The Open Borders Conspiracy

The Open-Borders Conspiracy
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 15, 2002

If I could choose to have my readers learn one and only one thing from what I write, it would be that America's problems are not the result of blind, much less inevitable, forces, but are the consequences of deliberate political action by motivated individuals and groups. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of our ongoing immigration crisis. Let's trace the lines of influence in the open-borders conspiracy, a word I use despite its connotations of grassy knollology because in this case it is factually appropriate. Given who has been pushing mass immigration in America and how open they have been about why they are doing it, it boggles my mind that anyone who considers himself conservative can still support this policy.

Starting with the hardest Left, there is the radically pro-immigration position of the Communist Party of the United States. Don't discount their significance because of their tiny membership and marginalized position in mainstream political discourse; their positions are indicative of the consensus of the most radical and determined core of the Left. This is true because much of the Left's fundamental thinking is done by avowed communists and their splinter groups, and because these groups have all sorts of ties through shared personnel with mainstream organizations. This radical core authenticates its positions as the extreme leftist view, at which point it is picked up on by more moderate leftists and endorsed in kind but with a difference of degree. The CPUSA supports immigration because it believes that this will enable it to solve the fundamental problem it faces in America: a materially contented working class. As put in William Hawkins's excellent 1994 book on the open-borders conspiracy, Importing Revolution,

The solution? Increase immigration, especially that of undocumented, illegal workers. The Communist Party, USA, in its publication, Political Affairs: Theoretical Journal of the Communist Party USA, understands well the cause-effect relationship of this: "undocumented workers in any work... have the effect of depressing wages and lowering the quality of working conditions." In other words, CPUSA and its fellow travelers suggest that, in order to "save" workers, the working class must first be destroyed through declining wages and living standards!"

This is the first prong of the Communist assault: worsen conditions for American workers.

The second Communist prong is to use immigration to increase the numbers of racial minorities, whom they believe can be relied upon to be disloyal to the existing regime. As the Marxist theoretician Mike Davis puts it in his book Prisoners of the American Dream,

The real weak link in American imperialism is a black and Hispanic working class, fifty million strong. This is a nation within a nation, a society within a society, that alone possesses the numerical and positional strength to undermine the American empire from within."

One of the ironies of the significance of communists in the immigration debate is that the origin of American communism itself lies in immigration. As Nathan Glazer reports in his study of the movement's formative years, "the most striking characteristic of Communist Party membership throughout the 1920's was that it was overwhelmingly composed of recent immigrants. Probably only one in ten of the members was a native American." (The Social Basis of American Communism) These immigrants came to this country in the great wave from 1890 to WWI, and therefore the New Left, which two generations later grew out of the intellectual and social milieu these communists created, is yet another baleful indirect consequence of immigration. Now let's move (a little) towards the center and look at the ideas of the National Lawyers Guild, which is not openly communist but is a front organization for communists. One of their leaders once said, speaking of immigration, that, "[T]o adopt a liberal policy would provide the basis for thousands of non-white, often left-leaning and politically conscious individuals to remain lawfully in the United States." He was speaking specifically about one provision of law, so his numbers were a bit off; we are currently taking in nearly a million a year. Notice the way that left-wing politics is linked to race: there is a pervasive anti-white bias running through all these people. The NLG worked on a number of individual and collective legal cases for immigrants, but its most pervasive influence has been in its ability to insinuate its staff into other organizations. For example, one Amy Novick, a member of its National Immigration Project, its principal tool for promoting open borders, became the assistant director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. (Its extremism has been so offensive that even liberals like Robert F. Kennedy and Americans for Democratic Action have denounced it). It helped found the National Immigration Forum in 1981.

Again moving a little to the center, next comes the Ford Foundation, an organization that has contributed to the problem of immigration in a number of ways. Following is an incomplete list of organizations the Ford Foundation has funded that promote immigration. My point in subjecting the reader to this mind-numbing list is to make the point of just how busy Ford has been in pushing this agenda, and how innocuous-sounding are so many of the organizations they use to do it. Ford often uses organizations that have some legitimate aspects to them to provide cover, giving funds to finance a specific pro-immigration program within the organization. To wit:

Arizona Farmworkers Union, African-American Institute, American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education, American Civil Liberties Foundation, American Council for Nationalities Service, American Friends Service Committee, American Immigration Law Foundation, American Public Welfare Association, Asian-Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, Bilateral Commission on U.S.-Mexican Relations, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Casa de Proyecto Libertad, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Economic and Social Studies of the Third World, Center for Migration Studies of New York, Center for Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement, Center for Teaching and Research in Economics, Central America Resource Center, Centro Presente, Chinatown Resources Development Center, Christian Community Service Agency, Clinica Monsignor Oscar A. Romero, Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services, Farmworker Justice Fund, Haitian Centers Council, Haitian Refugee Center, Haitian Task Force, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Indochina Resource Action Center, Institute for Regional Education, International Refugee Center of Oregon, Inter-University Program on Latino Research, Intertect Institute, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Lutheran Council in the USA, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Migrant Legal Action Program, Multicultural Education Training and Advocacy Center, National Association for the Southern Poor, National Bureau of Economic Research, National Chicano Council on Higher Education, National Coalition of Advocates for Students, National Coalition of Haitian Refugees, National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, National Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Forum, New York Association on New Americans, Policy Sciences Center, Population Council, Population Reference Center, Potomac Institute, Refugee Policy Group, Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition, Texas Legal Services, Travelers and Immigrants Aid Society of Metropolitan Chicago.

The point is that all these organizations are not just pro-mass immigration by nature; they are specifically paid - bribed - to be so by massive handouts of Ford Foundation money. Other left-wing foundations - and most foundations are left-wing - have behaved similarly.

When bribing existing organizations hasn't been enough, the baleful Ford Foundation has established entire groups from scratch to promote its mass immigration agenda. Case in point is the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is almost an entirely artificial creation. Only 2% of its budget comes from grass-roots donations. MALDEF has lobbied for:

Higher quotas of legal immigration to the US.

Non-prosecution or deportment of illegal aliens.

Non-guarding of our border with Mexico.

Amnesty for illegal aliens.

The right of illegal aliens to welfare and other public services in America.

Bilingual education (which is known to fail).

The right of illegal aliens to vote in American elections.

Hate crimes laws against free speech.

Continuing with the Mexican theme, another major player in the open-borders movement has been the government of Mexico, which openly proclaims (only to its own people, of course) its intention of reconquering the parts of the Southwestern United States that were conquered from them in 1845. It has done a number of things:

It financed the notorious Supreme Court case Plyler vs. Doe, which established a "right" for the children of illegal immigrants to attend school.

It has a deliberate policy, called acercamiento, (reconciliation or bonding) of attempting to use Mexican-Americans as a voting bloc to advance its political interests, principally in increasing immigration, opening America to Mexican trade, and dealing with Mexico's foreign debt.

Basically, the Mexican government adopts one, very smooth, tone when speaking to its patsies in America, and another, very militant, tone when speaking to its own people about its ruthlessness in pursuing its own national interest at the expense of ours. As long as political correctness makes people cowards about blowing the whistle on this scam, and as long as the Mexican government continues to bribe the American corporate elite with a supply of docile cheap labor, we may expect this to continue. The other problem with the immigration debate in this country is that nominally moderate groups have been perverted by the influence of highly-motivated extremists. For example, the Marxist National Lawyers Guild has been able to infiltrate its people into the American Immigration Lawyers Association. AILG has about 2,000 members, but is dominated by the 100 or so members who are also members of NLG.

There have been other communist front organizations active on the immigration issue, like the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. Then come the Marxist-influenced organizations like the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights. There is also the Center for Constitutional Rights is a group organized by William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy. Kunstler (recently deceased) was a well-known extremist lawyer; Kinoy was a Trotskyite attorney who was twice president of the National Lawyers Guild and worked with the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born. All these groups, which have appeared, split, and mutated over the years, have worked to undermine the immigration-control laws and increase the number of immigrants

The American Civil Liberties Union, as one might have known, has been busy over the years working mischief on the immigration issue. Its basic strategy has been to use extreme "civil liberties" claims to hamstring enforcement of the immigration control laws. In addition, it has an Immigration Task Force with a list of 40 issues to litigate, including:

Weakening employer sanctions for employing illegal aliens.

Making it impossible for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to conduct inspections without a search warrant.

Allowing "political" and "religious" refusals to present proof of citizenship.

Requiring the INS to provide free legal counsel to illegal aliens.

Requiring the INS to release illegal aliens who contest their deportation.

Preventing the denial of welfare to illegal aliens.

Expanding anti-discrimination law to require employers to hire illegal aliens.

The ACLU also actively works with MALDEF to encourage immigrants to file allegations of discrimination. Mexican ethnic organizations are not the only ones behind the push for more immigration. Surprisingly, given that substantial Jewish immigration to this country ended two generations ago, so are Jews. One major force behind the disastrous 1965 Immigration "Reform" Act that caused the current crisis was organized Jewry. According to J.J. Goldberg's approving book Jewish Power,

Everyone agreed that the Jewish community must undertake a massive effort to repeal the quota system, but the ADL and the American Jewish Committee refused to join an operation under NCRAC auspices. Instead, Minkoff put NCRAC immigration specialist Jules Cohen in charge of a "non-auspices committee," operated by NCRAC under its "non-auspices." In 1955, this committee spearheaded the formation of a broad coalition for immigration reform, made up of civic associations, labor groups, and Protestant and Catholic groups. For a decade the coalition lobbied, leafleted, planted articles in magazines, and held public meetings on the racist nature of the immigration quota system. The entire operation was run by a steering committee of the "non-auspices committee," made up of four staffers from the three defense agencies and NCRAC. The quotas were finally repealed by the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, passed by Congress during the civil rights surge of President Lyndon Johnson's early years. (p.127)

Thus the gates were opened to the Moslem immigrants who today chant "Death to Israel" on the streets of Brooklyn, New York and Dearborn, Michigan. It is only fair to remark that some of the most courageous opponents of mass immigration, like Dan Stein, head of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the major group working on the issue, are Jewish.

Now we come to the saddest dupes of the immigration debate: what Lenin called the "useful idiots" of the Right. These are basically a combination of extreme libertarians (like the Cato Institute) who support immigration on ideological grounds and hired guns who promote it on behalf of interested economic constituencies like the cheap-labor lobby, which is composed of agribusiness and other employers of immigrant labor. (Naturally, there exist some genuinely intelligent libertarians like Nobel laureate and former Chicago economics professor Milton Friedman, who has said, "it is obvious you can't have open immigration and a welfare state." Of course it is.) It is time for these people to wise up and realize that they are pawns of a far-left agenda. Immigrants who come to this country only fatten the voting blocs of the Left which oppose the economic agenda of libertarians, anyway, so these people are just shooting themselves in the foot.

Note: I have started writing a blog every business day at http://www.robertlocke.com.

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