employers in Gwinnett County, north of Atlanta, have grown reluctant to hire illegals after highly publicized federal raids on an international pallet company in April and the passage of an omnibus Georgia law that, among other measures, punishes employers for breaking the immigration rules.

A Mexican from Guanajuato told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he is going back home if the jobs picture doesn’t pick up soon; others like him may be making similar plans.

Phoenix teaches the same lesson. Home Depot, on the city’s central business artery, for years tolerated the hundreds of illegal Hispanics congregating outside the store and in its parking lot. Neighboring businesses complained bitterly about lost customers and the constant littering, trespassing, and public urination. This May, Home Depot posted signs against trespassing and picking up day laborers, and hired off-duty police officers to enforce the rules. Since then, the day laborers have almost completely disappeared.

Federal agencies have designated a stretch of the Texas border a zero-tolerance zone for border trespassing since December 6, 2005. Rather than releasing illegal entrants upon capture, the feds jail them for their border crime, then deport them. One Border Patrol agent told the Washington Post that the 51 percent drop in apprehensions since the operation began are “the most dynamic results” he had seen in 19 years on the force. The Post concluded: Operation Streamline II “has shown what it takes to stop the flow of illegal immigrants: aggressive enforcement of the laws on the books.”

Immigration liberalizers wield the threat of mass deportations as the only alternative to amnesty. By now this argument borders on bad faith, since it has been refuted so many times. The attrition strategy—relying on illegal aliens to leave voluntarily as their access to American benefits diminishes—would work just as effectively, without coercion.

The next conservative argument is "but their lovely people." Supposedly we share some sort of mythical connection with our leftist brethren from across our southern border. I'm not buying it, neither it appears, is Heather Mac Donald...

Principle 4: Pay attention to facts on the ground. If someone proposed a program to boost the number of Americans who lack a high school diploma, have children out of wedlock, sell drugs, steal, or use welfare, he’d be deemed mad. Yet liberalized immigration rules would do just that. The illegitimacy rate among Hispanics is high and rising faster than that of other ethnic groups; their dropout rate is the highest in the country; Hispanic children are joining gangs at younger and younger ages. Academic achievement is abysmal.

Conservatives pride themselves on reality-based thinking that rejects utopian theories in favor of facts on the ground. Yet when it comes to immigration, they cling, against all contrary evidence, to the myth of the redeeming power of Hispanic family values, the Hispanic work ethic, and Hispanic virtue. Even more fanciful is the claim that it is immigrants’ children who constitute the real value to American society. The children of today’s Hispanic immigrants, in fact, are in considerable trouble.

Conservatives have never shrunk from pointing out that dysfunctional behavior creates long-term poverty among inner-city blacks. But when Hispanics engage in the same behavior, they fall silent. From 1990 to 2004, the number of Hispanics in poverty rose 52 percent, accounting for 92 percent of the increase in poor people. The number of poor Hispanic children rose 43 percent, reports Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. By contrast, the number of poor black children has declined 17 percent since 1990. The influx of dirt-poor Mexicans drives the Hispanic poverty increase, of course, but their behavior once here doesn’t help.

Illegitimacy. Half of all children born to Hispanic Americans in 2002 were illegitimate, twice the rate for American whites and 42 percent higher than the overall American rate.

It is hard to reconcile these statistics with the durable myth of superior Hispanic family values.

Academic failure. It would be useful for open-borders optimists to spend some time in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is 73 percent Hispanic, and where just 40 percent of Hispanic students graduate. (Nationwide, 53 percent of Hispanics graduate from high school, according to the Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene—the lowest rate among all ethnic groups.) Of those Hispanic students who do graduate, just 22 percent have completed the course work necessary for admission to a four-year state college—which means that of all Hispanic students who enter in ninth grade, fewer than 15 percent will graduate ready for college.

Native-born Hispanics collected welfare at over twice the rate as native-born whites in 2005; the foreign-born Hispanic welfare rate was nearly three times that of native-born whites.

Uncertain assimilation. Multicultural cheerleaders argue that assimilation is proceeding apace by pointing to the fact that virtually all third-generation Hispanics can speak English.

Contrast with this...

At a city council meeting this March in Maywood, California, the illegal-alien sanctuary, a resident suggested that a council member was using English as a sign of disrespect. All this adds up to a significant, and accelerating, transformation of American culture.

And this...

ESCONDIDO – From their back porch near Washington Avenue, Benny and Anita Herrera used to watch their sons play baseball with neighborhood children in a 2-acre backyard.

Now a forest of apartments stands there.

The Herreras were once the only Latino family on their street.
“Now I see a white person and think, ‘What’s this person doing here?’ ” Benny, 69, said.

The couple live in the heart of a mostly Latino neighborhood in central Escondido, laboring under the fastest-growing poverty rate in the state.

In recent years, the city has spent $9 million on the neighborhood for new sidewalks, affordable housing, after-school and day-care programs, and a 4.5-acre park. Last month, the city released a study that painted a sobering picture of the area, where 75 percent of the households are headed by single mothers and half the residents don’t have a high school diploma.

As waves of Latino families moved in, white families moved out.Today, 80 percent of Mission Park’s 16,000 residents are Latino.

“At first, I thought, ‘This is great, my people are moving in,’ ” Benny said. “Then came the graffiti and the trash on the streets and the gunshots.” Link

And finally, this...

WARREN COUNTY — Shots were fired at a Hamilton Twp. construction site in Warren County Friday and the owner of a construction company beaten in retaliation for the firing of an undocumented worker, according to Hamilton Twp. police.

Police responded to a “shots fired” call around 1 p.m., in which the male caller told them “Mexicans were shooting at him.”

Two men were injured, according to police, after the man who earlier had been fired from a construction company allegedly returned with about eight other men — armed with three handguns and several baseball bats.

Hamilton Twp. Police Lt. Jeff Braley said police are looking for a “vehicle of interest” — a white Chevrolet SUV with Ohio license “CDGOMEZ.”

Braley said he believes the suspects have been residing in the city of Hamilton, although investigators say they have not been able to fully identify the suspects.

According to police, the suspects arrived and rammed the construction foreman’s truck with their vehicle, jumped out and damaged the truck with baseball bats, then sought out the foreman and rushed him. At that time they displayed the handguns and fired 10 to 12 shots in the direction of the foreman and another employee, James Parsons Jr., who was coming to the foreman’s aid.

Parsons was struck multiple times with a baseball bat, police said. The suspects re-entered their white SUV and fled the scene, police said.

Parsons was taken to the hospital with multiple injuries. The foreman was treated at the scene for minor injuries.

A construction company supervisor said the incident began when a worker at the 21 Oaks subdivision construction site off U.S. 22/Ohio 3 was asked to produce paperwork to prove he was a legal immigrant. When he failed to produce the paperwork, he was fired.

After cheap labor, I genuinely believe the reason a mojority of conservatives support amnesty for illegal aliens is fear and cowardice. They know it will get ugly if we try to deport, but can fear and cowardice be a good place from which to guide a nation?

Yes, it will get ugly, but truthfully it almost couldn't be uglier then it is now. American citizens are caught in a bloody harvest no matter where we turn. At least if it was because of deportations we could know there would be an end to it. Not the endless grinding drip of Americans murdered every day by our president's good hearted folks.

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