Immigration

During an interview with conservative talk show host Steve Deace last night, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) once again showed us the art of eschewing well-established facts in favor of right-wing talking points. First, Huelskamp talked to Deace about Benghazi, where he demanded answers to questions that have already been answered, and then claimed that the lack of answers to those questions prove there is a cover-up.

“Who made the decision that someone should die, who refused to send support to protect our ambassador, the information officer and two ex-SEALS, somebody made that decision and they’ve covered it up for eight months,” Huelskamp asked, warning of a “cover-up that probably extends to the highest levels of the administration.” He also admitted that the House Republican leadership “said there is no more to Benghazi…we’ve found out everything we can find out.”

Maybe if Huelskamp listened to the hearings he would’ve learned that the call not to send special forces to Benghazi during the attack came from Special Operations Command Africa and not Obama administration officials. Furthermore, the team was told to stand down because they would not have arrived in time to prevent the deaths in the compound and their mission shifted to securing the airport.

Even a senior Republican aide mocked the “crazy stuff” coming from GOP members regarding Benghazi: “Four more M-4s [rifles] inside the annex doesn’t change that outcome. In fact, they might have just created more casualties.”

Later, Huelskamp and Deace discussed the Senate immigration reform bill where he said if a reform bill fails due to Republican resistance to creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants it would be Obama’s fault because Republicans don’t want to give him “a voting bloc of 11 million new voters to the Democratic Party.”

He then decried the bipartisan Gang of 8 for voting together on amendments, which he said proves that they want to create. “a voting bloc that is going to have an unlimited take on the Treasury and then they’re going to buy their votes for a whole generation or two or three.”

The congressman bases his concerns on the Heritage Foundation study, authored by a racist researcher, that uses such faulty data analysis that even Republicans have denounced it.

I just had a private meeting with some constituents in very difficult situations, they came here—one of them illegally and a few others in different situations—and the question I had for them was, ‘Do you think that you deserve citizenship? Well, absolutely. I said but how about if I told you that a bill wouldn’t pass unless you were just given legal status, would you pick no bill?’ The reason I asked them this is, think about that, I don’t think the President wants any immigration issue to pass unless it gives a voting bloc of 11 million new voters to the Democratic Party. I think that’s what it comes down and frankly people are going to get hurt.

…

When you have a welfare state, an insecure border and you’re talking about giving amnesty, that’s three strikes. Tie on top of that the tremendous Heritage study that shows this massive drain on the economy, $6.2 trillion cost of this, this is staggering, this would probably the worst decision since ’86 if we’re going to head down this path. When you see those amendments I mean that calls out that the real purpose here is a voting bloc that is going to have an unlimited take on the Treasury and then they’re going to buy their votes for a whole generation or two or three.

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt spoke May 11 at a rally in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, in support of an unconstitutional measure that would nullify federal gun laws in the state – a favorite cause of extremist gun activists.

In his off-the-cuff remarks, Pratt diverged from his primary topic of opposing any and all gun laws to discuss immigration reform. Gun activists should be interested in blocking immigration reform, Pratt said, because, “If you bring in a whole bunch of Democrats into the country, most of them are going to vote to take away our guns.”

I know it’s not a, per se, a gun issue, but it’s a freedom issue. We began to see that if we were able to beat the president on this flagship issue of his, gun control, then the rest of his agenda was likely to falter. And you know what? That’s exactly what’s happening. Even the immigration bill, which tactically I think they should have led with, that might have passed if that had been first, I don’t think it’s going to pass now. It’s probably not going to get out of the Senate because it might be that we can filibuster.

Why do we care about an immigration bill? Well, frankly, it’s a matter of numbers. If you bring in a whole bunch of Democrats into the country, most of them are going to vote to take away our guns. And in a few years, that’s exactly what would happen. So, we don’t want the other problems that come with that, but just from a Second Amendment point of view, we have a dog in that fight and it’s important that we keep that bill down.

Pratt added that he is hopeful “that we’ve got an agenda that’s set to take off” thanks to his primary allies in Congress: Rep. Steve “If Babies Had Guns” Stockman and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Of Cruz, Pratt said, “I’m so happy that we made a major effort to support his campaign when he was a candidate.” Gun Owners of America contributed over $9,000 to Cruz’s primary campaign and Cruz touted the group’s endorsement.

“He has not disappointed us and I’m certain that he’s not going to disappoint us,” Pratt added.

Pratt’s confidence in Cruz is apparently well-founded: according to The New York Times, Cruz is Gun Owners of America’s “key ally in the Senate.”

That Pratt is “certain” of a U.S. senator’s loyalty is troubling, to say the least. After all, he is an avid conspiracy theorist who thinks the Aurora movie theater shooting might have been an inside job, warns that President Obama is building a private army to overpower the U.S. military, claims that liberals were happy about the Boston Marathon bombings, thinks that President Obama is a “Marxist” who stole the 2012 election and thinks it’s “not stretching” to say that the president is instigating a race war between white Christians and black Muslims.

So I think we’ve got an agenda that’s set to take off. We’ve got them down and if we keep the pressure on offense, thankfully we’ve got people like Rep. Stockman and Sen. Cruz in the Senate, we’ve got people that will fight. And because of that, we’re going to see a lot of action during the rest of the year, and especially in the Senate, where the rules are more favorable to what we’re trying to do. And Sen. Cruz has shown that he may have only been there for four months, but he knows how to run circles around just about everybody else in that Senate. We’ve got a real hero there that’s ridden into town from Texas. And I’m so happy that we made a major effort to support his campaign when he was a candidate, and he has not disappointed us and I’m certain that he’s not going to disappoint us. This guy is the real deal.

Phyllis Schlafly has been going all out in opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, warning that would be “suicide for the GOP” and that it’s all part of President Obama’s plan to “destroy our system.”

So it makes sense that this month’s "Phyllis Schlafly Report" is devoted entirely to opposing immigration reform. In particular, Schlafly is worried that immigration authorities aren’t “vetting” immigration applicants to “make sure that the applicant really wants to become an American.” This, she claims, is more necessary than in the past because “the immigrants of earlier generations, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc., certainly did want to be Americans; like Irving Berlin, their attitude was God Bless America.”

Schlafly is concerned as well that immigrants be made to “accept the rule that disputes in our courts must be decided according to U.S. law, not any foreign law,” a nod to the Right’s bogus “Sharia law” conspiracy theory.

But don’t read too much into this. After all, Schlafly has explicitly assured us that her opposition to immigration reform is “not racist, isolationist, nativist, or xenophobic.”

The vetting of immigrants should make sure that the applicant really wants to become an American. The immigrants of earlier generations, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc., certainly did want to be Americans; like Irving Berlin, their attitude was God Bless America.

There is plenty of evidence that legal and illegal immigrants of various nationalities, in contravention of our citizenship pledge, retain their loyalty to the land they came from. Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington, says, “I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where Americans turn to violent jihad — are you American first or are you Muslim first?”

Our government should investigate thoroughly and reject those who do not want to become Americans, obey our Constitution and laws, speak our language, and salute our Flag. And they have to accept the rule that disputes in our courts must be decided according to U.S. law, not any foreign law.

Rep. Steve King attacked the proposed immigration reform legislation during an appearance on The Steve Deace Show last night, warning that the bill will do great damage to “American liberty” and “the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism.” He said that undocumented immigrants, whom he believes are approximately 33 million in number, and their children and grandchildren will “be taught to disrespect” the rule of law and collect tens of thousands of dollars in welfare benefits.

King maintained that Democrats are only pushing the reform bill in order to create a voting bloc “similar to that bloc that they have created out of African Americans,” describing Hispanics as a “special interest group” that will become part of the Democrats’ “powerful political base.”

It destroys the rule of law with regard to immigration and if that happens the generations of people who would follow, those beneficiaries of amnesty, would not be taught and raised to respect the rule of law, they’d be taught to disrespect it and they would be rewarded for disrespecting the law. The only claim that this 11.5 million people that’s more legitimately projected to be 33 million people, the only claim to the welfare benefits that range up into the area of $46,000 a year for typical benefits for a household, the only claim that the people have for that is that they broke American law. That is the wrong reason, it’s the wrong thing, it’s wrong economically, it’s wrong culturally, it’s wrong for the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism such as the rule of law and there’s no way that Americans benefit from this. When we ask the question, why? There is no real reason except Barack Obama and the Democrat Party [sic] for a long time have been seeking to create a monolithic voting bloc out of Hispanics that is similar to that bloc that they have created out of African Americans and they have designs to go right on down the line with each special interest group, creating a more powerful political base at the expense of our American liberty.

One of the most fascinating things about last week’s conservative infighting over the Heritage Foundation’s immigration reform study was how it revealed the careful balance that “mainstream” groups like Heritage must maintain with the more radical elements of the conservative base.

The Heritage study’s coauthor, Jason Richwine, resigned after his paper trail of racist pseudo-science came to light. Groups like Heritage and the Center for Immigration Studies are generally exceedingly careful to try to insulate themselves from charges of racism – instead of explicitly talking about race, they talk about “multiculturalism and diversity,” “patriotic assimilation,” “professional ethnics” and “high rates of welfare use.”

All of which drives radical anti-immigrant groups crazy. The White Nationalist group VDARE, for instance, is livid that Richwine was booted from Heritage.

In a VDARE blog post Saturday, VDARE editor Peter Brimelow writes that “Beltway immigration patriots” who are “terrified to death of any sign of Political Incorrectness” will ultimately be powerless to stop comprehensive immigration reform. Instead, he writes, they will ultimately be dependent on people like himself and on xenophobia – or, “the very Incorrect sentiments of national identity etc.” – among the grassroots. These sentiments, he writes, were responsible for defeating immigration reform in 2007.

Weigel writes:

"Anyone could have predicted it. Richwine didn’t mind taking on taboos or talking to taboo people. That’s how immigration reform foes talk amongst themselves. That’s not how they’re going to stop the bill."

Actually, my observation is that the small community of Beltway immigration patriots are terrified to death of any sign of Political Incorrectness and have substantially internalized this inhibition.

But it doesn’t matter anyway, because what will really stop “immigration reform” a.k.a. the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge is grass roots opposition—as in 2007. And that is motivated by the very Incorrect sentiments of national identity etc.

Nevertheless, the Richwine saga has to make you wonder where America is headed.

Brimelow is no stranger to the nexus of mainstream and radical on the Right. Last year, Brimelow was invited to speak on a Conservative Political Action Conference panel about “how the pursuit of diversity is weakening American identity” –at which he was joined by Rep. Steve King of Iowa.
 

The mainstream media’s favorite racist commentator, Pat Buchanan, is predictably upset by a Census report this week that in last year’s election, black voters turned out at higher rates than white voters for the first time in history.

In a WorldNetDaily column yesterday, Buchanan laments the fact that African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2012 and that even more people of color are immigrating to the United States.

His solution, of course, is not for the GOP to try to appeal to non-white voters. Instead, he suggests that Republicans focus exclusively on turning out white voters by re-implementing what he sarcastically calls the “evil Southern Strategy” that helped catapult Richard Nixon to office. Buchanan implies that this time around, instead of stirring up racial resentment against black Americans, Republicans should work to pit white voters against “illegal foreign aliens."

“Is the way to increase the enthusiasm and turnout among [white voters] for the GOP to embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal foreign aliens?” he asks. “Or is it to demand the sealing of America’s borders against any and all intruders?”

Who are these folks? Perhaps half are Hispanic, but 90 percent are people of color who, once registered, vote 4-to-1 Democratic. One would not be surprised to hear that the Senate Democratic Caucus had broken out into chants of “Go, Marco, Go!”

Who are these folks? Perhaps half are Hispanic, but 90 percent are people of color who, once registered, vote 4-to-1 Democratic. One would not be surprised to hear that the Senate Democratic Caucus had broken out into chants of “Go, Marco, Go!"

Setting aside the illegals invasion Bush 41 and Bush 43 refused to halt, each year a million new immigrants enter and move onto a fast track to citizenship. Between 80 and 90 percent now come from the Third World, and once naturalized, they vote 80 percent Democratic.
This brings us back around to the Electoral College.

After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988. In four elections – 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2004 – the Republican Party swept all 11 states of FDR’s “Solid South.”
Such were the fruits of that evil Southern Strategy.

But when conservatives urged Bush 1 to declare a moratorium on legal immigration in 1992 and build a security fence, the politically correct Republican establishment fought tooth and nail to keep the idea out of the platform.

…
From these Census figures, white folks are losing interest in politics and voting. Yet, whites still constitute three-fourths of the electorate and nine in 10 Republican votes.

Query: Is the way to increase the enthusiasm and turnout among this three-fourths of the electorate for the GOP to embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal foreign aliens?

Or is it to demand the sealing of America’s borders against any and all intruders?

Just asking.
 

Center for Immigration Studies research director Steven Camarota paid a visit to the raving conspiracy theorists at the Talk to Solomon Show late last month to discuss the Gang of Eight’s bipartisan immigration reform proposal.

Host Stan Solomon started off the discussion with a rant about immigration reform amounting to “total surrender” for conservatives because undocumented immigrants will somehow start  committing large-scale voter fraud in favor of Democratic candidates. Camarota replied that while allowing a path to citizenship would be “boon for the Democratic Party in general,” it is in fact legal immigration that “dooms” conservatives. “Legal immigration means conservatives are going to have a tough time in the coming decades, if it’s allowed to continue,” he said. “Obviously we could change it.”

Later in the discussion, Camarota called the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that grants birthright citizenship to children born in the United States “unwise,” saying that it amounts to “squatter’s rights” for undocumented immigrants.

Camarota then presented his novel twist on the concept of “self-deportion,” the extreme strategy developed by Camarota’s boss Mark Krikorian and disastrously embraced by Mitt Romney. After several years of making life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they leave the country, Camarota suggests, “then we can come back and decide if there’s some share of the population that are left that we might want to amnesty.”

Solomon: Anyone that believes that this is anything less than total surrender, total amnesty and a total victory for liberalism and the Democrat Party, because all these people will become Democrats before they become citizens, and by the way they’ll vote too because we won’t allow them, anyone, to be identified because it would be somehow wrong to ask them if they’re legal or citizens yet before they vote. So, everyone knows this is a game-changer for America. Am I right or wrong?

Camarota: Right, I mean, it’s a long-term boon for the Democratic Party in general. The amnesty is…there’s something else, I mean, you know, I guess people may not realize, it’s legal immigration that mainly kind of dooms…Well, I don’t know that it doom’s Republicans, that’s just simply not fair. It dooms, sort of, conservatives. Because all of the survey research on the new immigrants, well, at least the ones we can do on Hispanics and Asians, are overwhelmingly in favor of government regulation, more spending, that sort of thing. And we have anecdotal evidence that the small number of European immigrants who come in now also are quite liberal in their political orientation, so the political system will respond to that. I mean, sure, it would be wrong to say it’s just simply a voter registration drive. But legal immigration means conservatives are going to have a tough time in the coming decades, if it’s allowed to continue. Obviously we could change it.

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The bottom line, though, is when you haven’t enforced the law very much for twenty years, it’s like, maybe the analogy is squatter’s rights. Or at least this is Marco Rubio and his analysis is that they have a kind of squatter’s rights. And there are perhaps four to five million U.S.-born children now of illegal immigrants. Now, whether we should have given citizenship to people’s children, to a child born in the United States to an illegal parent – virtually no other country in the world would do that, but we do – you know, it’s a fair question to say that was unwise, but we did it. So now, we’re in a very tough situation.

But I do think that we don’t have to deport everyone. The best research indicates that about 200,000 illegal immigrants go home on their own each year. So, it’s just that more than that come and that’s what caused the population to grow. But we think the number coming is down and the number going home is up. So if we enforce our laws, illegals couldn’t jobs or access public benefits, if they couldn’t get drivers’ licenses or access in-state college tuition and all the other things we do, I think we could dramatically increase the number of people going home.

And then, after we show for a number of years that we were serious about enforcing laws, then we can come back and decide if there’s some share of the population that are left that we might want to amnesty.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a GOP witness at last month’s Senate hearings on immigration reform, laid out his strategy for stopping the reform bill on a Tea Party Unity conference call Thursday.

Krikorian told the Tea Party activists on the call that they were lined up against “all the big institutions in the country” including “Big Business…Big Labor, all the big donors, Big Government Big Education, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, Big Religion -- the Southern Baptist Convention has been roped into this as well.”

Opponents of immigration reform shouldn’t be “distracted by particular pieces of the bill” they might support, he said. Instead, “This needs to be a kind of kill-and-replace, like the fight on Obamacare response.”

“There may be parts of it that some people like, increasing some skilled immigration or guest worker programs, what have you,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of either of those things, but if they’re included in this bill it doesn’t matter because there’s so much in this bill that shouldn’t be there that’s so bad that the whole thing needs to be killed.”

All the big institutions in the country are behind this. Big Business is for this, Big Labor, all the big donors, Big Government, Big Education, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, Big Religion -- the Southern Baptist Convention has been roped into this as well. And once the bill came out, though, it became pretty clear that there’s plenty there to attack. The inevitability is not real. This in fact can be stopped, and in fact I think the approach needs to be not to sort of be distracted by particular pieces of the bill, but the whole thing needs to be killed. This needs to be a kind of kill-and-replace, like the fight on Obamacare response. Because this really is an equivalent to Obamacare and frankly probably much more consequential in the long term, much more damaging to the health of the country.

There may be parts of it that some people like, increasing some skilled immigration or guest worker programs, what have you. I’m not a big fan of either of those things, but if they’re included in this bill it doesn’t matter because there’s so much in this bill that shouldn’t be there that’s so bad that the whole thing needs to be killed.

Krikorian went out of his way to attack two of the four Republicans on the bipartisan Gang of Eight that devised the immigration reform proposal. Sen. Lindsey Graham, he said, is facing attack ads in South Carolina “both because he’s on the Gang of Eight and because he’s frankly kind of a jerk.”

He then accused Sen. Marco Rubio, the main Republican spokesperson for the Gang of Eight’s bipartisan proposal, of having “totally drunk the Kool-Aid” and acting as “Chuck Schumer’s water boy.” The best home immigration opponents have to stop the bill, he added, is to “scare [Rubio] enough to give him some kind of excuse to walk away.”

Rubio needs to be the focus, not so much of attack, although he does kind of need to be attacked. Rubio needs to be, it needs to be made clear to him he’s got to back off this bill. I’m not sure that’s possible. He’s completely, totally latched himself to Chuck Schumer at this point. But, you know, it seems to me it’s at least possible, offering him and a lot of other Republicans an opportunity, a way of backing out of this thing. Because especially if Rubio backs out, if he somehow, and it’s going to be hard at this point, but if he were to walk away from this and say, ‘Look, I tried, it just didn’t work,’ the whole thing is over, it’s collapsed and there’s just no chance the Democrats have of getting this through.

So, in a sense, Rubio really is the key guy. And your  question is, the question, the way it would have to be presented to Rubio, is, ‘Are you the conservative ambassador to this Gang of Eight writing this bill, or are you Chuck Schumer’s ambassador to conservatives?” And I’m afraid he’s the latter. He’s now Chuck Schumer’s water boy, making the case for the bill that the Democratic staff, Schumer’s staff, wrote, and making the case for it to conservatives to try to get enough people basically, you know, silenced enough that this thing can get through the Senate. That’s the real danger and that’s where it seems to me the pressure has to be applied.

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There are some people running ads in South Carolina, for instance, against Lindsey Graham, both because he’s on the Gang of Eight and because he’s frankly kind of a jerk and because he’s up in 2014 and there are people talking about primarying him. My point is that making Rubio feel the heat isn’t going to get him to change his mind. He’s totally drunk the Kool-Aid.  I mean, I can’t put it too strongly: he is Chuck Schumer’s water boy. He is Chuck Schumer’s assistant in tearing out this amnesty. And he just thinks that all the rest of it doesn’t matter as long as he can get everybody amnesty. And remember, everybody’s amnesty first, within a few months of this bill passing. Everything else is just promises. ‘If, you know, we get everyone amnesty then we can get our message to Hispanic voters,’ or something. It’s a complete fantasy. He’s totally bought into it. The point is to scare him enough to give him some kind of excuse to walk away, that’s what my point is.
 

President Obama is traveling to Mexico this week to advocate for increased trade ties and cooperation on border enforcement with Mexico in advance of his push for comprehensive immigration reform. But in an interview with Steve Malzberg yesterday, Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King said that Obama is actually in Mexico to “undermine national sovereignty and rule of law” by delivering a “greeting card” to Mexican nationals previously deported from the United States and telling them to “come back and try again.”

King was referring to a provision of the Senate bipartisan immigration reform proposal that would allow some people previously deported for non-criminal reasons to reapply for U.S. residency. Going further, he called the president’s trip “completely outrageous” and accused Republican immigration reform supporters of being “complicit” in the president’s scheme.

King also falsely claimed the bill would provide “instantaneous amnesty” to undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.

Malzberg: Let me ask you, since there’s nobody more active on the immigration than you, and the president of course is in Mexico, and he’s going to give his, you know, his immigration presidential stump speech down in Mexico. To me, that is so inappropriate, it just reeks of inappropriateness. What can we anticipate in his campaign to, again, push for comprehensive immigration reform down in Mexico?

King: Oh my, you know, if you read the bill, the 834-page bill, I think what the president will be doing is already written into the bill. We know that it grants instantaneous amnesty to everybody that’s in the United States illegally, with some exceptions that perhaps will materialize due to law enforcement over time. But it also, in the bill, it invites everybody who has been deported in the past to reapply to come back into the United States, it says, ‘We didn’t mean it.’

So here’s the president down in Mexico, he’s the one that’s essentially carrying the greeting card. Presumably there are people in Mexico who have been deported, he’s down there as president saying, ‘We’re going to legalize everyone that’s in America and if you’ve been deported, come back and try again, we may be able to let you back into the United States.’ I think you’ll hear that from him. This is just, it’s completely outrageous to think that a president would undermine national sovereignty and rule of law that way, and not have the utter outrage of all of Congress lined up against him. And he doesn’t even have the utter outrage of all Republicans lined up against him, because some of them are complicit.