Illegal immigration, Liberal Elites, and Obama

American Thinker ^ | May 03, 2009 | David Paulin

[neverdem]

Millions of Hispanics, mostly poor and uneducated, have immigrated to America illegally since the early 1990s. Most are Mexicans and most of them are high school dropouts.  Compared to what they might have had in a slum or impoverished rural area of Mexico or Central America, these immigrants have done well here.

It has been different story for their neighbors -- middle-class Americans. For them, illegal immigration has often meant a deterioration of their neighborhoods, public schools, and their quality of life -- especially across America's Southwest.

Some have watched their culture erode: It's not uncommon to see Mexican flags flying in Spanish-speaking enclaves in towns and cities from Texas to California. This includes "sanctuary cities" like Austin, the Texas state capital, where until recently I'd lived for the past few years.

Most middle-class Americans are fed up with illegal immigration. They get no sympathy from liberal elites, however, including the open-borders elites at that lofty bastion of American journalism, the agenda-setting New York Times.

There is some amusing liberal hypocrisy going on here when you consider where top editorial staffers and executives at the Times and many of their affluent readers live. It's in trendy parts of New York City: places like gentrified Brooklyn and SoHo and Manhattan's posh Upper East Side. You definitely won't find any Mexicans crowding into low-rent apartments in those areas, creating Spanish-speaking enclaves resembling shabby parts of Mexico.

Some Times readers and top staffers don't live in the city but in the suburbs -- in pleasant "bedroom communities" boasting first-rate public schools, safe neighborhoods, and a high quality of life. In exclusive towns like Westport, Connecticut (pop. 27,000), a place I'm familiar with. It's composed almost entirely of very expensive single-family houses. Oh, and something else about Westport: It's overwhelmingly white. 

Stroll down Westport's boutique-lined Main Street, and you'll see mostly well-to-do white folks and maybe a few Asians. There are plenty of Mercedes and BMWs on Main Street. But you won't see any pick-ups racing about with an illegal alien at the wheel, driving without a license and liability insurance -- a common problem in Texas. In Westport, homes have not become flop houses for large numbers of illegal immigrants. There are no menacing Hispanic gangs. In Austin, which prides itself on being inclusive, multicultural and diverse, gang activity is surging, say police. However, Austin's politically correct media tiptoes around the Hispanic character of gang violence.

It's not as if Connecticut has no illegal immigrants; it does. The working-class city of Danbury just north of Westport -- a 40-minute drive away -- is home to thousands of illegal immigrants from Ecuador and Brazil. They comprise an estimated 20 percent of the 80,000 population.

Angry residents blame the invasion for straining the city's schools and social services and lowering its quality of life. Above all, homeowners are outraged at seeing their property values decline. "They're blue-collar workers and their whole life savings is tied up in their house and they're seeing their neighborhood being destroyed," homeowner Peter Gadiel told Fox News. 

Zoning Wall of Exclusion

So why has nothing like this happened in Westport? It's thanks to draconian zoning rules. In Westport, apartments are all but prohibited;  there are only a handful of them. Overwhelmingly, Westport consists of very expensive single-family houses; the medium sale price is $1.2 million. Accordingly, housing is too expensive for middle-class Americans to buy or rent and it's too expensive for unskilled immigrants, too. This prevents them from gaining a foothold in Westport. Instead, they go to working-class and inclusive places like Danbury or to "sanctuary cities" like New Haven, Conn., home to Yale University.

Back in the mid-1980s, before illegal immigration was a problem, critics of Westport's zoning policies accused the town of creating a "zoning wall of exclusion." As a consequence, middle-class people working in one of Westport's many office complexes couldn't afford to live in town; they had to commute from less affluent towns and cities in the region. Westport's homes also were too expensive for policemen and firemen, school teachers, and social workers.

Yet that's exactly what Westporters wanted: exclusivity. Accordingly, they created a Planning & Zoning Commission, hired a town planner, and elected fellow Westporters to that body to enforce their will: maintain the town's character, property values, and resist calls to allow "affordable" apartments and even condominiums.

In other affluent bedroom communities in the northeast's blue states, that's how they do things. "Nobody has the right to live anywhere. They have a right to earn the right to live anywhere," an influential member of Westport's powerful Planning & Zoning Commission, a Democrat, told me in June, 1985.

I was a young journalist at the time, writing a freelance piece about Westport's lack of "affordable" housing for the Connecticut section of the Sunday New York Times. I was a Democrat back then, and affordable housing seemed like a darn good idea to me, one everybody would surely rally behind.

Yet at spirited town meetings, I was shocked to see red-faced Westporters shout and hiss at proposals to allow affordable housing and even rent-controlled condos. Now, I think I understand: People change a lot when they get married, buy houses, and put down stakes in their communities. Some Democrats even become Republicans. I've known at least two Times staffers who lived in Westport.

In the suburbs outside New York City, there are lots of towns like Westport, situated within an hour's train ride from the heart of New York City. They're popular abodes for well-to-do liberals, people who earn six figure salaries in business and finance, and even in big-time journalism. This is not to say that there are not some open-borders Republican elites living in these places, too.

Memories of Westport and its affluent and civic-minded residents drifted back to me while reading an article in the New York Times: "Texas Mayor Caught in Deportation Furor."  The article was part of the Times' ongoing "Remade in America" series on immigration, and it focused on efforts in Irving, a Dallas suburb, to crack down on illegal immigration.

Spinning its story around an open-borders agenda, the Times portrays Irving's residents (its white residents) as narrow-minded hicks. Yet even the Times cannot ignore some of the changes that have happened in Irving due to illegal immigration, primarily from Mexico. Residents of Danbury should pay close attention.

Back in 1970, Irving had a population of 100,000; 95 percent of its residents were white. Now, whites are a minority, as they are in Texas.  Hispanics comprise 45 percent or more of the population of 200,000 - and according to city officials, 20 percent of them may be illegal immigrants, noted the Times.

Hispanic birthrates have been explosive in Irving and across the nation. Many of these children are the offspring from millions of illegal immigrants whom Congress allowed to stay under an amnesty in the 1990s.  Today, Irving's future may be found in its public schools: 70 percent of kids enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade are Hispanic, notes the Times. More than a few experts on immigration have expressed concern that the sons and daughters of these immigrants tend to do poorly in school, and dropout up until the fourth generation.  Indeed, compared to other immigrant groups, the children of Hispanic immigrant groups have the highest dropout rates, say experts. 

All of which underscores that culture is a powerful thing: It does not change easily, especially in sanctuary cities where "diversity" and "multiculturalism" are presumed to be virtues. "The people who come here illegally across the border are not educated people. They don't have any culture or any respect for ours," Sue Richardson, vice president of the Greater Irving Republican Club, tells the Times.

America is experiencing massive levels of immigration that are unprecedented in scale and fact that many of the newcomers are from the Third World, not Europe as in the past. The impact of this flood of immigrants is the subject of the Times series "Remade in America." Its underlying theme is that America is remaking the immigrants. But that's certainly not the case in Irving, parts of which now have the shabby look of Mexico.

Residents Fight Back

Two years ago, Irving's residents decided enough was enough; they demanded that America's immigration laws be upheld. Naturally, the Times is outraged.

So what did all those rubes in Irving do that was so shocking? Did they give the KKK a permit to march through town or ban people who look Hispanic from sitting at lunch counters? Have the city's rednecks and "white trash" been racing around in pick-ups? Shouting lewd insults at hapless Mexican women? Roughing up shabby-looking Mexicans? Or torching Mexican-American business?

No, it's much worse.

Irving Mayor Herbert A. Gears --  a well-known supporter of Hispanic groups and causes in the past -- did something truly despicable in what the Times calls a "once welcoming" city. The formerly "immigrant friendly Democrat" ordered Irving's police to start running "immigration checks" on everybody whom they arrested and tossed into Irving's lockup. Suspects found to be in the country illegally were turned over to immigration authorities and deported.

What's the upshot of all this? Last year, Irving's crime last dropped to a record-low level. And illegal immigrants appear to be steering clear of Irving. Following the immigration checks, Mexico's council in Dallas issued a warning advising its citizens to avoid Irving.

Yet to Irving's "Hispanic leaders" and open-borders defenders with whom the Times sympathizes, the immigration checks are unconscionable. Irving has abrogated a federal responsibility, they complain. Even worse, the deportations are "breaking up families." It's an argument the Times highlights by focusing sympathetically on the plight of a hapless 35-year-old Mexican, Oscar Urbina.

Last summer, Urbina's life as an allegedly model citizen unraveled when he ran into what the Times called "paperwork" problems when buying a Dodge Ram pickup. Urbina, it turns outs, had been using a false Social Security number since immigrating illegally to America in 1993. Until then, he'd been a "portrait of domestic stability" -- a man "with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job," the Times claims.

Now, he faces deportation.

Ah yes, "breaking up families:" It's a familiar complaint among open-borders liberals. Yet oddly, they never seem to decry anti-family polices in places like Castro's Cuba. It's a regime that's broken up countless families -- either by tossing family members in jail for political reasons, or by even killing them on occasion.

The Times belittles Irving's lower crime statistics, suggesting immigration checks and deportations are mostly rounding up illegals guilty of minor offenses such as identify theft. A closer look at those statistics reveals much about the Times biases and values. As the Times itself notes:

As of early March, of the 4,074 people whose arrest led to their being handed over to immigration officials, 129 had been charged with violent crimes or illegal possession of weapons, and 714 with other types of serious felonies. In addition, 579 had been charged with driving while intoxicated. The other 2,625 had been arrested for lesser offenses; the largest categories were public intoxication and not having a driver's license or insurance.

All in all, the immigration checks are producing some terrific results. Yet the Times portrays Mayor Gears as being a conflicted man for having imposed such a morally problematic policy as immigration checks. "I'm the hero of every redneck in America," the Times quotes him as saying, while noting he speaks only "scant Spanish." It's interesting that the Times used that "redneck" quote in what must have been a lengthy and wide-ranging interview, one filled with lots of good quotes.

You have to wonder how liberal elites at the Times would feel if such problems suddenly visited their neighborhoods -- drunken illegal aliens stumbling about in the street. Driving without a license and insurance. Or contemplating their next violent crime?

Interestingly, the Times notes that many of Irving's "Hispanics" don't vote. Well, so much for their civic engagement values, a hallmark of Americans whose self-reliant European ancestors immigrated to America, learned English and reinvented themselves as Americans. Today, these folks are not hyphenated Americans, as are the Hispanic-Americans to which the Times refers; they're just Americans.

Along similar lines, it's interesting that the Times does not interview one group of Texans in Irving -- Americans of Mexican ancestry whose roots go back for generations in Texas; people who are members of the solid middle-class and who do not reflexively think of themselves as hyphenated Americans. There are plenty of people like that in Texas.

Social Class -- not race

Why do liberal elites at the New York Times find it so much easier to identify with illegal immigrants than with middle-class Americans? Two things obsess them: race and ethnicity; so that's how they define the immigration debate. Accordingly, ordinary Americans upset over illegal Hispanic immigrants must be "racist" and "xenophobic." Indeed, that's how former Mexico president Vincente Fox, during a visit to this country, described Americans opposing illegal immigration from Mexico. Fox got away with that remark until he went head-to-head with Fox's Bill O'Reilly on the national airwaves.

What in fact upsets residents in Irving and other communities are issues revolving around social class, bad behavior, and quality-of-life considerations. Like most Americans, they expect the law to be obeyed. Illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America would be a non-issue if it consisted of an orderly flow of immigrants with middle-class backgrounds; people settling in the country legally and learning to speak English. Asian immigrants have this sort of background, and there is no backlash against them -- and no wonder. Their children do well in school. They Anglicize their names and learn English.

President Obama, for his part, seems determined to give 11 million illegal immigrants, mostly poor and uneducated Hispanics, a path to citizenship. No doubt, he believes this will again demonstrate America's "moral authority" to an audience whose opinions matter to him: anti-Americans elites in Mexico, Europe, and the Third World. And no matter if his immigration plan changes the nation's culture for the worse for ordinary Americans; or at least for ordinary Americans who don't holler and applaud at Sunday church services when their minister yells, "God damn America!"

On his recent visit to Mexico, President Obama spent much time hobnobbing with that country's elites. He also should talk with ordinary middle-class people in Latin America, outside of Mexico, to get their opinion on illegal immigration. Most have no sympathy for gate-crashing Mexicans and other illegal Hispanic immigrants.

The President will have no trouble finding these folks who are solidly middle-class. They form long lines starting early in the morning outside the gates of U.S. Embassies across Latin America. They're eyes are pensive as they clutch carefully prepared applications for visas and work permits. They wait patently in the hot sun. Most will be disappointed by the decision of the Embassy official behind the glass window. But those whom I've met vow to try their luck again some other day.

To them, America is about more than economic opportunities and social programs. They admire America's culture: believe it's a place with a rule of law that applies to everybody, whether you're Kenneth Lay or Martha Stewart. And they believe it's a place in which ordinary people obey little social courtesies, like going to the back of a line at a bank, rather than bribing a security guard to let them go to the front; that's how it's done in parts of Latin America I've visited.

In America, you stop your car at a red light, even when no cops are around; that's the sort of civic culture that foreigners admire who are from dysfunctional countries without a civic culture. Accordingly, gate-crashing Mexicans who are deported get little sympathy from them.

The impact of uncontrolled immigration, especially from Mexico, promoted the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington to pose a troubling question:

"Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish)."

David Paulin is an American Thinker contributor. He blogs at The Big Carnival.

[slowhandluke]

The American people voted for open borders and amnesty. They won.

Funny, I didn't see any place to vote against amnesty on my ballot.

Any poll that mentions amnesty as a separate question finds that amnesty loses with the American public.

[Just mythoughts]

The American people voted for open borders and amnesty. They won.

WRONG.

[Cacique]

Theoligarchy has already decided they want cheap willing labor to care for their lawns. Americans are aware of their rights, won’t take abuse and won’t work for the slave labor wages the “liberals” want to pay. The result is that illegal immigration fills a number of their needs. We will get more of oit because that is what they want and as far as they are concerned public opinion only counts when it supports their agendas.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[AuntB]

More Obamamania on immigration!

Alejandro Mayorkas picked to head immigration agency
May 1, 2009

[snips]

A former top Los Angeles federal prosecutor who was involved in a Clinton-era clemency controversy has been tapped to head an influential Department of Homeland Security immigration agency.

Alejandro Mayorkas is President Obama’s pick to be director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which adjudicates a broad range of immigration and naturalization issues and oversees international adoptions, asylum, refugee status and foreign student authorization.

‘Alejandro’s expertise covers a wide array of issues critical to the department, including law enforcement, civil rights, computer crime and international money laundering,’ Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement Thursday.

Born in Cuba, Mayorkas was the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California from 1998 to 2001.

Mayorkas also was one of several prominent Southern California political figures who played a role in a 2001 decision by President Clinton to commute a drug dealer’s prison sentence.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mayorkas1-2009may01,0,2053675.story

[Liz]

The flood of illegals tends to bring their degraded culture with them, threatening the bright and shining nation that drew them, changing the US into the dirty and retarded backwater they left behind. They’re dragging to the US what they’re running away from........

EXCERPT It's an unprecedented scale of immigration .....emanating from the Third World, not Europe, as in the past. The underlying theme of the Times series, "Remade in America," is that America is remaking the immigrants. But that's certainly not the case in Irving, Texas, parts of which now have the shabby look of Mexico.

=====================================

Reposting Cong TOM TANCREDO's conversation with Juan Hernandez (Hernandez was McC's Hispanic outreach rep). Hernandez is a dual citizen and headed the Mexican govt's **Ministry of Mexicans Living in the United States. ** Hernandez told Tancredo the purpose of the Mexican govt agency was:

(1) to increase the flow of Mexican nationals to the US to serve Mexico’s needs;

(2) to increase transfers of $50 billion a year (30% of the Mexican GDP);

(3) to alleviate Mexican social instability, and,

(4) to get free training for Mexicans who are expected to repatriate the skills (paid for by US citizens) back to Mexico.

Hernandez supports amnesty. Hernandez told Tancredo: "By populating the US with millions of Hispanics who are tied economically, politically and linguistically to Mexico, we are able to exert enormous influence and pressure on U.S. policy and its dealings with Mexico."

SOURCE http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33894

[Liz]

Alejandro Mayorkas is President Obama’s pick to be director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which adjudicates a broad range of immigration and naturalization issues and oversees international adoptions, asylum, refugee status and foreign student authorization. Mayorkas also was one of several prominent Southern California political figures who played a role in a 2001 decision by President Clinton to commute a drug dealer’s prison sentence.

God help us.

[AuntB]

“For them, illegal immigration has often meant a deterioration of their neighborhoods, public schools, and their quality of life — especially across America’s Southwest”

Destiny. Look, all the politicos tell us this can’t be stopped, that it is ‘Inevitable destiny’....just one ‘superior’ culture taking over one that has been stagnant and must be replaced, right? It’s progress!!!

Just like the indigenous people of this country has been replaced before. Just remember, we ARE the current indigenous tribe...but not for long. History does indeed repeat itself.

c. 1830 -——Elias Boudinot, (aka Buck OOwatee) as Editor of The Cherokee Phoenix, which was published both in English and Cherokee and read in the East and Europe, captured the Cherokee situation in just a few words.

“Perhaps Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were only tantalizing us when they encouraged us in the pursuit of agriculture and government. Why were we not told long ago that we could not be permitted to establish a government within the limits of any state? The Cherokees have always had a government of their own. Nothing, however, was said when we were governed by savage laws. Others say it is time for the Cherokees to submit to inevitable destiny.
What Destiny? To be slandered and then butchered? Yes, this is the bitter cup prepared for us by a republican and religious government. We shall drink it to the dregs.”

[AuntB]

Just 2 items in the NAFBPO report today.

Suspect arrested in girl’s hit-run death in Salinas (4 year old)

Fletes is being held without bail at Monterey County jail on suspicion of felony hit-and-run. A jail spokesman said Fletes also is being held on an immigration hold.

http://www.thecalifornian.com/article/20090428/NEWS01/904280310/1002/rss

Marietta, GA — Cobb Police say a man stabbed a 13-year-old girl on Monday in the parking lot of Lincoln Hills Apartment Homes off Windcliff Drive.

Officer Joe Hernandez said Marietta resident Gedioney Ferreira, 23, allegedly attacked and stabbed the girl multiple times when she was getting off the school bus around 2 p.m.

Ferreira is charged with aggravated battery, aggravated assault and cruelty to children in the first degree. He is being held in the Cobb County Jail on $100,000 bond, said Nancy Bodiford of the Cobb Sheriff’s Office.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has also placed a hold on Ferreira to determine his immigration status, Bodiford said.

http://www.firecoalition.com/forum/yaf_postst5703.aspx

[AuntB]

“God help us.”

Destiny. Look, all the politicos tell us this can’t be stopped, that it is ‘Inevitable destiny’....just one ‘superior’ culture taking over one that has been stagnant and must be replaced, right? It’s progress!!!

This isn’t the first time the indigenous people of this country have been replaced because of some group of
elites political desires. Just remember, we ARE the current indigenous tribe...but not for long. History does indeed repeat itself.

c. 1830 -——Elias Boudinot, (aka Buck OOwatee) as Editor of The Cherokee Phoenix, which was published both in English and Cherokee and read in the East and Europe, captured the Cherokee situation in just a few words.

“Perhaps Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were only tantalizing us when they encouraged us in the pursuit of agriculture and government. Why were we not told long ago that we could not be permitted to establish a government within the limits of any state? The Cherokees have always had a government of their own. Nothing, however, was said when we were governed by savage laws. Others say it is time for the Cherokees to submit to inevitable destiny.
What Destiny? To be slandered and then butchered? Yes, this is the bitter cup prepared for us by a republican and religious government. We shall drink it to the dregs.”

[Jeff Chandler]

Any poll that mentions amnesty as a separate question finds that amnesty loses with the American public.

Remember the Republican Rule: When you have a winning issue, chicken out and agree with the Democrats.

[slowhandluke]

This isn’t the first time the indigenous people of this country have been replaced because of some group of elites political desires. Just remember, we ARE the current indigenous tribe...but not for long. History does indeed repeat itself.

I don't follow your example. While there is a similarity of change, it's not history repeating itself, except maybe as parody.

The Cherokee leaders didn't decide submission to the USA was a good idea and force it on their people. They didn't have the wherewithal to prevent it.

With any smidgen of backbone, the border could be closed. This is national suicide.

[Tennessee Nana]

The Terry Anderson Show...
Are you stupid ??? Are you mad ???

Terry says the illegal aliens should all go home..

Agree ??? Disagree ??? On the “fence” ????

Call Terry LIVE 9-10 PM PST at (866) 870-57521

LIVE stream at http://krla870.townhall.com/

http://www.republicbroadcasting.org/index.php?cmd=listenliv

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2243451/posts?page=1

[AuntB]

“They didn’t have the wherewithal to prevent it.”

And neither do we.

[AuntB]

“The Cherokee leaders didn’t decide submission to the USA was a good idea and force it on their people.”

BTW, the Cherokee leaders submitted to ‘American civilization’ fully 30 years before the Trail of Tears. They were better educated and more eloquent than you or I ever will be. Many were rich. They won supreme court decisions in their favor, but it didn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter now. Do you own your property? No. The state does. And I’ve had to uproot and leave my home because of a barrio moving in. Millions of US citizens are having to leave their home for work, yet the aliens and visa holders work in our home towns.

All our protests are as hollow and ineffective as they were 200 years ago and we have no more rights than those folks did. We can’t get the government’s support or protection against invasion any more than they could. And if another amnesty is given, that’s exactly what it’s going to be.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

[slowhandluke]

Thanks for the history refresher.

I don't think that the Cherokee considered themselves to be fully US citizens, but could be wrong.

Any small nation (as I think the Cherokee could be considered) that depended on the goodwill of the US has generally gotten shafted at some point, especially if they had something that some business interest wanted.

[AuntB]

“I don’t think that the Cherokee considered themselves to be fully US citizens, but could be wrong.”

You’re correct,they considered themselves a sovereign nation/state and the supreme court agreed.

The April 27 segment of We Shall Remain on PBS did a pretty good job on this subject.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2233470/posts