The United Nations and US Immigration Policy (UNESCO’s Migration without borders)

canadafreepress.com/ ^ | Tuesday, April 11, 2006 | Joseph Klein

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Global Commission on International Migration The United Nations and US Immigration Policy Growing disparities in standards of living are driving workers from the world’s poorest countries to cross national borders in search of better opportunities.

The United States is not alone among the developed countries in having to deal with the consequences - large inflows of illegal immigrants from less developed countries. However, the way we deal with the approximately 11 million such individuals, who are already residing here — many from neighboring Mexico - is nobody’s business but our own.

It is the American economy that provides some of these illegal immigrants with the opportunity to earn enough money to support themselves and their families while they live here, and it is the American taxpayers who pay for the health, education and welfare services for those without any means of self-support.

This country is, of course, a nation of immigrants. We understand the vital role that immigration has played in the growth of our economy over the course of our history, but we are also a nation of laws. The United States, like every other nation, has the absolute sovereign right to decide who is entitled to enter its territory. Nothing is more central to our national sovereignty than being able to determine for ourselves the conditions under which non-citizens may be legally admitted to our country and eventually become eligible for benefits and citizenship.

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Robert D. Novak: Who is in charge at State, Condoleezza Rice or Nick Burns? By ROBERT D. NOVAK

THE U.S. decision last Thursday not to seek a seat on the new United Nations Human Rights Council followed a week of frantic backstage conflict. Beyond human rights, this was the overriding question: Does Nick Burns run the State Department? The outcome of the UN dispute indicates that he is not in absolute control but is mighty influential.

R. Nicholas Burns is a 50-year-old senior foreign service officer who was named under secretary for political affairs, third-ranking at State, to begin President Bush's second term. Behind the scenes, he fought hard for the United States to take part in an organization it had just voted against on grounds it would not keep out the worst human rights abusers. (Cuba and China are expected to win council seats soon.) With Bush's political appointees in the national security apparatus opposing Burns, his failure was cloaked in language intended to trivialize the decision.

News accounts did not even mention Burns. He flies below the radar in controlling State Department policy on many issues beyond human rights. Inside the Bush administration, Burns is seen as guiding the nation's course on Iran and Korea. His influence on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is so surprising that critics use the word "Svengali."

As a career diplomat, Burns has worked for Presidents of both parties. He was a special assistant to Bill Clinton, who in his second term named Burns the ambassador to Greece. He was ambassador to NATO in George W. Bush's first term. Nevertheless, Burns has been regarded as a Democrat and is close to Richard Holbrooke, who would have been secretary of state if John Kerry had been elected President in 2004. Under Kerry, Burns would have the job he has now and would be promoting the same policies. The current multilateral approach to Iran and Korea is reflected in his going along with the UN majority on human rights.

The UN human rights issue is a spectacular example of Burns's influence. The UN Human Rights Commission, disgraced and discredited as the instrument of anti-American rogue nations, is being replaced by the new 45-nation council. Contending the new creation embodies no real reform, Ambassador John Bolton cast the U.S. vote against it. Elliott Abrams and other senior officials at the National Security Council (NSC) argued that U.S. participation would look ridiculous after that negative vote.

On March 31, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist turned what had been a sequestered argument into a public debate. He issued a statement claiming the council "makes only superficial changes," contending it "will not prevent serial human rights abusers from gaining membership and cannot be relied upon to monitor human rights abuses throughout the world."

Although this was a Presidential decision, the call clearly was the secretary of state's. Even after Frist's intervention and the majority leader's intention to pass a Senate resolution on the subject before the Easter recess, the word circulating in State Department corridors was that Burns probably would persuade Rice to accept the council. Burns can be very persuasive. Last week, he talked Sen. Norm Coleman, the first-term Republican from Minnesota who has been a stalwart in exposing UN corruption, into giving the council a chance to work.

Burns was too isolated on this issue to prevail. But the State Department's explanation for the decision not to participate, given in unattributed statements to reporters, made it appear that course was taken because the U.S. candidate for the council might lose. "It's a question more of tactics than principle," a "senior U.S. official" was quoted as saying in a Reuters dispatch. The same official then went on to say "we'll probably run for a seat later on."

That sounds like Nick Burns or at least someone who reflects his opinion. It is an absolute rejection of Frist's arguments. When the decision was announced Thursday, Frist declared: "The administration's decision to oppose U.S. membership on the new council will uphold America's credibility on the issue of human rights and deny the council unwarranted legitimacy." That does not sound like the State Department's rationale for the UN decision, and that underlines the question of who really runs the State Department.

Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist and a commentator for the FOX network.

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Their Goal Here Is To Create Chaos by Using Immigration

April 11, 2006




BEGIN TRANSCRIPT



RUSH: All right, now, look, some of you people need to calm down out there. I've been reading the e-mails here at the top, and you think I'm missing the boat when I say, "This is not about illegal immigration." I'm talking to you about the reason that the Democratic Party has glommed onto this and who the organizers are and what their objective is. Of course it's about illegal immigration! It's a way to create chaos; it's a way to tear down the country, but it's primarily about getting them back in power. I am not diminishing the impact of illegal immigration on this. You should see the e-mails I got. "You're going off the reservation! You're being sucked into not believing what this is really about."

I'm not being sucked into anything. I am thinking independently here. I am not saying illegal immigration is not the problem. I'm saying it's simply the latest springboard, it's the latest vehicle. Two weeks I've been covering this. I'm just talking now about the motivations and the opportunity that illegal immigration presents. Ted Kennedy doesn't really care about these people the way he's speaking to them. He only cares about them as voters, and whatever harm illegal immigration en masse will do to the country is of no consequence to him. In fact, the more chaos the better. He can blame it all on the Republicans for their attitudes; he can blame the Republicans for creating this angry population group of people.

By the way, I've got an interesting note. We had the call from Weston in Philadelphia who said that the Democrats are trying to create the chaos, they want the case object to be created so that the people will eventually throw their hands up in despair and turn to some powerful state or figure to fix it, and a guy from Sikeston, which is about 30 miles south of where I grew up in Missouri, Cape Girardeau, he said, "With all due respect, the caller was wrong about states taking over responsibility given up by the federal government. He's ignoring history."

I don't think he meant states. I think he meant the state, the federal government, but the Greek and Roman empires were destroyed from within by the influx of non-Romans and non-Greeks and apathy about it at all. "The great civilizations in history crumbled by a failure of a strong leader to hold together the diverse culture's conqueror." Will Durant said that, and so if you wanted to apply that to this, you would have to say that there is no strong leader holding together the country, and so the great civilization is potentially crumbling because nobody has the guts to stop the evil conqueror. Now, nobody is saying that illegal immigration represents an evil conqueror. That would be Al-Qaeda, and Bush, of course, is rallying the country to that. But this does have its own implications.


END TRANSCRIPT

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Immigration "solutions"
Apr 11, 2006
by Thomas Sowell ( bio | archive | contact )

Email to a friend Print this page Text size: A A Activists who are organizing mass marches and demonstrations in cities across America may well be congratulating themselves on the huge numbers of people they can get to turn out to protest efforts in Congress to reduce illegal immigration.

No doubt that will impress many in the media and intimidate many politicians. But how these marches will be seen by millions of other Americans is another question entirely.

The Mexican flags and the strident assertions of a right to violate American laws are a danger signal to this society, as they would be to any society.


The releasing of children from schools to take part in these marches and the support of the marchers' goals by some religious leaders demonstrate that this contempt for the laws of the land has spread well beyond immigrant communities.

For some, this is just another extension of their general anti-establishment attitudes and activities. They are ready to protest virtually anything at any time.

At the other end of the political spectrum are staid and sober representatives of business interests who simply want a continuing supply of cheap labor. They don't march, they lobby politicians.

Both liberals and free-market libertarians often see this as an abstract issue about poor people being hindered from moving to jobs by an arbitrary border drawn across the southwest desert.

Intellectuals' ability to think of people in the abstract is a dangerous talent in a world where people differ in all the ways that make them people. The cultures and surrounding circumstances of those people are crucial for understanding what they are likely to do and what the consequences are likely to be.

Some free-market advocates argue that the same principle which justifies free international trade in commodities should justify the free movement of people as well. But this ignores the fact that people have consequences that go far beyond the consequences of commodities.

Commodities are used up and vanish. People generate more people, who become a permanent and expanding part of the country's population and electorate.

It is an irreversible process -- and a potentially dangerous process, as Europeans have discovered with their "guest worker" programs that have brought in many Muslims who are fundamentally hostile to the culture and the people that welcomed them.

Unlike commodities, people in a welfare state have legal claims on other people's tax dollars and expensive services in schools and hospitals, not to mention the high cost of imprisoning many of them who commit crimes.

Immigrants in past centuries came here to become Americans, not to remain foreigners, much less to proclaim the rights of their homelands to reclaim American soil, as some of the Mexican activist groups have done.

In the wars that this country fought, immigrant groups were among the most patriotic volunteers, earning the respect of American citizens on the battlefield with their blood and their lives.

Today, immigrant spokesmen promote grievances, not gratitude, much less patriotism. Moreover, many native-born Americans also promote a sense of separatism and grievance and, through "multi-culturalism," strive to keep immigrants foreign and disaffected.

This is not to say that all or most of the illegal immigrants themselves share this anti-establishment or anti-American bias of many of their spokesmen or supporters. Most are probably here to make a buck and have little time for ideology.

Hispanic activists themselves recognize that many of the immigrants from Mexico -- legal or illegal -- would assimilate into American society in the absence of these activists' efforts to keep them a separate constituency. But these efforts are widespread and unrelenting, a fact that cannot be ignored.

Whatever is said or done in the immigration debate, no one should insult the American people's intelligence by talking or acting as if this is a question about the movement of abstract people across an abstract line.

What is likely to be done? A pretense of reducing illegal immigration and a reality of amnesty under some other name.