1. There are nearly 7 billion people living on planet earth.
2. 313 million of them currently live in the United States.
3. If given the chance, another 313 million people would move here in a heart beat. Probably many more would, too.
4. Being a sovereign nation means that our country is private property.
5. As owners of this property, we get to decide who comes here to live.
6. Living on our border doesn’t give anyone special rights.
7. If we decide we want to invite more computer engineers or entrepreneurs than unskilled workers, that is our business.
8. Able bodied people should not be on welfare as long as there are “jobs Americans won’t do.” In short, if you don’t work, you don’t eat.
9. Enforcing laws against illegal immigration is not the same as being anti-immigrant.
10. Our immigration laws do not break up families. If you want to keep your family together, follow the law.

Words matter. Laws matter. Logic matters. But not to the likes of Democrat John Conyers

Opening the first immigration hearing of the new Congress, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee warned his colleagues not to use the term “illegal immigrant” as the debate goes on.

“I hope no one uses the term illegal immigrants here today. Our citizens are not — the people in this country are not illegal. They are are out of status. They are new Americans that are immigrants,” said Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat.

As Congress begins the immigration debate, both sides are preparing for an emotionally charged fight, and language will be one of the battlegrounds.

Many immigrant-rights advocates object to the terms “illegal” and “alien,” saying that people cannot be deemed illegal, and that the word “alien” makes them sound inhuman. They argue the better terms are “undocumented migrants.”

Conyers should be more sensitive to illegality. After all, his wife Monica is serving a three year term for bribery as Detroit city councilwoman.

Obama has a sure talent for being wrong on important issues.

L. Gordon Cravitz

In 1492, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Bayezid II, made a controversial decision. He ordered his navy to the Iberian Peninsula to evacuate Jews being forcibly converted to Catholicism by the Spanish Inquisition. He gave them safe haven in Turkey and throughout his Muslim empire. “You call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” he told his advisers, referring to the king of Spain, “he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine.”

If only Washington could embrace the wisdom of Sultan Bayezid II. Instead, President Obama last week declared dead on arrival the latest effort to admit more skilled workers.

Republicans in the House passed a bill that would expand visas for skilled workers, easing the waiting list that can be a decade or longer for technologists from populous countries such as China and India. It would repeal a law that limits visas from any one country to 7% of the total—a quota system modeled on the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, which limited immigrants from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country already in the U.S. as of 1890.

Under current law, if you’re from China or India, you’re out of luck, but if you’re from tiny Belgium or Iceland, places are available. The Republican bill would end this quota and instead allot spaces to people based on their skills in sciences, technology, engineering and math.

President Obama never delivered on his pledge early in his first term to craft broad immigration reform. He now risks alienating loyal supporters. A headline last week on the CNET technology website: “Obama Opposes Silicon Valley Firms on Immigration Reform,” reporting him at odds with “many of the Silicon Valley firms and executives who bankrolled his re-election.”

Immigration is a highly charged political topic, but boosting the number of skilled workers should be a no-brainer. America’s entrepreneurs have disproportionately been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell to Sergei Brin of Google.

Just as the free movement of financial capital funds growth, free movement of human capital brings innovation. The U.S. should staple a green card to every advanced technology degree earned by a foreign student at an American university. More than 25% of U.S. technology companies have at least one foreign-born founder, a majority of Silicon Valley startups have a foreign-born founder, and 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by an immigrant or first-generation American.

Immigration scholar Vivek Wadha reports in his recent book, “The Immigrant Exodus,” that restrictive rules are causing a brain drain. For the first time, there is a decline in Silicon Valley in the percentage of high-growth startups founded by immigrants. “Driven to despair, skilled immigrants have soured on America,” responding to a “backward, destructive immigration policy,” Mr. Wadha writes. More than one million foreigners, including many graduates of top U.S. universities, live in legal limbo. Increasingly, they’re taking their skills back home.

The U.S. once had few global competitors for talent. Now, Australia offers 126,000 visas for skilled workers and their families, compared with 140,000 provided by the U.S.—despite Australia having less than one-tenth the population of the U.S. In Canada, doctoral candidates in the sciences apply for permanent residency while still in school. China calls its top students “sea turtles,” letting them come to the U.S. to study, then luring them back home. Unlike the U.S., many countries offer visas for people working at startups. Canada and Australia let local governments add visas as needs arise.

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg in 2010 organized a bipartisan think tank called Partnership for a New American Economy. The group publishes research with titles such as “Not Coming to America” and “Help Wanted: The Role of Foreign Workers in the Innovation Economy.”

This year Mr. Bloomberg pointed out that Detroit, which has lost more than half its population, could solve its problems by inviting more immigrants. “You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here,” he said.

Allowing skilled immigrants to stay in the U.S. would fill the hundreds of thousands of job vacancies expected in the sciences and technology. An increase in skilled immigrants would jump-start the economy. They would support the housing market by increasing demand. The best way to raise tax revenues is by adding new workers paying taxes, not by having fewer people paying more in taxes.

The U.S. has long been a haven for immigrants, giving the country a comparative advantage in attracting talented people. There is now global competition. Human capital will keep coming only so long as the U.S. has the wisdom to reopen its borders.

Richard Morosi in the LA Times

Luis Ernesto Rodriguez eyed the metal door as he waited for his little girls. Now 6 and 5 years old, they were his only children, inseparable, with thick black hair and mischievous smiles that reminded people of little mermaids.

More than two years had passed since he had last seen them. What would they be like now? Would they recognize him? He had shed 20 pounds during the long journey north.

The door opened and his girls bounded into the tiny room. They shouted and laughed the same way they did when he used to carry one in each arm on the way to day care.

But their smiles melted away when they saw the thick wall of Plexiglas between them and their father, clothed in an orange jumpsuit worn by detainees at an immigration detention center in California’s Imperial Valley. There would be no hugs, no kisses.

Touching, right? Then. after you wade through the four feet of ink in this front page article you discover:

• “In 2007, social workers had taken his daughters from Rodriguez’s dirty, near-empty apartment in South Los Angeles. Rodriguez and his wife, Blanca, were cocaine users.”
• He was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, whom the Mexican government caught twice trying to the USA sent back immediately. Note: Mexico is pretty tough on illegal immigrants.
• His daughters were eventually adopted by a family that would provide them a stable home.

The kicker about the headline reads: “Without a country.” He has a country, just not ours.

No, just against illegal immigration.

Ira Stoll:

Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, spoke about how his father had come to America from Italy at age 7 and worked as a coal miner until he was 72.

Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, spoke of how his father fled Cuba in 1957 with $100 sewn into his underwear and, after arriving in America, worked washing dishes for 50 cents an hour.

Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, spoke of her experience as the daughter of immigrants from India. Her parents started a small business out of the living room of their home.

Ann Romney, the wife of the presidential candidate, spoke of her father who came to America from Wales at age 15.

Mia Love, the Republican mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, is the daughter of parents who came here from Haiti with just $10.

Aw, it hurts their feelings.

A small group of immigrants gathered in Woodbury Monday to protest the use of the word “illegal” to describe those who have entered the United States without documentation.

“By saying illegal, they’re assuming that we broke a criminal law,” said Jackeline Saavedra, 27, of Bay Shore, a Touro Law Center student who identified herself as undocumented. “Not everybody enters illegally.”

In other news, the union of US bank robbers is demanding an end to the term bank robbery. They want their actions to be defined as “undocumented withdrawals.”

Memo to the immigrants: America attracts millions from around the globe because we are a nation of laws.

This is from the website of Local 2544, Border Control Agents. Check out the site to see how little respect they have for their higher-ups, and with good reason.

…is Asian, and that’s good for America.

Walter Russell Mead in the WSJ:

…A report released this month by the Pew Research Center shows just how much the face of immigration has changed in the past few years. Since 2008, more newcomers to the U.S. have been Asian than Hispanic (in 2010, it was 36% of the total, versus 31%). Today’s typical immigrant is not only more likely to speak English and have a college education, but also to have come to the U.S. legally, with a job already in place.

What’s responsible for the change? The reasons include a rapidly falling birthrate in Mexico, dramatic economic growth there and the collapse of the U.S. residential construction industry—a traditional market for low-skilled, non-English speaking immigrants whose documentation was often subject to question.

A great deal of mythology has grown up around American immigration. Images of Irish and Italians forced by starvation to emigrate, Jews fleeing Russian persecution—this was all real, but just part of the story. Waves of educated and professional middle-class people also arrived—men like Albert Gallatin fleeing the radicalism of the French Revolution, disappointed liberals abandoning Europe after the failure of the revolutions of 1848, and of course the generations of educated exiles from the terrible totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

America needs and benefits from both kinds of immigration. Like all waves, the Asian influx mixes the skilled and the unskilled. But overall it resembles earlier waves of educated and already urbanized immigrants more than the desperate and often unskilled rural groups from Europe and Latin America.

The Pew study found that the new Asian immigrants identify themselves, surprisingly, as 22% Protestant and 19% Catholic, but whatever their religion, most of them have in spades what Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic. Arguably, in America’s long history of immigration, the group that the new immigrants resemble most is the original cohort of Puritans who settled New England.

Like them, the Asians tend to be better-educated than most of the people in their countries of origin. Steeped in the culture of enterprise and capitalism, they’re more likely than native-born Americans to have a bachelor of arts degree. While family sponsorship is still the most important entry route for Asians (as for all immigrants), this group is three times more likely than other recent immigrants to come to the U.S. on visas arranged through employers.

In many cases, they’re not coming to the U.S. because of the economic conditions back home. After all, places like China, Korea and India have experienced jumps in prosperity and an explosion in opportunity for the skilled and the hardworking. But most of the new immigrants like it here and want to stay (only 12% wish they had stayed home).

More Asian-Americans (69%) than other Americans (58%) believe that you will get ahead with hard work. Also, 93% say that their ethnic group is “hardworking.”

There also seems to be some truth in the “Tiger Mom” syndrome described by author Amy Chua. While 39% of Asian-Americans say their group puts “too much” pressure on kids to succeed in school, 60% of Asian-Americans think that other Americans don’t push their kids hard enough.

Other family values are strong as well, according to Pew. Only 16% of Asian-American babies are born out of wedlock, in contrast to 41% for the general population. In the U.S., 63% of all children grow up in a household with two parents; the figure for Asian-Americans is 80%. Some 66% of Asian-Americans believe parents should have some input into what careers their children select and 61% think that parents have something useful to say about their children’s choice of a spouse. The hard work and strong family values appear to pay off: Asian-Americans’ median household income is $66,000 (national median: $49,800) and their median household wealth is $83,500 (national median: $68,529)…

Mickey Kaus:

Katrina Trinko:

It seems likely that we’ll be hearing, from either President Obama himself or from his surrogates, in the days ahead that the decision to grant legal status to young adults currently illegally in the country, wasn’t about politics, but about doing the right thing. But interestingly, as recently as April, the White House was actively working against Senator Marco Rubio’s proposed DREAM Act. From Salon:

The Obama White House hates the idea. Last week, presidential advisors Celia Munoz and Valerie Jarrett tried to discourage the dreamers from embracing Rubio’s proposal, saying it put at risk the original DREAM Act, which laid out a specific path to citizenship. According to the Washington Post, they had a meeting with DREAM Act-eligible students in Washington, arguing that “Rubio had not demonstrated he could win support from fellow Republicans and that the president would use his clout to push an immigration plan next year. ”

[DREAM activist Gabby] Pacheco, who attended the meeting, was not impressed with the White House appeal.

“You can’t wait until next year if you’re getting deported this year,” she said. She described the White House officials as “very strategic” in their opposition to Rubio.

So when there was a potentially viable path to giving these young adults legal status — a path that, admittedly, was so retro it involved letting Congress vote on the matter — the White House did what they could to shut down the potential legislation’s path to success.

Also, it looks like Obama himself thought last year that he couldn’t give young adults illegally here legal status last year, although I don’t have the full context of the question he was asked. From an account of the President’s response from United We Dream:

When Ramos asked a follow-up question about granting formal administrative relief to undocumented youth, Obama was even more forceful: “There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.”

Pacheco also said that when DREAMers asked the White House could halt the deportations without Congress’ approval, the White House said that wasn’t in the cards. “The thing that surprised us was they said no,” Pacheco told Salon. “They said, practically, ‘We don’t have the power to do this.’”

Bryan Preston says Obama was asking for an argument by unilaterally imposing a new immigration policy.

…The president announced a major policy change that impacts not just the 800,000 illegal aliens who benefit, it impacts the entire country. By circumventing Congress, it impacts our rule of law. By announcing it in a way that suggests its political origins, it impacts the presidential race.

If the president expected no arguments, then he is deluded. If he will brook no arguments, then he is unfit for the office. He is not a king, and we are not his subjects. We have a duty to push back if we believe that his actions are wrong or illegal, both of which may apply to today’s seismic policy shift.

But the fact is, President Obama damn well knew that he was provoking an argument, and he expects that argument to get heated in ways that will help him keep his job. He also expects to win it.

He will not.

Senator David Vitter of Lousiana

The federal government is handing out $4.2 billion a year to illegal aliens.

This isn’t some service benefit that illegal aliens are receiving, like taxpayer-subsidized health care or education. And it’s not a tax deduction or a non-refundable tax credit, which would require recipients to actually pay taxes in order to receive the benefit. It’s a refundable tax credit, a taxpayer-funded check from the federal government. And the government requires no proof that the recipient is actually eligible under the law, which illegals are not.

Abuse of this tax benefit is one of the most ridiculous examples of fraud adding to our federal deficit today. Equally harmful, it is acting as a powerful incentive for more illegal aliens to come to America.

While illegal aliens don’t qualify for legitimate Social Security numbers, the IRS allows them to apply for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs). The overwhelming majority of returns with ITINs are filed by illegals. This is how they fraudulently apply for and receive these checks.

This tax credit was designed to help working families offset the costs of raising children. But illegal aliens — who don’t possess valid Social Security numbers because they are not authorized to work in this country — are able to receive these tax credits by simply providing an ITIN and claiming to have children. So, American taxpayers are writing checks to illegal aliens — $1,000 per child, $4.2 billion per year total.An investigative reporter in Indianapolis recently uncovered cases in which illegal aliens were claiming the child tax credit for nieces and nephews who did not even live in the United States. Some received more than $10,000 from the federal government.

One admitted that his address was used by four other illegal aliens who don’t even live there. They claimed 20 children were living in one mobile home and received returns, including the additional child tax credit, totaling $29,608. But only one child actually lives at the residence; the other 19 live in Mexico and have never even visited the United States.

The Obama administration’s own Department of Treasury, through its inspector general for tax administration, has repeatedly warned about these abuses and said that “millions of people are seeking this tax credit who, we believe, are not entitled to it.”

Vitter is introducing a bill to end the abuse.

As we noted earlier, the amount of money lost to this fraud is amount the money Obama would raise with his “Buffet rule.”

How your tax dollars are being sent to Mexico. The money lost is about what the Buffet rule would raise.

The actual Republican Establishment –- political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits — are exhorting Mitt Romney to flip-flop on his very non-Establishment position on illegal immigration.

Both as governor of Massachusetts and as a presidential candidate, Romney has supported a fence on the border, E-Verify to ensure that employees are legal and allowing state police to arrest illegal aliens. He is the rare Republican who recognizes that in-state tuition, driver’s licenses and amnesty are magnets for more illegal immigration.

These positions are totally at odds with Establishment Republicans who pander to the business lobby by supporting the cheap labor provided by illegal immigration, and then accuse Americans opposed to a slave labor class in America of racism. If this continues, America will become California and no Republican will ever be elected president again. Big business doesn’t care and Establishment Republicans are too stupid to notice.

If you’re not sure how you feel about illegal immigration, ask yourself this: “Do I have a nanny, a maid, a pool boy, a chauffeur, a cook or a business requiring lots of cheap labor that the rest of America will have to subsidize with social services to make up for the wages I’m paying?” Press “1″ to answer in English.

If the answer is “no,” illegal immigration is a bad deal for you. Cheap labor is cheap only for the employer.

Today, 70 percent of illegal immigrant households collect government benefits — as do 57 percent of all immigrant households — compared to 39 percent of native households.

Immigrant households with the highest rate of government assistance are from the (more…)

As a photographer I know how easy it is to make someone look bad. Even gorgeous people take bad pictures. So when I see an unflattering shot chosen in a newspaper I can spot bias.

This from the LA Times. Trust me, they had dozens of choices besides this one.

Ugly as they wanted to make Arizona Governor Jan Brewer look, they could not conceal the ugliness of Obama’s argument before the Supreme Court.

Even the liberal justices weren’t buying it.

“I’m sorry.… I’m terribly confused by your answer,” Sotomayor said at one point. “Your argument — that this systematic cooperation is wrong — is not selling very well. Why don’t you try to come up with something else?”

JusticeStephen G. Breyeralso said he did not see a problem if “all that happens is a policeman makes a phone call.… I’m not clear what your answer is to that,” he told Verrilli.

When Verrilli said the law could lead to “mass incarceration,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy snapped, “So you’re saying the government has a legitimate interest in not enforcing its laws?”

When the solicitor general said the “aggressive enforcement” of immigration laws could offend Mexico, Justice Antonin Scalia objected. “Look, free them from the jails and send them back to the countries that are objecting. What’s the problem with that?”

Verrilli replied that U.S. officials needed to work cooperatively with Mexico.

“So we have to enforce our laws in a manner that will please Mexico? Is that what you are saying?” Scalia asked.

You may recall that our esteemed attorney general, Eric Holder spoke out against the Arizona law before having read it.

Sir Paul McCartney wasn’t always the gentle liberal. Unreleased versions of the song Get Back had a decidedly anti-immigrant point of view.

“Who what that black man? Don’t dig no Pakistanis, taking all the peoples jobs.”

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

Ronan Relimun, was a Puatarican, working in another world.
Want it thrown around, Se patiha mohican, livin’ in the USA.

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

Pretty Ado Lamb, was a pakistani, living in another world,
Want it thrown around, don’t dig no pakistanis, taking all the people jobs.

Etc.

Listen to an audio version at the link.

Southern California has hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, people who crossed the border and made a life for themselves. Rarely do you hear of deportations.

So how about a couple from Japan, who immigrated legally, set up three restaurants (one of which I quite like) and under reported their business income 20 years ago?

Deported. It’s all legal, but one must ask, why them?

Akio and Fukado Kawashima came to Southern California in 1984 as lawful Japanese immigrants determined to succeed in business. They operated popular sushi restaurants in Thousand Oaks and Tarzana and recently opened a new eatery in Encino.

But after they underreported their business income in 1991, they paid a hefty price. The Internal Revenue Service hit them with $245,000 in taxes and penalties. The couple pleaded guilty and paid in full. A decade later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided to deport them.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the final blow, ruling 6 to 3 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement — as the INS is now known — was within its authority to declare such a tax crime an “aggravated felony,” subjecting an immigrant to automatic deportation. Once limited to murderers and drug kingpins, this deportation trigger has steadily expanded over the years.

“It’s really sad — and really unfair,” Wakako Kawashima, the couple’s daughter-in-law, said at the door of her home in Thousand Oaks.

The restaurants have been the couple’s life work, she said, and the family is crushed that a mistake two decades ago could result in their deportation.

Tax lawyers said the ruling in the case of Kawashima vs. Holder sends an ominous warning to legal immigrants throughout the country, and especially to small-business owners whose tax liabilities may be large enough to attract IRS attention.

Under the court’s holding, an immigrant who makes a false statement on a tax return could face not only tax charges but also automatic deportation.

The Kawashimas never became U.S. citizens but were granted lawful permanent residency in the 1980s. They pleaded guilty in 1997 to filing a false corporate tax return, and the husband was given a four-month prison sentence…

Heather MacDonald

The U.S. is not spending enough on helping immigrants to assimilate, argues a USC professor in the New York Times. We should redirect “the billions of dollars spent on border enforcement” to the education budget, both to federal student loans and to community and four-year state colleges, says public-policy professor Dowell Myers.

The notion that taxpaying citizens are not already shelling out plenty for educating immigrants and their children is fanciful. Let’s look at community-college outlays, where the majority of second- and third-generation (overwhelmingly Hispanic) immigrant college students are found. Federal, state, and local governments spent nearly $4 billion from 2004 to 2008 on community-college students who dropped out after their first year; add in part-time students and capital expenditures, and the number would be much higher, reports the American Institutes of Research. Hispanic students are overrepresented among those community-college dropouts. Would more spending make a difference in the dropout rate? Unlikely.

So perhaps we are simply not spending enough on K-12 education.  California, where over 50 percent of the student body is now Hispanic, is a bellwether.  No other item in its budget comes close to K-12 education–$64 billion—much of that devoted to trying to close the achievement gap between Hispanic students and whites and Asians. So far progress has been slim, as I discuss in the forthcoming Winter issue of City Journal. Only Mississippi had as large a percentage of its 8th-grade students reading “below basic” on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); in 8th-grade math, California came in third after Alabama and Mississippi in the percentage of students scoring “below basic.” Myers projects that by 2030, 18 percent of second-generation Hispanic students will have a college degree. He apparently means that as good news; in fact it is a sign of how slowly progress between the generations is occurring, since the Hispanic graduation rate in California was 10 percent in 2006.

Myers wants to declare the problem of illegal immigration over, based on the claim that population flows from Mexico have become stagnant and will remain so. That remains to be seen. But it is not the case that Americans have been stingy in providing public resources to immigrants and their children.

Thomas Sowell:

…The more doctrinaire libertarians see the benefits of free international trade in goods, and extend the same reasoning to free international movement of people. But goods do not bring a culture with them. Nor do they give birth to other goods to perpetuate that culture.

Why do people want to come to America in the first place? Because America offers them something that their native countries do not. This country has a culture that has produced a higher standard of living and a freer life than in many other countries.

When you import people, you import cultures, including cultures that have been far less successful in providing decent lives and decent livelihoods. The American people have a right to decide for themselves whether they want unlimited imports of cultures from other countries.

At one time, immigrants came to America to become Americans. Today, the apostles of multiculturalism and grievance-mongering have done their best to keep foreigners foreign and, if possible, feeling aggrieved. Our own schools and colleges teach grievances.

European countries have learned the hard way how massive imports of a foreign culture can undermine your own culture, polarize your population, and create internal dangers that are irreversible. Victor Davis Hanson’s chilling and insightful book, Mexifornia, shows similar patterns in California.Moreover, in an age of terrorism, not everyone who comes across the border from Mexico is Mexican. It is the height of irresponsibility to leave that border open and the people who cross it a protected group. Punishing employers who hire illegals is punishing an accessory to an illegal act more harshly than the one who committed the illegal act in the first place…

Five illegal immigrants armed with at least two AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole known as Mesquite Seep just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and one U.S. agent was killed, records show.

A now-sealed federal grand jury indictment in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry says the Mexican nationals were “patrolling” the rugged desert area of Peck Canyon at about 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 14 with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.

At least two of the Mexicans carried their assault rifles “at the ready position,” one of several details about the attack showing that Mexican smugglers are becoming more aggressive on the U.S. side of the border

Modern living.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to sweeping revisions in the way it teaches students learning English, as well as black youngsters, settling a federal civil rights investigation that examined whether the district was denying the students a quality education.

…The Education Department launched the probe last year, at first to determine if students who entered school speaking limited English, most of whom are Latino, were receiving adequate instruction. The nation’s second-largest school system has more students learning English, about 195,000, than any other in the United States — about 29% of the district’s overall enrollment.

Let’s break this down:

• The federal government has a constitutional duty to protect our sovereign borders, but does not.
• Millions of Spanish speaking people walk across the border and burden our schools with kids who can’t speak the language.
• The federal government, who really has no business nosing around local schools, butts in with demands.

“60 Minutes” ran a story last night about NYC’s impressive anti-terror apparatus.

You can watch a preview of the segment here.

It’s high tech, expansive and expensive. It involves overseas agents, security cameras that monitor the streets, regular demonstrations of police force and much more.

Commissioner Ray Kelly tells CBS’ “60 Minutes” that after the Sept. 11 attacks, he decided the city couldn’t rely on the federal government alone. He set about creating the NYPD’s own counter-terrorism unit. He says the department is prepared for multiple scenarios and could even take down a plane.

Kelly didn’t divulge details but said “obviously this would be in a very extreme situation.”

Other measures include sending NYPD officers abroad, using radiation detectors and creating a network of surveillance cameras in Manhattan.

But as I watched I couldn’t help wonder:

• Who paid for all this?
• Where were the civil liberties/privacy rights activists in the story?
• Why is NYC allowed to do this when Arizona gets repudiated, and sued by the Feds, for trying to protect itself when it determines that it can’tt rely on the federal government

Sometimes, for some people, even the obvious isn’t obvious.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D.-Fla.), chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, denounced Republicans last week for believing illegal immigration “should in fact be a crime.”

How radical. This recalls Congressman Sonny Bono’s  response when asked to talk about illegal immigration.

“Whats to talk about? Its illegal.”

Naturally, Bono was dismissed as a buffoon by the elites.

Yesterday Obama’s  smirking “maybe we should build a moat with alligators in it” spiel to Hispanic voters in El Paso made me want to smack him with a 2×4.

The man really is shameless.

At the Corner, Peter Kirsanow has some shovel-ready questions for the prez.

In 2006, Congress passed legislation to construct a 700-mile fence along the southern border. Construction of the fence began, but according to several sources, including Sen. Jim DeMint, of the 36 miles built to date, only 4.3 were built since you took office.

In 2009, you sold  the $800 billion stimulus bill, in part, on the promise that the funds would be directed toward “shovel-ready projects” that would create jobs. But a few months ago, you conceded that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” in public works. Given that the border fence is an authorized public-works project already under construction, isn’t it, in fact, a “shovel-ready project” that could have benefited from stimulus funds? Were any of the stimulus funds (in addition to any funds already appropriated) dedicated to expediting the construction of the fence? If not, is it because Republicans insisted that a portion of the funds be used for the creation of a moat with alligators?

Wednesday’s bonus questions: Yesterday you called for comprehensive immigration reform but suggested that Republicans are an impediment thereto. Is that the reason why you failed to seriously pursue comprehensive immigration reform in the two years Democrats held sizable majorities in both houses? Or is it possible that some Democrats also insist on a moat with alligators?

Mark Steyn:

At the New York Conservative Party conference in Albany the other week, I was asked about the party’s role in state politics. I replied that in a multiparty system it’s very important to have some sort of force to the right of the right-of-center party – to arrest the tendency of the “mainstream” right to drift across the spectrum and wind up taking the rest of us to the same destination as the lefties want to go but at a slightly slower speed.

A useful illustration of that role can be seen in Europe’s current debate. Asked on TV about David Cameron’s recent attack on “multiculturalism”, I said flippantly that it was heartening to hear the Prime Minister sounding like a six-year-old Steyn column. Of course, he didn’t go quite that far. But, because I and Melanie Phillips and Henryk Broder and Thilo Sarrazin and Geert Wilders and a relatively small number of “extremists” did go so far, it’s become possible for a lot of folks in the mushy middle to meet us halfway. Hence, the bizarre new phenomenon of European heads of governments stampeding to denounce multiculturalism: If it’s Tuesday, it must be Angela Merkel. That multiculturalism is a failure is the new conventional wisdom, the centrist position.

This in itself is certainly remarkable. One of the oddest moments in my long battle with Canada’s “human rights” shakedown racket came after my TV encounter with the Canadian Islamic Congress’ three sock puppets. After the show, I mentioned to Naseem, the least disagreeable of the socks, that I’d heard her say on NPR that it was improper for me to attack “multiculturalism” because multiculturalism was officially embedded in Canada’s constitution. And I said: So what? A free society shouldn’t have an official ideology, but, if it has, I certainly reserve the right to object to it – as I would have objected to Italy’s official ideology if I’d chanced to live under it 80 years ago. And Naseem looked at me as if I was nuts, and explained, somewhat pityingly, that I didn’t understand that being Canadian means supporting multiculturalism.

Millions and millions of Canadians and Britons and Australians and Germans and French and Dutch and Swiss take the same position: A concept that barely existed two generations back is now regarded as a defining attribute – the defining attribute – of some of the oldest nation states on the planet. What can’t be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism? British public buildings should cease to fly the national flag because it no longer “reflects our multicultural society”. Canada should ditch the monarchy because it no longer “reflects our multicultural society”. Belgian cops should eschew doughnut consumption during Ramadan because their dietary practices no longer “reflect our multicultural society”. You’d almost think this “multicultural society” was some sort of organic societal evolution, as opposed to a racket consciously imposed on the nation by its ruling elite. Initially, mass immigration was justified on economic grounds – we need immigrants to come to the west and work in the mills. But the mills closed anyway, and now there are mosques and madrassahs, and gender-segregated swimming sessions at municipal pools and Islam-compliant nurses’ uniforms in state hospitals, and reoriented non-Mecca-facing toilets in prison. “Multiculturalism” was invented as a cover for the failure of the economic rationale: okay, mass immigration won’t make us richer, but it does make us better…

Chris Salcedo at The Americano.

Despite the concerted effort to paint all Republicans as anti-brown, I think it’s fair to say, if one were being honest, that most Americans agree with the premise of the Dream Act. What American, regardless of skin color, believes in holding children responsible for the sins of their parents? But the leftists in America, along with their willing accomplices in the main stream press, have managed to focus the entire country on the wrong problem.

Think about it. The whole reason the Dream Act is necessary is because over the last four or so decades American politicians have not earned their tax-payer funded salaries when it comes to border enforcement. Now, our nation is starting to deal with the sticky and often heart-wrenching consequences of their dereliction of duty. Does anyone believe for one moment that a nation of laws can ignore those laws for so long without consequence? So we’re now seeing the problems that we conservatives warned would come as a result. And here come the liberals with “Band-Aid” laws to treat the symptoms, all the while ignoring the disease.

The Dream Act is one such law. Aside from being a flawed bill, it does nothing to address the reason why the act was needed in the first place. Americans are naturally suspect, not of the Hispanics affected by the law, but by the fact that more Dream Acts will be necessary because the root cause, illegal immigration has not been dealt with. Patriotic Hispanics, because liberal Hispanics couldn’t care less about the rule of law, missed an opportunity in this Dream Act debate. Latino Patriots could have put the focus where it belonged, on illegal immigration. And they were uniquely qualified to turn up the heat on law makers and make them earn a living for a change by passing strong reform. Instead many were duped by the MSM and the liberals into debating the Dream Act, an act that, at the end of the day, solves nothing…

Judith Miller in City Journal.

The site of the Altamont Speedway, where four died and scores were injured in an infamous 1969 rock concert, isn’t far from Fremont, the largest city in Alameda County, California. But the area has changed dramatically in 40 years. The raceway itself is long gone; so are the hippies, most of the farms, and the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll culture. In their place, the first thing that a tourist might notice is that Fremont—along with other cities in this county just south of San Francisco Bay—now hosts enormous Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, and Chinese populations, as well as smaller clusters of a dozen other nationalities. In fact, this city of 217,000 is among the nation’s most ethnically and culturally diverse. Some 136 languages are spoken at home by children who attend Fremont schools, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and white, native-born Americans constitute only 38 percent of the city’s residents.

One of Fremont’s most surprising and least accessible ethnic enclaves is its Afghan population, probably the largest in the Western world. To outsiders, the Afghans of Fremont seem to be a tight-knit community, faring relatively well in a new and very different place. But those who know them well see a more troubling picture. Though some Bay Area Afghans are enormously successful and have integrated fully into American life, many are not assimilating. Far too many exist in a state of suspended animation between Afghanistan and America—anxious, uprooted, belonging totally to neither culture, intensely competitive with one another but even more suspicious of outsiders. Among those concerned: local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which have quietly intensified their scrutiny of the area’s Afghan community, worried about possible ties with Islamic terrorism.

For people whose native country routinely makes front-page news, the Afghans of Fremont exist in relative obscurity. With a handful of exceptions, they hold no prominent posts in American political and cultural institutions and have no influential groups to lobby Washington or even city hall. There are no Afghan state senators, members of Congress, mayors, or even school board members. Many of the community’s “spokesmen” speak mainly among themselves; the organizations that they represent have few members and are little more than good intentions on a business card. “In many ways, the community is still politically invisible,” says Abdul Naseer Yasiri, a recent immigrant who heads the Afghan Cultural Association.

As a community, these Afghans are also enormously understudied, except by law enforcement. After 9/11, journalists descended on Fremont, writing stories about “Little Kabul”—a short strip along Fremont Boulevard, really little more than a grocery store, jewelry shop, bookstore, and a couple of clothing shops that sold such items as long-sleeved tunics and head scarves for women and native hats called pakol for men. In 2003, Fremont got another jolt of publicity when the young Afghan author Khaled Hosseini set part of his best-selling novel, The Kite Runner, in the Fremont area…

Don Surber:

From Sara Jerome of the Hill:

The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.

ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.

What the devil are these idiots doing?

This administration refuses to shut down illegal aliens (something the Bush administration also refused to do) but the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement can go after Legal Americans to protect Hollywood and the recording industry from a few people who pass around their music.

I suppose next the Department of Defense will send drones after people who record music off the radio.

This is a case for the music industry’s lawyers — not the $35 billion-a-year Department of Homeland Security.

But then again, look at all the millions the entertainment industry gave Barack Obama.

In a story about the California Supreme Court deciding that illegal immigrants can take advantage of in-state college tuition rates, there was this:

The court observed that the state law also benefits U.S. citizens who reside in other states but attend and graduate from high school in California.

How can you reside in another state and attend high school in California, aside from a few border towns in Nevada or Arizona?

“It cannot be the case that states may never give a benefit to unlawful aliens without giving the same benefit to all American citizens,” Chin wrote.

Sure, no matter how theoretically impossible it is for American citizens to qualify.

The “waging war” bit seems a bit overheated.

Still, the clowns on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals– the most leftwing and most overturned court in the nation — must be nuts to rule that a foreign nation has legal standing in our internal affairs.

Do they believe Mexico or any of the others has a right to send their citizens to our nation? Probably. Who put those idiots on the court? Democrats.

HT: Susan Gertson