One of the most persistent divides between traditional conservatives and their libertarian/anarcho-capitalist counterparts involves a fundamental philosophical disagreement about immigration. While most conservatives view immigration primarily through the lens of preserving American culture by only accepting those immigrants who are assimilable and will tangibly benefit our society in the future, a view expressed repeatedly during debates over illegal immigration in this country, many libertarians view the subject in an altogether different light. For them, the question is not so much whether a particular cohort of immigrants will be an asset to the United States but whether we have any right to prevent them from settling in this country in the first place, which many answer in the negative.

Libertarians extol the primacy of individual rights, which in this case entails the right to emigrate from your country of birth whenever you so desire-something that I don’t think any conservative would take issue with-and to immigrate to whatever country you want to live and/or work in for an extended period of time, which is where the divide between the two camps emerges. Libertarians view the issue as one of freedom of association-and by extension, contract-wherein willing employers, such as large agribusinesses and meatpacking plants, seek out willing employees coming from nations with under-performing economies that can’t meet the personal and financial needs of their citizens. They believe that the nexus between trade and unfettered migration is inextricable, if not completely self-evident, and that the two can not be severed if a nation hopes to grow its economy. While this may well be true as a matter of law, there are numerous holes in this thesis intellectually, which opponents of open borders-even anarcho-capitalists such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe-have exposed through well-researched arguments of their own.

However, underlying the debate over whether immigration and settlement is a natural right is the assumption that all libertarians/anarcho-capitalists agree on the immigration issue, which is not as much of  a given as it would seem on the surface of things. One of the things that I’ve attempted to do with American Rattlesnake is debunk commonly held assumptions about immigration issues, and the assumption that libertarians all subscribe to Gary Johnson’s point of view is one that needs to be reexamined. There are many libertarians and  anarcho-capitalists who recognize both the practical difficulties and existential problems inherent in society based upon unfettered immigration, especially one with the vast social welfare apparatus of the United States. One of the chief exponents of the view that welfare programs need to be curtailed in order to solve the immigration problem is Gary Johnson’s opponent in the Republican presidential race, Congressman Ron Paul. Paul has repeatedly emphasized the need to do away with the generous, taxpayer subsidized social welfare programs that-while not serving as the initial magnet-provide incentives for illegal aliens to extend their stay in this country indefinitely. The population density of legal immigrants is also heavily correlated with the availability of welfare benefits. Even acclaimed economist Milton Friedman, who held a rather benign view of immigration in general, emphasized the incompatibility of a welfare state with unfettered immigration.

The same opinion is held by many libertarians today, including self-professed constitutionalist Andrew Napolitano, who views Arizona’s landmark immigration law primarily through the prism of the Constitution’s supremacy clause and potential violations of the 4th Amendment via racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers. I’m not sure that the Constitutional objection to statewide laws is dispositive, because-as Andrew McCarthy has pointed out repeatedly in National Review-there is no precedent for prohibiting states from enforcing laws that are consistent with federal statutes. Furthermore, if we look to the broader issue of legal immigration, there’s nothing to suggest that the men who drafted the United States Constitution supported the sort of unfettered immigration we have endured since passage of the Hart-Celler Act fundamentally altered this nation’s demographic destiny. This is a concept that is seldom grasped by arm-chair commentators on immigration these days, whose default option is to repeat the platitudinous-not to mention, factually incorrect-bromide that we are a “nation of immigrants.” What they neglect to mention is that most this nation’s founding fathers would have been implacably opposed to the present lassez-faire system of immigration, a fact that Thomas Woods-as anti-statist an individual as you’ll find among academics-expertly limns in this Human Events column published during the height of the amnesty debate in Washington D.C.

Yet, even if we were to concede that there’s no firm historical or Constitutional foundation for this nation’s current open borders policies, can it not be argued that there is a compelling moral case for the views espoused by those at the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Cato Institute, Reasonoids, and other trendy, beltway cosmotarians? You would definitely think so if you took their arguments at face value. The notion that we have no moral basis for barring certain immigrants from entry into the United States is certainly widespread in certain libertarian circles, but I don’t believe that makes the idea, ipso facto, libertarian. Julian Simon, in a 1998 essay published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, articulated the perspective felt by many that individual autonomy takes precedence over other “public” goods, including our national borders. In an anarcho-capitalist reality, nation-states would not exist, therefore deciding who should or should not be admitted to your nation would be a moot point.

But while it might seem logical that freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of contract-and at its most essential level, the individual him or herself-are all prioritized over the wishes and feelings of citizens who have a vested interested in preserving the character of their nation, there are those that don’t think these competing values are necessarily mutually exclusive. In a persuasive essay written for Lew Rockwell several years ago, N. Stephan Kinsella made a very compelling argument that while the disposition of property in our society is unjust-insofar as the state has no right to expropriate land that rightfully belongs to individuals-so long as that property is entrusted to the state it has a responsibility to act as caretaker for the rightful owners. In this case, it has the responsibility to prevent the ingress of people that citizens do not want to welcome into their country. While those who are opposed to communitarianism in even its most minimal form might reject Kinsella’s public pool analogy, I think he makes a convincing case that some prophylactic measures need to be enforced to prevent the exploitation of your property-even if it’s already been subjected to theft by the state.

There are many cogent arguments against the current trendy libertarian support for open borders, several of them outlined by the first presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, John Hospers, in paper published by the Journal of Libertarian Studies over a decade ago entitled A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders. The concluding paragraph of the essay is especially perceptive in its analysis of the problem:

Occasionally, we hear the phrase “limousine liberals” used to describe the members of the liberal establishment who send their children to expensive private schools while consigning all the others to the public school system, which educates these children so little that by the time they finish the eighth grade they can barely read and write or do simple arithmetic, or make correct change in a drug store. It would be equally appropriate, however, to describe some other people as ”limousine libertarians” —those who pontificate about open borders while remaining detached from the scenes that their “idealism” generates. They would do well to reflect, in their ivory towers, on whether the freedom they profess for those who are immigrants, if it occurs at all, is to be brought about at the expense of the freedom of those who are not.

This passage describes, in a nut shell, the quintessence of cosmotarianism, and why most Americans-and even some in the libertarian movement-continue to reject it. I could post the most meticulously researched George Borjas journal article, the most statistically devastating backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, or the most irrefutable essay by Mahattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald. And although all of these sources are invaluable in the fight to define the terms of this debate, they wouldn’t hold a candle to the self-evident fact that none of the greatest exponents and defenders of open borders, be it Tamar Jacoby, or Jason Riley, or Nick Gillespie, abide by their own exhortations. None of these individuals partake of the glorious mosaic which their unyielding ideology has done so much to create.

You won’t find many Reason Magazine editors or Cato Institute scholars living in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Maywood, California, or Eagle Pass, Texas. Why, you might ask? Because they would rather pass off the tremendous costs of their bankrupt philosophy onto ordinary Americans than to admit that they might just be wrong. These people are insulated from unfettered immigration’s worst effects, including chronic unemployment, violent crime, and environmentally devasting pollution from Arizona to California and throughout the country. They have the luxury of ignoring the impact of this country’s changing demographic profile while promoting the patently absurd notion that our open borders are a boon to all but the small percentage of high school dropouts.

What’s more, they make the equally ludicrous assertion-outlined in the Caplan speech above-that importing millions of unskilled, uneducated immigrants, who will be dependent upon costly government services, from quasi-socialist nations will expand this nation’s economic liberty. Forget the fact that we now enjoy less economic freedom than our northern neighbors, a development concurrent with the greatest expansion of immigration in this country’s history, the entire premise underlying this concept is flawed. You do not build a prosperous, 21st century, post-industrial society around foreigners from countries with low human capital. And the amount of time, energy and economic resources that need to be shifted in order to improve the educational prospects and earning potential of these immigrants, e.g. the billions funneled into ESL programs each year, is so cost prohibitive that it outweighs whatever benefits can be gleaned from such an arrangement.

Another seeming inconsistency in the archetypal libertarian solution to our immigration problem is the reluctance of most libertarians to support any sort of relief for American taxpayers who are tasked with paying for millions of illegal aliens and immigrants who are dependent upon costly social services. Particularly, public schooling and emergency health care. Invoking Friedman’s argument once again, we find that while many libertarians will concede that dependency upon welfare programs is a bad thing they will do nothing to limit access to these programs by illegal aliens or permanent residents. To the contrary, if any such bill-which is immigration neutral-is proffered, they will stalwartly oppose it. Just ask new Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who supports the DREAM Act, despite the fact that taxpayers would be subsidizing the in-state tuition discounts of its recipients. Paleolibertarian writer Ilana Mercer deftly skewers  purported libertarians who routinely call for the abolition of the welfare state while adding a proviso that excludes immigrants and illegal aliens from the fiscal demands of their libertopia.

True believers in liberty, like Mercer and the late Murray N. Rothbard, recognize the inherent contradiction in persuading your fellow Americans to reject the embrace of the state while simultaneously welcoming millions of non-Americans into the country who prefer a larger and more intrusive government in almost every respect into our society. They realize that the banal platitudes used to support unfettered immigration are grossly inaccurate, if not transparent lies. They also realize that the interests of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, and the hospitality industry do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the free market, and that to a large extent our current immigration policy is another form of corporate welfare, which putative libertarians would be quick to denounce in any other context. The time-saving, productivity-increasing technological innovations that would normally be welcomed by these same individuals are rejected by those who apparently think pre-industrial stoop labor is the best method of improving  our agricultural production. Finally, they recognize that the  utopian, globalist conception of freedom-where people living in Gabon or the Hadhramaut have just as much say in how we are governed as American citizens living in New York-contravenes the distinctively American, Constitutional, federalist, representative republic designed by this nation’s founding fathers.

In short, the issue before the house is not whether it is an abandonment of principle for libertarians to embrace sensible immigration restrictions, it’s why institutional libertarians representing organizations like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have stifled an honest, open intellectual debate about this subject. Even as the negative repercussions of our government’s devotion to open borders become harder to ignore for all but the most oblivious, the gatekeepers of respectable opinion on this subject continue to narrow the parameters of discussion to their own narrow, ahistorical perspective. I don’t expect that to change any time in the near future, but those of us who want an intellectually honest debate about the most important issue of our time can at least begin to clarify its terms, if for no other reason than to educate those novices interested in how mass immigration has impacted our society who are asking themselves how they should view these changes from a liberty-oriented perspective.

In my previous post, I described two presentations by post-graduate students invited to (New) Debates On Belonging, a workshop by the CUNY Graduate Center-seen above-devoted to exploring original research into the subjects of illegal immigration and the lives of illegal aliens within the United States. There were three other presentations that day, beginning with a discussion of the legal status and health of immigrants by Julia Gelatt of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. 

 Ms. Gelatt’s research focused on immigrant-headed households in Los Angeles, as well as families led by parents who are illegal aliens. She divided her subjects into three distinct groups: legal immigrants, those families with mixed citizenship, i.e. where one family member was illegal while others were legal, and “undocumented,” which I will hereafter refer to as illegal. This research was grounded in the Los Angeles Family Neighborhood Study, which was a bilingual study undertaken from 2001-2002 and in 2005. She began with a clinical recitation of the numbers, e.g. 5.3 million children who have parents that are illegal aliens, 1 million children themselves who are not legal, the decline, from 1.5 to 1 million, in the number of illegal children,  and the one-third of Latinos who allegedly know someone who was deported from the country.

She then proceeded to describe how she believes assimilation theory plays into the health outcomes of these individuals. This theory purports to demonstrate a link between a parent’s immigration status and the well being of his or her child. She cited a previous study by Hirokazu Yoshikawa that found lower cognitive skills among children of illegal aliens, which is an observation that she hopes to extrapolate to other areas of  child development such as “externalizing” and behavioral problems among the children of illegals. Her focus relies upon studies of access to health insurance and medical care in Los Angeles County. She found access to the former limited among illegal aliens-who also had less access to welfare programs such as food stamps-but access to the former widespread, indicating that illegal status was not an obstacle to obtaining health care, as the many public hospitals in Los Angeles that have closed because of costs incurred treating illegal patients can attest to. 

My primary objection is to the underlying assumption of Ms. Gelatt’s presentation that it is the illegal status of these individuals that has resulted in health and behavioral problems among them and their family members, which even she undermined when she conceded that legal immigrant families also exhibited similar problems, albeit to a lesser degree. Left unaddressed is the ineluctable fact that many of these families-both legal and illegal-come from rural, undeveloped parts of Mexico and do not have the education and/or language skills necessary to adapt to life in a post-industrial, 21st century American metropolis. Although this subject is rarely touched upon in mainstream media outlets eager to portray California as a multicultural paradise, it has suffused life to such an extent that even reporters are reluctantly acknowledging the divide between traditional, American residents of California and newcomers who are both literally and figuratively aliens to the dominant culture and its mores. Although I’m certain that attributing these epidemiological problems to the immigrants themselves-rather than to what set of “documents” they do or do not have-would not endear Ms. Gelatt to her academic advisors, or to the institutions she’s seeking academic grants from, it would be a more open-minded, intellectually rigorous approach to the sociological problems she hopes to address. 

A presentation that I found much more compelling, both stylistically and substantively, was delivered by Bilesha Weeraratne, a PhD candidate in Economics at CUNY who has used a micro data-based approach to identify the population of unauthorized immigrants inside of the United States. In order to ascertain an accurate estimate of the number of illegal aliens living in the United States-and I should note that unlike all of the other speakers at this event she described them as illegal immigrants  rather than using the misleading euphemism undocumented-she used several important surveys as a frame of reference. 

One of these happened to be the Legalized Population Survey of 1989, which was a sample of over 6,000 illegal aliens who applied for legal permanent residence under the terms specified by the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986, known more widely by its shorthand, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. The chief shortcomings of using the LPS, obviously, are that it does not include statistics from non-naturalized aliens who did not meet the criteria set forth by ICRA, and overlooks the estimated 10 to 11 million illegal aliens who have entered the country since Simpson-Mazzoli was enacted into law. In order to compensate for these shortcomings, Weeraratne used another data set culled from the American Community Survey (2009), which determines the number of estimated illegal aliens by subtracting the population of legal residents from the total foreign-born population. Again, this method is not  perfect, since it does not take into account those who have left the country but are not properly tracked. Perhaps this explains why-as the speaker pointed out during her presentation-existing DHS figures mischaracterize nearly 1 in 4 legal immigrants as illegal. Even researchers who are well-immersed in the minutiae of this issue-such as the Pew Hispanic Center-often come up with imprecise numbers because of dubious assumptions, e.g. the unsubstantiated belief that the occupational structure of the illegal community remains constant, notwithstanding our incredibly dynamic economy. That’s why Bilesha Weeraratne believes that her micro data based methodology-which doesn’t rely upon static assumptions or merely one data set-is the best way of arriving at a precise figure for the number of illegal aliens living in the United States. After listenning to her incredibly well-researched presentation, it’s hard to disagree with that belief. 

The final paper of the afternoon-and by far, one of the least persuasive in my eyes-was a joint presentation by Brian Levin and Paul Lagunes, both doctoral candidates in Political Science from Yale, which was entitled “Documenting The Undocumented.” Along with Ruth Dittelman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at the same university, they attempted to analyze the success of a New Haven program which gave illegal aliens a muncipal ID card called the Elm City Residence Card. After giving us a brief of overview of the political history behind Mayor John DeStefano’s decision to issue these ID cards-beginning with his unsuccessful run for the governorship of Connecticut-the presenters outlined the contours of their experiment, which entailed sending six males to different merchandisers in the state of Connecticut using both the Elm City ID Card and the Ameracard. The former being the “official” identity card issued as a means of documenting illegals-although, as pointed out during the presentation, it was available to legal residents-while the latter is a “fake”  card issued by a profit-seeking document mill. 

The point of the experiment was ostensibly to answer the question, “Are Latinos trustworthy?” In order to answer this question, the students picked both Latino and what they described as white males, all controlled for age, height, education, and other factors that might otherwise influence a retailer’s decision to discriminate-by asking for identification-against customers of Latino extraction. The findings were that the Latino subjects were 10 percent more likely to be asked for identification prior to making a transaction. The actual purchase comprised the second phase of this experiment, which was used as a barometer to compare the rates of acceptance for the “real” ID card issued by New Haven with that of the “fake” ID card. Lagunes and Levin found that the two cards were accepted at equal rates, leading them to conclude that the poor quality of the Elm City ID, and perhaps an insufficient public education campaign among local merchants, accounted for what they viewed as ignorance on the part of  those merchants. 

Leaving aside the pre-existing biases of these researchers, there are a number of problems with the both the methodology and conclusions of this study. First of all, “Latino” is a notoriously imprecise term, especially when it’s used to describe one’s race or ethnicity. The word Latino might describe the region in which one was born, or the language a person speaks, but it has no significance when it comes to finding examples of “racial profiling,” which was the intention of Lagunes and the co-authors of this paper. The fact that we couldn’t see photographs or video of the subjects they used for this experiment only further undermined their original hypothesis, in my opinion. 

Secondly, they didn’t seriously consider the possibility that the reason the Elm City Resident Card might not have been given any more credence than the Ameracard is because neither one is a truly legitimate, valid form of identification, regardless of what a city bureaucrat intent on undermining federal immigration law believes. This is illustrated by the fact that the person responsible in large measure for the New Haven card was working with the Mexican government to proliferate the notoriously fraudulent matricula consular. Although someone raised that very issue during the question and answer session that followed the final presentation, she was not given a satisfactory response. In fact, the question of this card becoming an invitation for New Haven to become a haven for breeder documents used by criminal aliens-and perhaps terrorists-which I posed was even more befuddling to Lagunes and Levin. The two had begun their presentation by asserting that there was such an overwhelming need for illegal aliens to be given “documents” in order to function in society that policies like that pursued by New Haven’s mayor were necessary. But when I asked them how New Haven could avoid becoming a beacon for illegal aliens seeking breeder documents-as is the case in states like New Mexico-they replied that the people seeking cards were living in New Haven, and that even this demand quickly dissipated. So which is it? They never seemed to resolve the contradiction.

Finally, and I found this to be supremely ironic given the context, the authors applauded the denial of a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request filed by opponents of the Elm City Resident Card that would have required the names, photographs and addresses of its recipients within New Haven. The same people agitating for a way to “document the undocumented” want to keep these poor, undocumented individuals stuck “in the shadows.” I have no doubt that if an open borders advocacy organization had filed suit to obtain similar information from a group of pro-enforcement, patriotic Arizonans opposing the recall of State Senator Russell Pearce their viewpoint on this particular “privacy” issue would have been worlds apart from the one they espoused during the Q&A session. 

 So the final part of this fascinating multi-hour workshop was disappointing. That said, I do think that the trip to Manhattan was a worthwhile endeavor, especially since it allowed me to learn more about the current state of social science research regarding the issue of immigrants living in America. To conclude, I’d have to say that while there are some very thoughtful researchers and academicians of this subject-such as the brilliant Bilesha Weeraratne-there is also much tendentious research pursued under the rubric of sociology, which was certainly on display at the CUNY Graduate Center this past week.  

Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending a discussion held at New York City’s Penn Club, sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies, which featured one of my favorite journalists/media critics, William McGowan. The author of Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America, Mr. McGowan delivered a speech outlining the largely negative contribution New York’s “newspaper of record” has had on the immigration debate, both in the past and during the current nationwide battle over controversial measures such as amnesty and the DREAM Act.

McGowan’s talk divided the journalistic crimes of the New York Times into two major categories: sins of omission and sins of commission. The Times is replete with examples of both, the former found in its steadfast refusal to cover the 2007 case of a Mexican illegal alien who murdered a woman after being released by police in Denver, despite a long rap sheet. Despite the obvious newsworthiness of this horrific crime, and the fact that it was covered by both local dailies at the time, it did not merit the attention of anyone at the Times, which had a bureau in the city. An example of the latter is the concerted effort by the paper to affirm archaic, barbaric cultural and religious customs imported from the third world as valid alternatives to mainstream American culture. McGowan cited as evidence of this editorial practice the paper’s benign treatment of West African immigrants who practice polygamy in their adopted country.

In many cases, however, the two methods of promoting mass immigration and cultural fragmentation are found within the same story, as the Times attempts to both minimize the readily apparent drawbacks of this country’s skewed immigration policies while at the same time promoting the very policies that it had previously claimed had little to no impact on American society. A prime example of this double-edged assault is a story that examined the illegal alien sanctuary known as Maywood. The 2006 article focused on a group of illegal aliens who marched in support of amnesty, however it neglected to point out the fact that many of them trampled upon the American flag while at the same time calling for the Reconquista of the southwestern United States by Mexican nationals. And even as the Times produced laudatory coverage of the initiative to provide illegal aliens with official documentation in New Haven, Connecticut, it studiously avoided any mention of the crimes committed by the undocumented then living in New Haven. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mr. McGowan’s talk was his recapitulation of the New York Times’s past coverage of immigration issues, which is an often overlooked chapter in the paper’s history. I found particularly fascinating his portrayal of its coverage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which is a watershed law that inalterably redefined both the scope and nature of immigration into the United States. Although I had an inkling of how the Times treated immigration in years past, I was astonished at some of the vivid details that the author provided about how the paper had soft-pedaled what turned out to be the most transformational piece of domestic legislation signed into law during the 20th century. 

As it turns out, one of the main reporters on the 1965 immigration bill had been a trusted member of the Kennedy camp, which at any other reputable journalistic institution would have raised alarms since the original impetus behind the bill had come from President Kennedy. After JFK’s assassination, his younger brother Teddy had squired the bill through a distracted Congress and onto Lyndon Baines Johnson’s desk, using much of the same divisive rhetoric supporters of the bill at the Times would employ. The New York Times’s coverage of the hearings leading up to eventual passage were equally slanted, devoting numerous column spaces to those testifying on behalf of the bill while it’s most eloquent critic-a woman representing a patriot organization from the state of New Jersey-was given short shrift.

Unfortunately, its coverage of immigration issues has not improved in the ensuing decades; in fact, it could be argued that it’s grown inexorably more biased and shrill since that seminal piece of immigration legislation was enacted. A compounding factor, naturally, is the explosive growth in Islamic immigration to the United States, which the Times has treated as an unalloyed good. McGowan made several trenchant points about the remarkable solicitude the Old Gray Lady has shown towards the world’s second-largest religion, including the observation that after the September 11th massacres in 2001-an issue whose coverage earned the New York Times several Pulitzer prizes-the paper went into overdrive trying to assure its readers that Islam was an anodyne alternative to America’s traditional, Judeo-Christian heritage. From its indulgent tone towards Muslim students who disclaimed their American identity-and condemned the country their parents immigrated to-to the madrassa created by radical Islamist Debbie Almontaser in the heart of Brooklyn, the Times has consistently neglected to ask the tough questions so many Americans wanted answers to in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

This deference to Muslim sensibilities dovetails nicely with what William McGowan describes as an institutional effort by the paper’s editors to create not a melting pot, nor even a mosaic, but a nation of collective victims. Or in this case, a distinct subculture of victims who have been unfairly treated by American society due to their customs-which include female genital mutiliation and honor killing-and religious beliefs, which can include a call to murder and/or convert anyone who does not subscribe to the shahada.The rampant victimology enunciated by the editorial staff at the New York times has gradually expanded to include numerous ethnic minorities, and the renewed interest in the seamier side of Islam has given the paper a perfect opportunity to expand this philosophy to include America’s newest-and from the perspective of Times editors, most besieged-minority, Muslims living in the United States. 

I came away from this lecture greatly impressed by Mr. McGowan’s thorough deconstruction of what was once a prestigious media lodestar. Even though I might not agree with his assertion that the New York Times is salvageable, I do respect the eloquence with which he articulated his position. Keep your eyes open for an exclusive interview with the author of Gray Lady Down in the coming days.

While the police dragnet for the murderers of ICE agent Jaime Zapata continues, in spite of potential obstruction by a systematically corrupt Mexican polity, the brutality of the cartels that are thought to have been behind his murder continues to be documented by the news media.

Thanks to Boing Boing, we’ve learned of the lengths to which paramilitary drug cartels such as the Zetas will go in order to intimidate their criminal rivals. In this case, posting the most gruesome images from their attacks on the popular video-sharing website owned by Google. As hideous as these videos might seem, they’re merely documenting a pattern of horrific violence and retribution that has been occurring for years. If you don’t believe me, just skim a story about a series of decapitations aimed at the cartel that allegedly employed the perpetrators of agent Zapata’s murder. 

If the audacity and brutal nature of these crimes seem familiar, that’s because they are. They are tactics adopted from the terrorist  groups that have targeted Americans and our allies for the past three decades. Creeping Sharia has a great archive of articles exploring the connections between these Islamic terror organizations and their unlikely partners along the Mexican border. 

It shouldn’t take these bone-chilling images to make you aware of the problem inherent in our porous, lightly patrolled southern border, but I do think they clarify the issue before us. Unless we start to address this anarchic situation with serious solutions, the chaos will spread even further into American territory. Even a congressman with relatively liberal immigration views, Devin Nunes, has called for the United States Army to be called into service protecting this nation’s border security in his recently published book. 

It is one of the few proposals that would permanently stem the flow of illegal aliens flooding into this country via Mexico. Even the purely cosmetic, politically expedient experiment President Obama conducted with our National Guard was partially successful in deterring illegal border crossings. How much more successful would such a project be if our federal government made a tangible, serious commitment to stop this pandemic of illegality with our nation’s Armed Forces? Perhaps it would even begin to have a salutary impact upon our North American neighbor, so that grisly stories such as the one highlighted in this post won’t have to be published so often in the future.

Michael Cutler, an immigration enforcement activist who worked for decades as a federal government employee protecting our nation’s security-including helping to thwart a terrorist plot by the Japanese Red Army-has a fantastic essay today explaining in detail just why the DREAM Act is the thin wedge of a much larger amnesty.

I highly suggest you check it out. Kudos to our friends at Diggers Realm for posting these invaluable thoughts of someone who’s made our country safer, and who continues to do so  today.

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, as predicted here and on Twitter by Mickey Kaus, attempted to forestall the vote, Senate Republicans rejected the move and will now vote on cloture for the first Dream Act bill approximately an hour from now, according to Numbers USA.

 That’s why you need to call those senators listed in the previous update RIGHT NOW! You are the only people who will be able to stop amnesty before it’s too late! Don’t be fooled, Digger’s Realm is absolutely right. This is the last obstacle Harry Reid and his many amnesty supporters face before victory for them and misery for American citizens. 

YOU ARE THE PEOPLE! But even more importantly, you’re the American people and need to make that fact apparent to the members of the United States Senate, who are evidently not aware of it or confused on that point. Go to it, folks!

As you might have noticed, with Election Day imminent, I’ve turned the website’s focus to some very competitive political races throughout the country whose outcomes might have a significant impact on immigration policy on either a state/local or national level.

I’ve drawn attention to races that I consider pivotal to the outcome of the immigration debate, including the exciting gubernatorial race in Colorado, which features a surprisingly strong campaign by maverick Republican, and current Constitution Party nominee, Tom Tancredo. I’ve also focused on the highly publicized campaign by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina to oust open borders incumbent Barbara Boxer in the California Senate race, as well as the highly-charged contest between Sharon Angle and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

However, for the next five days I intend to highlight several underreported races taking place right now that could have an equally significant impact on American immigration policy in this country going forward. I’d like to begin this coverage by examining one congressional race that has escaped scrutiny thus far due to the incumbent’s presumably insurmountable advantage over any prospective Republican opponent. The contest involves Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the current chairman of the House Homeland Security Commitee.

Thompson was elevated to that post after the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2006, replacing then Chairman Peter King, a man with impeccable national security credentials and a fairly good record on border security and immigration issues. Unfortunately, his successor is the complete opposite of King, going out of his way to diminish border security, demand that citizenship be conferred upon millions of illegal aliens, and thwart any attempt at reforming our nation’s most dysfunctional immigration policies. For a full report exploring just how bad Rep. Thompson is on immigration/border security, I suggest you read this dossier.

Fortunately, voters in Mississippi’s second congressional district have a choice this year, unlike in most election cycles where their congressman handily wins re-election in a heavily gerrymandered seat. That choice comes in the form of challenger William Marcy, a man who not only has a distinguished career in law enforcement-who better to police our border than a former policeman-but one who offers a refreshing departure from Mr. Thompson’s siren song of open borders. In fact, Bill Marcy is a staunch advocate for shoring up our porous southern border, as a quick perusal of his website indicates.

Whether recent polling suggesting a neck and neck race is an accurate reflection of voter sentiment remains to be seen. However, what can’t be denied is that many of his African-American constituents-and it should be noted here that Rep. Thompson serves a majority-minority district-have finally begun to rebel against a congressman who arrogantly pursues open borders policies in spite of the astronomical employment rate among black Americans and the empirical evidence demonstrating that illegal aliens undercut black American citizens in the labor market.

Hopefully, people in the 2nd District will express their displeasure with their errant congressman’s immigration stance at the ballot box this coming tuesday.

The first thing you think when hearing the all-too-common news of a U.S. soldier’s death is the escalating war in Afghanistan or, as is less often the case, the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, a  completely different war is occurring on our nation’s doorstep, and one of our nation’s heroes on call has become its latest casualty. Diggers Realm has the news. 

Our thoughts go out to the family and loved ones of Pfc Ramirez.

Let me preface this entry by declaring unambiguously that I don’t think getting into physical altercations with random strangers, even people who may be criminal aliens that are committing statutory rape-is ever a wise idea. Putting that caveat aside for a moment, I also believe that this verdict is a horrific travesty of justice, one that can only come about in a country that has forgotten the true meaning of civil rights.

For a full accounting of how Mr. Piekarsky and Mr. Donchak have been wronged, I suggest you visit the invaluable Diggers Realm, which has covered this miscarriage of justice from the very beginning and has an insightful post explaining how this dreadful verdict came to be and which political apparatchiks engineered it. 

Although this specific case might not seem like a watershed in the immigration debate, it is. It represents the depths that we sink to once we allow the ethnic grievance industry and their open borders lobbyists, e.g. MALDEF, The National Council of La Raza, LULAC, dictate our laws to us. The fact that constitutional and statutory law can be so manipulated in order to serve the interests of a belligerent minority should alarm all of us, regardless of our ethnic identity or ancestry. 

If this case strikes some as familiar, it should. Just substitute the names Campeon and Ramos for those of these two Pennsylvania teenagers and you’ll recognize a disturbing pattern. Unfortunately, I doubt that our current president, overseeing a Department of Justice that worked diligently to cook up these absurd charges, will grant any sort of clemency to these young men. That is why people of good will need to speak up in their defense. The only people whose civil rights were denied in this case are the two individuals who now face a life-time of imprisonment for simply defending themselves.

One of the biggest misconceptions in the debate over our nation’s immigration policy is the notion that in order to be a good Christian or a decent Jew you need to support a policy of open borders in perpetuity. Although the link between a partisan political agenda and belief in the scriptural teachings of a given religion might be hard to discern for most neutral observers, the vast majority of the religious establishment in this country has nevertheless made this connection a focal point of their vocations.

Whether it’s a United Methodist Church in Chicago sheltering the noxious illegal alien Elvira Arellano,  the Roman Catholic Church’s seemingly implacable quest to foist amnesty upon a resistant American public, despite its utterly discredited leadership, or the Progress by Pesach campaign launched by liberal rabbinical leaders in this country, there would appear to be unanimity among America’s clerical and rabbinical hierarchy on the topic of immigration. 

I broach this subject now because of a fascinating discussion I recently had on Facebook with Professor Carol M. Swain, the brilliant conservative immigration enforcement activist and political science professor from Vanderbilt University. She obliquely alluded to some comments made by Richard D. Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission-whose logo is reproduced above-with which she vehemently disagreed. I could only assume that these comments were related to Mr. Land’s vocal support for amnesty legislation. 

Although the discrepancy between the views of religious leaders and their congregants, re: immigration, has been empirically demonstrated by respected pollsters, there is still a tendency among the public to defer to men and women of the cloth when they begin to expound upon our obligation to the “pilgrim” or “refugee.” This is an egregious error in judgment, in my opinion.

Despite the fact that the Lutheran Church is now often associated with liberal causes-such as the sanctuary movement revived by open borders advocates masquerading as pastors-this reverend makes one of the more compelling, persuasive Christian arguments in opposition to the movement aiding illegal aliens living in this country. And as hard as it may be to conceive of, there are other voices that dissent from the current orthodoxy, as this essay by Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, demonstrates.

The notion that Judaism or Christianity are synonymous with a specific immigration policy advocated by liberal political figures with religious facades is simply false. The more people expose the fallacies in this way of thinking the closer we’ll be to having a real examination of the problems that porous borders and weak interior immigration enforcement pose to our country. The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops are on the wrong track, and they need to be told so by their flock. Unfettered immigration and indifference to criminal behavior are not Christian values, and no one should be deceived into believing they are.