The Amnesty Radicals’ Big Mistake

Frontpage ^ | 8/12/2014 | Daniel Greenfield

[markomalley]

A new Reuters poll shows that not only do 70% of Americans think that illegal aliens threaten the traditional American way of life, but 45% believe that even the number of legal immigrants should be reduced.

Only 17% think that legal immigration should increase. That’s a problem because increasing legal immigration is one of the major planks of the “immigration reform” plan of both parties.

Everyone used to agree that immigration was a good thing. But that was before they saw photos of gang members slumped in their gyms and buses full of illegal aliens in Homeland Security convoys coming to hike up their taxes while lowering their property values.

And then immigration suddenly stopped being a Neil Diamond song and became a national crisis.

America is developing an anti-immigration consensus. That wasn’t supposed to happen in the nation of immigrants. Media outlets are shaking their heads over the poll numbers and correctly tying them to the border crisis. What they aren’t saying though is that the border crisis was calculatedly set off by Obama’s illegal alien DREAM amnesty. And as with ObamaCare, the radical agenda backfired.

The border crisis was supposed to start the amnesty machine. It was the sort of confrontational activism popular with Chicago community organizers who know that if you can’t get what you want, you dump a bunch of people on the doorstep of whatever agency you want to blackmail which creates an instant social services mess so that the politicians will have no choice but to “solve the problem” on your terms.

The harassment of politicians by illegal alien activists took Chicago community organizing to the national level. The border crisis was the next phase of the assault aimed at hitting Americans right where they lived by turning every state into a border state. But the rest of the United States isn’t Chicago. Or at least not the parts of Chicago that community organizers like.

Crowds waving American flags blocked buses. Stories leaked out about diseases being spread around. Even Democrats did their best to keep the illegal alien drops out of their states.

The border crisis was meant to move Americans toward an even more liberal position on illegal immigration. Instead it had the opposite effect and tainted the idea of immigration as a whole.

The backlash was completely predictable to anyone who had been paying attention to Europe.

The United States didn’t have an anti-immigration consensus until Obama duplicated the European situation by manufacturing a refugee crisis. Europe developed an anti-immigration consensus when a poor economy collided with large numbers of refugees and a central authority that remained blindly intent on pushing more immigrants and migrants through the system regardless of popular discontent.

Democrats and Republicans plotted amnesty while dismissing the idea of an anti-immigration consensus. They acted as if the rise of anti-immigration parties like UKIP was a purely European phenomenon and that the American political brass ring would go to the biggest amnesty shill.

Now the polls are telling them that they were wrong.

Republicans and Democrats had always been selectively reading the polls in favor of amnesty while ignoring the negative polls involving immigrants and the economy. Americans appeared to support legalization because they didn’t care much about illegal aliens. Even Latino voters ranked immigration low on their set of priorities. The passion had always been on the side of immigration opponents.

Just like ObamaCare, an issue that no one had particularly cared about before and for which passionate support was virtually non-existent, Obamnesty became the banner policy of the establishment and that made it possible for the opposition to define the issue through the politics of confrontation.

The border crisis made immigration seem urgent for the first time by visualizing a massive human tide swarming inside. Now immigration is polling as a priority and not the kind of priority that Obama had in mind. Instead the border crisis has caused immigration to be seen as an economic threat.

Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012 had played off isolationism among ordinary Americans while promising multilateral soft power to the elites. Pledges of opposition to the Iraq War in 2008 and the dishonest promises of “Nation Building at Home” in 2012 allowed Obama to outmaneuver a moribund Republican political machine that was desperately short of ideas.

But Obama forgot that isolationism tends to go together with immigration skepticism. Once people decide that the outside world isn’t worth bothering with, their suspicion of international interventions easily transfers over to immigration.

America today has more than a little in common with the period of the great immigration backlash of the 1920s. Economic uncertainty and a period of isolationism after an exhausting foreign war combined with the arrival of huge numbers of immigrants led to an immigration backlash back then. It would not be unprecedented for it to lead to an immigration backlash all over again.

Economic malaise and political isolationism are just as present in the United States as in Europe. The amnesty push polarized the issue and created a major crisis. Obama took on the role of America’s EU, an internationalist force dedicated to unlimited immigration with no concern for the citizenry.

The anti-immigration consensus stunned Tories and Labour alike in the UK. Both parties are still reeling from how easily UKIP exploited popular anger over immigration. And both parties have been forced to learn how to talk to working class voters again. If the same political tsunami hits America, Republicans and Democrats will be even more unprepared to deal with a phenomenon that will make the Tea Party disruptions over ObamaCare seem like a fond memory for the political establishment.

The two big parties are unready to deal with real isolationism. Barack Obama and Rand Paul may flirt with anti-war sloganeering, but they are also committed to amnesty, free trade and open borders.

Both Democrats and Republicans have made the mistake of trying to trade the white working class voters that they have for the future demographics of a transformed nation. But like their European counterparts they may find that they have prematurely buried the white working class voter.

Isolationism is less of a rejection of the outside world than it is a rejection of the terms on which a domestic political leadership has dealt with the rest of the world. Skepticism toward foreign intervention and immigration are really votes of no confidence in our own government. And that’s what the poll numbers for Obama and Congress have been communicating even before the border crisis.

In a miserable economy with living standards on the decline and little hope for the future, there is a great deal of free-floating anger in the political atmosphere. The sleeping giant of the coal mines and bars, the rust belt and the drought-plagued farmland may wake to his anger much more slowly than the mobs of migrants who have been community organized into parading back and forth all day in front of government offices waving their fists in the air, but when he wakes up, the political establishment that has gotten used to ignoring him will collapse and fall apart.

The amnesty radicals pushed too hard and too fast. They could have gotten everything they wanted through a consensus of both parties, but now they may end up with nothing at all.

[liberalh8ter]

As much as it does for the Senate who passed the bill for him to sign.

[Alas Babylon!]

Schools started today in Alabama. They’ll be dealing with it in about an hour or so, when the new non-English speaking kids don’t comprende homeroom.

[ChildOfThe60s]

Bump

[Liz]

ABOUT TO BE DRIVEN HOME: 1. The impact of non-English speaking hordes from 144 countries in US schools when classes reconvene.

“Central American students have very, very limited education...some cannot count to 10. They’ve never even seen a computer, ” said assistant director for student support in Dalton, Ga.

Forget computers. Do the stupid leeches know what to do with this (/snix)?

Observing the "unaccompanied minors" riding atop speeding freight trains 1700 miles---one can only conjecture on their personal hygiene. No running water or flush toilets atop that train. How did they handle body wastes? How will they handle this in US schools?

Americans need to know about possible infections from migrants shopping in retail stores, eating in their restaurants, shopping in supermakets...... handling food and merchandise. The deadly E-coli is passed through unclean hands from improper bathroom habits. E- coli has been found on the handles of supermarket carts. Not to mention contamination on school buses, school facilities, school supplies, books......and public buses that transported them....and so on. Mexican restaurants, fast food hamburger joints, supermarkets, retail stores, etc.....

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

Illegal Immigrants Bring Risk of Ebola and Global Array of Viral Illnesses
Christian Post ^ | 08/05/2014 | Elizabeth Vliet / FR Posted by Carbonsteel

Ebola. Chikungunya. Dengue. Norovirus. Hantavirus. Swine flu. Varicella. Variola. The names sound like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Yet, threats to Americans are real, and escalating by the week. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported on August 1 that serious diseases are spreading at detention centers for Illegal border crossers.

Health care workers and Border Patrol agents, plus their children, have tested positive for tuberculosis (TB), swine flu, chicken pox, lice and scabies. Instead of being quarantined, illegal border crossers are being dispersed rapidly across the U.S., with those of school age being registered in public schools opening soon for all. (Excerpt) Read more at christianpost.com ...

[ChildOfThe60s]

Jawoll, herr Patrick!

[thirst4truth]

Is it possible to find the newest 60,000+ illegals and deport them? Is it possible to find the 12 million+ illegals that have come here illegally or overstayed their visa's and deport them?

I don't see any politician campaigning on finding the illegals and sending them home, they are here to stay all of them and more and more to come, this is the fundamental transformation the dark powers have planned.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

Click the keyword Aliens to see more illegal alien, border security, and other related threads.

[KeyLargo]

Good commentary from a legal immigrant here:

Opinion
Lament of a Legal Alien

If I had come here illegally and married my wife, a U.S. citizen, I’d have a green card by now.

By
Manmeet Singh
Aug. 11, 2014 7:20 p.m. ET

Fayette, Miss.

My desire to come to the United States was born out of ambition, not desperation. I stood in every line there was, beginning at the U.S. Embassy in my native India and then here, filled out every form that needed to be filled out, and made copies and certified copies of all the documents that were needed to prove that I was who I said I was.

At every point I was warned that if I lied or falsified information or tried to find work other than the job I was authorized to do in the U.S. there would be serious consequences. In particular I was warned about the rather grave repercussions if I chose to stay here illegally.

I was impressed with the United States’ laws and those who enforced them. I felt that if I had to stand in line so did the others and that the process was fair to everyone. I did a whole lot of waiting, filled out lots of forms, got photographed and fingerprinted and waited some more to be called a “legal alien physician.”

I have been here for seven years and have been married to a U.S. citizen for a little over three years. The reason I am still on a visa is that I signed a clause with the U.S. government that said that I would work in a medically underserved area for a total of three years after my medical-residency training here, and that I wouldn’t be able to wiggle out of this commitment even if I married a U.S. citizen. My wife and I often joke that if I came here illegally and married her then I would at least have had a green card by now.

Read at: http://online.wsj.com/articles/manmeet-singh-lament-of-a-legal-alien-1407799256

[Paulie]

We welcome immigrants who YEARN TO BREATHE FREE.

[Paulie]

We welcome immigrants who YEARN TO BREATHE FREE.

[Dante3]

I agree.

[Guenevere]

He signed it ....no one made him.
I hold him accountable.

[longtermmemmory]

reminds me of the “starship troopers”’ sky marshal character in the first movie.

[liberalh8ter]

But you don’t hold anyone in the Senate accountable?

[eddiespaghetti]

Anybody know how to say versimilitude in German?

The best I can come up with is translatable as “similarity to reality” -

Wirklichkeitsaehnlichkeit

[spodefly]

Both Democrats and Republicans have made the mistake of trying to trade the white working class voters that they have for the future demographics of a transformed nation.

Straight-up evil on the part of manipulative politicians, and a crime that should be punishable by death.

[Guenevere]

Of course I do!.......but he could have stopped it!

[Liz]

Lordy, you ARE good.

Wirklichkeitsaehnlichkeit.

Who knew?

[liberalh8ter]

I don't disagree with you but unfortunately, if you don't go with Scott, you get orange Charlie! Nothing would have made me happier than to have a true conservative step up to the plate but it didn't happen.

[Guenevere]

I refuse to continue to vote for 'lesser of two evils'.....I'm sick of their games.....and I don't appreciate any arm twisting or guilt trips from anyone at FR.

All of you in Florida vote your conscience.....I will mine.