Immigration warnings: ignored then, ignored now
The Friday Letter / No. 479 / Feb. 11, 2022Will Rogers once explained his investment strategy: Buy a stock when its price is low, sell when the price goes up. If it doesn't go up, don't buy it.
(If you really want to know how valuable your investment advice is, go back and see what the experts wrote six months or two years ago. But that's a story for another day.)
Would that we could go back a half century and apply the Rogers model to the warnings of what illegal immigration would do to this country if allowed to continue. The warnings were clear, accurate, and ignored.
The modern era of immigration breakdown began in 1965 with passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, a Great Society program that ended national quotas from the countries whose opportunity-seekers built our society, replacing them with unskilled immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries.
As Mark Levin explains in Liberty and Tyranny (Simon & Schuster, 2006), the new policy affecting legal immigration is where the long decline in American sovereignty and the decay of our culture began: Jewish tailors and seamstresses, German shopkeepers, and Italian stonemasons replaced with people who just wanted to feed from our welfare trough. And it's when chain migration began – the endless cycle of immigrants allowed to bring in relatives without regard to their expected contributions to our society. The entire purpose of immigration was turned upside down.
Things got worse in 1986 when President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, (Simpson-Mizzoli), an act which neither reformed nor controlled illegal immigration. The promise was that three million illegal aliens, most of them from Mexico, would get amnesty in exchange for no more illegal immigration. We have seen how that worked out.
Two decades passed before Levin laid out the details of how immigration continues to destroy the nation's sovereignty. Sixteen years later, things have only gotten worse.
William Miller, Goldwater's 1964 running mate whom the Media Democrats dismissed as an extremist and a joke along with Goldwater himself, warned of the danger posed by Hart-Cellar: “We estimate that if the President (Johnson) gets his way, and the current immigration laws are repealed, the number of immigrants next year will increase threefold and in subsequent years will increase even more.”
Levin explains that “The bill abolished the decades-old policy of national quotas, which was said to be discriminatory because it favored immigrants from Europe (especially the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany) over the Third World” – you know, countries whose people built this country into the greatest land of opportunity known to man.
How would Miller react to learning that in November 2021 our foreign-born population hit 46.2 million? Or to this from the Center for Immigration Studies: “In 2021, the United States experienced the highest number of arrests in history by the Border Patrol at the Mexican border, a dramatic decline in deportations (including the deportation of convicted criminals), and the granting of work permits and Social Security numbers to an estimated one million illegal immigrants.”
Levin quotes the late author Theodore White (no conservative, Levin notes), who wrote that “the immigration Act of 1965 changed all previous patterns, and in so doing, probably changed the future of America . . . (It) was noble, revolutionary – and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society.”
Twenty-four Republican Senators voted Yea on the bill; 15 Democrats voted Nay. Here is how Sen. Sam Ervin, Democrat of South Carolina, sized it up:
“The people of Ethiopia have the same right to come to the United States under this bill as the people from England, the people of France, the people of Germany, [and] the people of Holland,” griped Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina. “With all due respect to Ethiopia, I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America.”
This quote is from a story at Politico, which tried to paint opposition as “a race problem,” but only for Republicans.
Short takes on the news
The watchdog group Open the Books reports that the Biden Administration awarded $200.5 million to a Soros-funded organization to provide legal services for illegal immigrants. Last year Health and Human Services handed out $158 million to Vera Institute of Justice for legal services to unaccompanied illegal minors. Just the News describes Vera as “a left-wing advocacy organization that backs defunding the police, criminal justice and bail reform, and releasing illegal aliens from ICE detention” . . .
It's just the cost of doing business. In his new book, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, Peter Schweizer says the Biden family “received some $31 million from Chinese businessmen with very close ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence during and after Joe Biden's tenure as vice president.” Schweizer says Hunter Biden was the U.S. representative of Yi Jianming, then chairman of CEFC China Energy Co., “an intelligence- and military-linked Chinese company that was supporting voices calling for an aggressive military posture against the United States and its allies” . . .
The founder of Black Lives Matter's Memphis chapter gets six months in prison for trying to register to vote even though a prior felony conviction makes her ineligible. In 2015 Pamela Moses pled guilty to felony charges of tampering with evidence and forgery, and to misdemeanor charges of perjury, stalking, theft, and escape, the New York Post reports. Meanwhile, a man called Mohamed Hussein Abdi received five years of probation for trying to burn down a high school during the Black Lives Matter-George Floyd riots of 2020. . .
She needs help – in learning how to wager. An 80-year-old nun won a year in the federal hoosegow for stealing $835,000 from the Catholic elementary school in Torrance, Cal., where she was principal. In pleading guilty to money laundering and wire fraud, Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper said she needed the money to pay her gambling debt. – from stories at KTLA-TV and The Blaze.. .
Developing: The inspector general of the U.S. Capitol Police opens an investigation of allegations that the police have been spying on Members of Congress. In one instance, an officer entered the unlocked door of Rep. Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas, and took photos of “suspicious writings mentioning body armor” on his whiteboard. “The following Monday, USCP dispatched three plain-clothes intelligence officers to Nehls' office and questioned a staffer who was there about the whiteboard and the legislative proposals it contained,” Sean Davis reports at The Federalist. . .
Revenge is sweet, but let us not be cruel. A 19-year old figure skater who renounced her American citizenship in order to compete for Communist China in what social media snarks have dubbed “the Genocide Olympics” may want to watch her back now that she came in last after falling during her performance. Has anybody seen Zhu Yi lately? She has been mercilessly heckled on heavily-censored Chinese social media. --from a story at Breitbart.
Where they stand
Senate Republicans who oppose the Republican National Committee for its censure of Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger: Senate Minority Leader McConnell and Romney, Thune, Cornyn, Rick Scott, Graham.
Meanwhile, Just the News reports that Liz Cheney's husband's law firm was working on behalf of companies “linked to China's military, intelligence, and security services” at the same time she warned that China poses a “generational threat” with its “malign behavior.” The story did note that husband Philip Perry did not personally work on these projects but is a partner in Latham & Watkins and benefits from all its work. The story also noted that the work is legal.
Quotes for today
“The Democratic Party is not the party of JFK. It is an entirely different party run by people, credentialed by leftist professors, continuously re-elected from gerrymanderedt districts and insulated from the risk their job will be shipped to Mexico.”
– Former prosecutor Robert Snider, writing at Boston Broadside
“We must make the streets safer. I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don't care why someone is anti-social. I don't care why they've become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society . . .”
– Excerpt of a Senate floor speech by Joe Biden, from an undated YouTube video that surfaced shortly after he announced $30 million in grants to supply crack pipes to drug addicts in “underserved communities to advance racial equity.”