Posted on 05/01/2010 8:41:59 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
As I write, I have my papers on me – and not just because I’m in Arizona. I’m an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.
Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law?
Er, well, that would be Franklin Roosevelt.
But don’t let the fine print of the New Deal prevent you from going into full-scale meltdown. “Boycott Arizona-stan!” urges MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, surely a trifle Islamophobically: What has some blameless Central Asian basket case done to deserve being compared with a hellhole like Phoenix?
Boycott Arizona Iced Tea, jests Travis Nichols of Chicago. It is “the drink of fascists.” Just as regular tea is the drink of racists, according to Newsweek’s in-depth and apparently non-satirical poll analysis of anti-Obama protests. At San Francisco’s City Hall, where bottled water is banned as the drink of climate denialists, Mayor Gavin Newsom is boycotting for real: All official visits to Arizona have been canceled indefinitely. You couldn’t get sanctions like these imposed at the UN Security Council, but then, unlike Arizona, Iran is not a universally reviled pariah.
Will a full-scale economic embargo devastate the Copper State? Who knows? It’s not clear to me what San Francisco imports from Arizona. Chaps? But, at any rate, like the bottled water ban, it sends a strong signal that this kind of hate will not be tolerated.
The same day that Mayor Newsom took his bold stand, I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop – black body armor, helmets and visors – as they marched down the street. Goosestepping? No, it’s actually quite hard to goosestep in those steel-reinforced kneepads. So just regular marching. Naturally I assumed they were Arizona State Troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Illinois facing down a group of genial Tea Party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts. They were acting at the behest of President Obama’s Secret Service, who rightly recognized a polite knot of citizens singing “God Bless America” as a clear and present danger to the republic.
If I were a member of the Quincy PD I’d wear a full-face visor, too, because I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror. It’s a tough job making yourself a paramilitary laughingstock.
And yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp stormtroopers from either a dinner-theatre space-opera or uniforms night at Mayor Newsom’s re-election campaign.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the flailing Prime Minister Gordon Brown was on the stump in northern England and met an actual voter, one Gillian Duffy. Alas, she made the mistake of expressing very mild misgivings about immigration. And not the black, brown and yellow kind, but only the faintly swarthy Balkan blokes from Eastern Europe. And actually all she said about immigrants was that “you can’t say anything about the immigrants”. The Prime Minister brushed it aside blandly, made some chit-chat about her grandkids, and got back in his limo, forgetting that he was still miked. “That was a disaster,” he sighed. “Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that..? She’s just this sort of bigoted woman.”
After the broadcast of his “gaffe”, and the sight of Brown slumped with his head in his hands as a radio interviewer replayed the remarks to him, the Prime Minister found himself going round to Gillian Duffy’s home to abase himself before her. Most of the initial commentary focused on what the incident revealed about Gordon Brown’s character. But the larger point is what it says about the governing elites and their own voters. Mrs Duffy is a lifelong supporter of Mr Brown’s Labour Party, but she represents the old working class the party no longer has much time for. Travis Nichols may be joking about “the drink of fascists”, but, in the same way as Gavin Newsom and Keith Olbermann, Gordon Brown genuinely believes Gillian Duffy has drunk deeply from the drink of bigots for so much as raising the subject of immigration. How dare she! Ungrateful bigot!
Gillian Duffy lives in the world Gordon Brown has created. He, on the other hand, gets into his chauffeured limo and is whisked far away from it.
That’s Arizona. To the coastal commentariat, “undocumented immigrants” are the people who mow your lawn while you’re at work and clean your office while you’re at home. (That, for the benefit of Linda Greenhouse, is the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent “undocumented” servant class by far too many “documented” Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states illegal immigration is life and death. I spoke to a lady this week who has a camp of illegals on the edge of her land: She lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the new law as an offense against “fairness”. Where’s the fairness for this woman’s family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she’s just supposed to get used to living under siege? Like Gillian Duffy in northern England, this lady has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away.
Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. Europeans were told that they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: In reality, Turks in Germany have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is 50. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.
But wait: what about the broader economic benefits? The World Bank calculated that if rich countries increased their workforce by a mere three per cent through admitting an extra 14 million people from developing countries, it would benefit the populations of those rich countries by $139 billion. Wow!
As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections On The Revolution In Europe, “The aggregate gross domestic product of the advanced economies for the year 2008 is estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion.” So an extra $139 billion works out to a spectacular 0.0035 per cent. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Austin Powers’ nemesis Dr Evil holding the world hostage for [ITAL>]one million dollars[The majority of Arizona’s schoolchildren are already Hispanic. So, even if you sealed the border today, the state’s future is as an Hispanic society: That’s a given. Maybe it’ll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys in the limos bemoaning the bigots knew what was best for them.
BTTT
It's about time we add "citizen" to the license data base.
> As I write, I have my papers on me – and not just because I’m in Arizona. I’m an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.
From your account, I see that you are NOT a citizen, just a permanent (legal) resident. When will you be applying for citizenship? Of course you have to carry proof and papers. You don’t have the right to be here and not carry them.
Immigration laws are there for a purpose.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2504563/posts
"The one thing we could do for a country like Mexico, for example, is to stop every illegal immigrant at the border, give him a good rifle and a case of ammunition, and send him back home. Let the Mexicans solve their customary problems in their customary manner".
"If this seems a cruel and sneering suggestion, consider the current working alternative: leaving our borders open to unlimited immigration until -- and it won't take long -- the social, political, economic life of the United States is reduced to the level of life in Juarez. Guadalajara. Mexico City. San Salvador. Haiti. India. To a common peneplain* of overcrowding, squalor, misery, oppression, torture, and hate".
*Steyn bump*
Allow me to take this discussion in another direction. Mr Steyn talks about illegals “mowing lawns” and “cleaning Houses”. These are supposedly the “jobs Americans won’t do.” I say that’s letting the pro amnesty chorus dictate the terms of the argument.
I’m 50 and when I went to college, almost ALL of my friends put themselves through college working construction, waiting or bussing tables, washing dishes, barbacking, mowing lawns, pumping gas, whatever it took to pay most of the bill.
My own son is 17 and is looking at colleges. The costs have gone way up and there are simply NO jobs he can get to even make a dent in what he will need to attend college. So, what happens? Like most college age teens, he will take on a debt, likely a big one.
So what have we done? By allowing illgals to come in and work these jobs, we have taken away the ability for born and bred Amercian citizens to possibly pay their way through college and to start their professional lives already behind the 8 ball with debts they’ll be forced to pay for perhaps a dozen years?
WHY DOES NO ONE TALK ABOUT THIS!
PS: Where are the so called leaders in the African American community and why do they side with the illegals. Unemployment among African American teens is at 50 percent. I work in an urban all boys Catholic High School, and my students can’t get jobs as they are in the same position as my son. They are bumped out of the jobs they are qualified for by illegals!
Take a look at this,
The FBI Wanted for Murder page.
Is this list of 100 bad guys 98% Hispanic or only 95% ???
Hmmmmmmmm, Arny, Obama, Pelosi, and all the others ...
Want any of these living near you? Oh, I forgot:
It’s US THAT THEY LIVE NEAR !!!
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/vc/murders/vc_murders.htm
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/vc/murders/vc_murders.htm
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/vc/murders/vc_murders.htm
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/vc/murders/vc_murders.htm
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/vc/murders/vc_murders.htm
Kinda says it all ...
Roosevelt approved of the profiling of Japanese citizens too, after Pearl Harbor.
The guy writing the article was pointing out that Arizona didn't make a law that was any different than law already on the books,he wasn't criticizing he was pointing out the hypocrisy of left wing moonbats. Read the whole article and maybe take a reading comprehension class also, it may help you to not ridicule those people who are on out side.
I believe at one time we closed the door completely to the Chinese because they were just sending the money home..
Plenty of Germans were profiled during WWII....Rochester, NY. I think local newspapers were also ordered to be EWnglish only.
Ping!
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