Today is the first official Republican Party primary of 2012, and although the consequences of this presidential election are great this site has not spent much time discussing the debates that took place in the 48 hours prior to the New Hampshire primary. Why, you might ask? Because the candidates, and the moderators, a.k.a. the MSM, have completely ignored the single most important issue of the campaign. Yes, even as we lament the diminution of citizenship in the state of California, Operation Fast and Furious claims more victims, and courageous ICE employees rebel against the patently unconstitutional actions of this administration, the main contenders for the highest office in this land continue to ignore the pain and suffering of their potential electors. Kudos to Chris Crane for doing what our politicians will not. 

Rest assured, we will address these topics-and more-in the days ahead. However, later today I’ll be live-tweeting a fascinating immigration discussion sponsored by the invaluable Center for Immigration Studies. You can follow the symposium on my Twitter account, Odd Lane. Look for more politically-oriented, topical journalism on this site when I cover the Manhattan Libertarian Party’s convention in New York City later this month. 

 For those of you who are living in his district, I strongly urge you to come out and support Senate President Pearce in his bid to stave off the charge of the open borders dogmatists. For those living outside of his legislative district, I’m imploring you to do whatever you can to help others vote for Senator Pearce. That includes phone banking, knocking on the doors of friends and neighbors who might need help traveling to their polling places, and promoting his campaign in the remaining hours of this campaign. Here’s a list of polling locations for tomorrow’s election. Do what you can to help him out, because the future of our movement depends upon tomorrow’s election results.

I’d like to use today’s post to echo the sentiments expressed by our publisher yesterday. As someone who once lived within the confines of the 9th Congressional District when it was represented by Chuck Schumer, one of the most irresponsible, worst actors in our nation’s immigration debate, I can’t urge you strongly enough to go out and vote today! For those of you who are able to impact the outcome of today’s vote in Brooklyn and Queens, you have a momentous opportunity to change the course of this city’s stagnant political culture.

The fact that former Rep. Weiner’s seat might ultimately be done away with once New York State has completed its decennial redristing process only lends urgency and weight to your vote. Committed political activists of all political stripes have already demonstrated that many voters are willing to buck the tide of political complacency that has too often come to represent our city’s electoral process, as Mr. Evanchik’s post demonstrates. The next step is proving that average New Yorkers are willing to oust an inveterately corrupt political machine from power.

It’s up to you, New York! Show the rest of the country what you’re made of.

A last minute storefront office for David Weprin, Democratic nominee for the 9th NY Congressional district, has popped up in Forest Hills.  The storefront, in a vacated beauty parlour, is a hundred feet from Queens Democratic headquarters and around the corner from former Repesentative Anthony Weiner’s old apartment.  It is organized by SEIU local 1199, which is shuttling in out-of-district canvassers to drum up the vote for Weprin’s faltering campaign.  Mr. Weprin also does not live in the district he hopes to represent.  Local voters have been inundated by robo-calls as an increasingly desperate Weprin campaign is at the brink of losing the previously solidly Democratic district.

American Rattlesnake has endorsed Weprin’s opponent,  Bob Turner, for the vacant seat.

UPDATE: Weprin allies are now hiring temp workers in Utah and Oregon to call voters in New York.  Registered Democratic voters in New York are receiving an avalanche of calls from bored temporary workers paid to shill for the candidate, who is unable to get support from voters in the district he wishes to represent.

American Rattlesnake urges you to vote for Bob Turner, the Republican candidate.  While immigration has not been a key issue in this race, Mr. Turner has vocalized his opposition to both the DREAM Act and broader amnesty legislation during an interview with Brian Lehrer of WNYC. He has also spoken out vigorously against the Ground Zero Mosque.  He will caucus with the Republicans, who have generally been on the right side of the issue when it comes to illegal immigration.

His opponent, David Weprin, doesn’t even live in the district he wants to represent.  He was picked by the local Democratic Party boss, Joe Crowley, in a cynical attempt to cater to the Jewish vote.  David Weprin is a party hack who can be depended upon to toe the line whenever his liberal masters order him to.  Any Democrat dismayed by the ineffectual and corrupt leadership of their party can send no stronger message than to vote against a toady like Weprin.

Bob Turner is a successful television executive, born and raised in the 9th district, with a practical sense of right and wrong.

Please send a message to Congress and the Democratic Party that business as usual is not acceptable.  Vote for Bob Turner.

They only get recycled, especially if those ideas were conceived on Capitol Hill by people who have no interest in serving their ostensible constituents. We were all wondering when our president would return to the Democrat Party’s favorite demagogic talking point. Well, we finally have our answer.

Despite the seeming patina of bipartisanship reflected by this meeting’s invitees-open borders devotees from the Republican as well as the Democratic parties were invited to this elaborately orchestrated charade-there was no disguising what the true agenda of this “gathering” was. Nor was there any doubt as to why its participants decided to take part in an exercise that most impartial observers view as a futile endeavor in the newly constituted, strongly pro-enforcement Republican Congress.

Our own mayor, Michael Bloomberg, desperately wants to deflect attention from his flailing, bordering on disastrous-no to mention completely unwarranted-third term in office, while former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has his sights set on something more ambitious. Namely, the presidency of the European Union. Their counterparts in Mr. Obama’s party, on the other hand, want to cement their party’s status as the one political vehicle in this country that panders exclusively to Hispanic voters, even if that means embracing a policy that rewards lawlessness, ensures future waves of illegal immigration, and compromises our national security, all while alienating hard-working American citizens and legal immigrants from their own society. 

Make no mistake, this meeting was not about policy but politics, and politics practiced in the most naked, exploitative manner possible. Barack Obama is not delusional, and the notion that he believes a meeting with the likes of Al Sharpton and Michael Bloomberg will convince Republicans in the House of Representatives to abandon one of the stances most responsible for their newfound majority is patently absurd. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that this stagecraft is intended to bolster President Obama’s flagging support among likely voters within the Latino community. 

The good news, at least from our perspective, is that this bit of political chicanery does not appear to be working with its intended audience. The (very) early reviews are in, and it does not look pretty for the President. The Phoenix New Times, a radical-left open borders rag,  mercilessly panned this gathering of open borders advocates, focusing its ire specifically on what it views as Obama’s overly harsh and contentless rhetoric regarding his proposed comprehensive reform. This, in tandem with the ultimately empty-yet still provocative-posturing of Congressman Luis Gutierrez add up to a huge political problem for the President with just one year until the 2012 presidential election. 

Whether he can find a way to square the circle, i.e. retain his heretofore solid support among Hispanic voters without accomplishing anything substantive to palliate his most rabid, pro-amnesty base, is something that remains to be seen.

If there’s one subject the mainstream media loves to skirt it’s the problems caused by Islamic expansionism in the developing world. If there’s another subject the MSM loves to avoid, it’s the problems caused by massive migrations of people into previously ethnically/religiously homogeneous nations.

The volatile political situation currently unfolding in the Ivory Coast highlights the overlap between both problems in an acute way. While many media outlets are depicting the battle between supporters of  President Laurent Gbagbo and Alessane Outtara as simply a fight between the southern and northern parts of Cote d’Ivoire, the truth is much more complex. As this analysis points out, one of the chief reasons that Mr. Outtara emerged victorious from this most recent, disputed election is because he was supported by almost all the immigrants who settled in the Ivory Coast from its Muslim neighbors, e.g. Burkina Faso, Mali, etc… 

In other words, the people who were brought to the country-one of the most prosperous in West Africa, and an oasis of stability at one point in time-as laborers eventually became permanent residents who disrupted the existing political dynamics of the Ivory Coast. This is the difficulty you face with unchecked immigration, especially of people that share a completely different set of values than the native population. It’s why the constant clamor for guest-worker programs from the likes of Tamar Jacoby and Jason Riley should fall on deaf ears in this country. 

While the concept of “workers” sounds appealing at first blush, the fact that those “guest” workers bring values and prejudices-like those workers who have now completely transformed the Ivory Coast-is something left unexamined by immigration’s biggest boosters. Before we allow millions of people to come here to “work” we should ask ourselves what else they will do once they’ve established roots in this country.

As we mark the end of the old year and the beginning of something new, it’s wise to take a step back and assess the accomplishments and setbacks of our movement. 2010 was probably the most significant year in terms of advancing the debate over immigration enforcement within the body politic of this country in recent memory.

The most notable event, of course, was the decision by Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona to sign into law Senator Russell Pearce’s signature piece of legislation, SB 1070. As a quick reminder, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act makes it a misdemeanor to be an illegal alien, requires the enforcement of all relevant federal immigration laws by state and local law enforcement officials during their regular duties, and targets those who hire, shelter, or harbor people living in Arizona illegally.

Although large parts of the law have been enjoined by Judge Susan Bolton, Governor Brewer and the state of Arizona are appealing that injunction. In fact, the likelihood that this law will eventually reach the Supreme Court, as another Arizona law targeting employers of illegal aliens already has, is high. But even more importantly, the decision by President Obama’s Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, to sue the state of Arizona served as a litmus test moment in the broader immigration debate we’ve been engaged in since Californian’s approval of Proposition 187 in 1994.

Taking the side of special interest groups like the National Council of La Raza, LULAC and other opponents of immigration enforcement in the United States, such as the ACLU and the government of Mexico, against the state of Arizona, as well as the vast majority of the American public, told us all where the Obama administration stands on this issue. It also galvanized public support for the stance of Governor Brewer and spurred efforts to enact similar laws in other states, as this New Year’s article by UPI points out.

But SB 1070 wasn’t the only major national development in the world of immigration reform. 2010 also saw the attempt by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his deputy whip, Senator Dick Durbin, to foist the DREAM Act upon us after being rebuffed repeatedly by Congress in the decade since it was first conceived. Thankfully, opponents of DREAM, led by the indefatigable Senator Sessions and his allies at Numbers USA, were able to defeat their backdoor attempt at amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.

As gratifying as this victory was, it was not the only success we had over the course of the past year. 2010 also saw the widespread adoption of Secure Communities, a program mandating local authorities share the fingerprints of arrestees with ICE, by  states and localities around the country, including ones run by governors with notoriously weak records on this issue, such as Massachusetts and our very own New York State. While perhaps a small step in the right direction, it is an indication that the Obama administration can be prodded into immigration enforcement when it is politically pressured to do so.

Perhaps the single greatest achievement of 2010, though, was the electoral victory of November 2nd, when the forces of immigration enforcement and reform defeated Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s deputies across the nation. And even though there were some blots on an otherwise great score card, the overall results represented a huge shift away from the House of Representatives that passed the DREAM Act in a lame duck session. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, whose comical efforts I’ve chronicled in the past, will be replaced in the new Congress with immigration hawk Steve King, while the former chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, anti-fence, anti-enforcement Rep. Bennie Thompson, will be replaced with a congressman familiar with that territory, Rep. Peter King.

And even though the campaign to unseat amnesty proponent and panderer Harry Reid fell short, we did see the replacement of several dreadful members of the U.S. Senate this year, including the defeat of DREAM Act supporter Bob Bennet, and the retirement of former co-sponsor Sam Brownback-who is now the governor of Kansas. Overall, the November elections marked a huge shift in favor of immigration enforcement and common sense tools like e-Verify, which is a priority of new House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.

Overall, I think we can look back on the past year with a great degree of pride in our achievements and determination to correct those mistakes that were made in the course of this struggle. The focus of most of our energies over the past year has been in thwarting potentially disastrous legislation on the federal level, such as the DREAM Act and AgJobs, and helping states pick up the slack of the federal government, as was the case with SB 1070. I think 2011 will mark a transition to a focus on the federal government assuming its proper, but long-neglected, role in border security and immigration enforcement. The success of Secure Communities proves that state-federal cooperation can be an effective tool in stemming the flow of illegal immigration.

Rest assured, this website will continue to bring you news of any developments on that front as the year progresses.

If you have read the online postings since the tsunami of GOP election victories, one gets the idea–which is not unwarranted–that with this new, refreshing realignment of power, the thorny immigration issue will be tabled.

Quite the contrary, it is not being tabled. The reform will consist of fixing the peculiar ideas of prior champions of upending and overturning our formative Constitution. Reform will consist of adherence to the laws and statutes of this country and our states. We have laws aplenty, but they have been ignored and flouted, mocked and ridiculed. The sitting, 44th President of the United States, who is now spending our billions for no discernible reason in other countries, has issued warrants against one of our beloved states for standing up to the tyranny of lassitude and benign neglect.

Naughty Arizona! How dare you defend your people and your state?! Let me, the brazen one without a clear understanding of the Constitution, sue you for your audactity at trying to oust the unconscionable and unwanted.

Why is the issue of immigration being tabled? For one thing, legal immigration is not an issue. Most of us, many of us, are legal immigrants. I am.

Then for what reason? For the chimera of jurassic era political correctness, which sacrifices hundreds of lives to rapists, thieves, criminals, dopers, smugglers and marauders creeping under our fortifications of national safety. For the peculiar ‘grace’ of losing millions of jobs–not the cream of the crop, perhaps, but certainly welcome to millions of us if we were given the chance to work them–to non-citizens.

For the dubious prank of bankrupting border-state hospitals, welfare systems and school structures to bring foreign and non-English-speaking aliens up to the level of education expected of locals.

For the dim privilege of emptying our country’s coffers in pursuit of radical notions of what is ‘fair’ to the Other, versus what IS fair to us.

So I say, instead of avowing that the GOP transformation of the backwaters of radical progressivism into long-maligned sanity, much-delayed sanity (not the Jon Stewart variety of anti-normal ”sanity” celebrated by bigot Yusef Islam/Cat Stevens several weeks ago in the shadow of the Capitol), I say that the nation can gratefully reclaim itself … for itself. We can assert our value to ourselves, assert our right to do the jobs available in our country, become educated in American schools for citizens of this country, provide a lending hand to those in need who are citizens and long-time legal residents of our great nation. We welcome the legal with open arms.

Further, we can think of this as ”reform,” since the left has for so long usurped the vocabulary of decency and co-opted reality to such an extent that we can now, just perhaps, read the “tea” leaves. Many of the illegals squatting unlawfully, driving boisterously on our roads, inhabiting our farmhouses, ransacking our cities and despoiling our deserts may read the message and…leave. Without the passage of vast new legislation. Reducing our inconceivable deficit and our suffering states’ glaring seas of red ink.

An oceanic lack of jobs engineered by the pod person living in the White House has begun the exodus. Many have already departed back to their original homes, reducing the in-trafficking of masquerading Middle Easterners packing heat of a different variety at the same time. Also, alleviating the unholy burden of border guards, still far too few, abstemiously denied support by his Brashness-in-Chief.

This new encouraging vote that expresses the will of millions upon millions of the utterly fed up might accelerate the long-prayed-for departure of the 20-million-plus unresidents.

As they say when you exit the jumbo airbus: B-b-bye, now.

Adios, amigos illegales.

marion d s dreyfus      .    .    .         20(c)10