How's This for Greed?

5 million (!) illegal aliens have mortgages in the U.S.

A significant proportion of the bad mortgages fueling this credit crunch, I would say.

The Price of Being A Sanctuary State

Legal citizens being mowed down by illegal drunk drivers.

Surprise, Surprise---The "Virtual Fence" Is SimStupid

WFB could've told them "virtual" means "not really extant".

Let's see how long phony baloney John McCain goes before his quivering advisors tell him he can't keep claiming he'll build this "virtual fence" any longer.

So Much for Looking Out for "The Little Guy"

Dem pols and RINOs are all for illegal immigrant invaders. And if poorly-educated and low-skilled Americans wind up on the dole to get them amnesty and voting rights, well, that's a price the limousine liberals are willing to pay.

The original Reagan coalition formed when anti-Communist and pro-life Democrats were drawn to Reagan's staunch support of their favored positions, neither of which the Rockefeller Republicans have ever embraced.

If we want to piece together the Reagan juggernaut again, we need only add strong support for protecting the right of citizenship and to secure our borders. There are millions of Americans who do not want to be on welfare or unemployment, but only want the chance to work and improve their lot.

So why are we snubbing them on behalf of Mexicans and others who come here illegally and steal jobs from our countrymen?

Does an American's vote today count less somehow than an anchor baby's vote or an illegal aliens illegal vote tomorrow?

What's Spanish for "Chutzpah"?

The Anchor Baby Syndrome meets the Left Wing Media:

When the majority of Americans remained unmoved by the plight of illegal aliens, Senorita Arellano pulled out her trump card, i.e., her doe-eyed son Saul. Last year the seven-year-old was dispatched to Mexico City to make a maudlin appearance before the Mexican congress where Arellano's supporters successfully passed a nonbinding -- but highly symbolic -- resolution calling for legal residency for the parents of anchor babies. In a surprisingly critical passage in an otherwise fawning story, the Chicago Tribune reported that, "For Saul, the trip has at times been too much, Flashbulbs exploded as he entered the Mexican congressional chambers. Saul scurried into another room and hid under a table." Activists also dragged the boy to Washington, D.C. for a "children's rally" and he has appeared on numerous TV talk shows. Meanwhile, critics charge that the boy is not old enough to be an immigration rights advocate or activist, and that his mother should be protecting him, and not the other way around. Not to worry, his handlers say, the boy sees a therapist every week.

Estimates on the number of anchor babies in the U.S. range from 3.1 million to 4.9 million, and unless Congress acts those numbers will continue to rise. Representatives should begin by revisiting Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Michelle Malkin notes the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was intended to be exclusionary (especially toward American Indians) and certainly was not intended to include children born to tourists and temporary workers.

In fact, many categories of people were excluded from automatic citizenship. When the amendment was introduced, its sponsor Sen. Jacob M. Howard (MI) clearly stated: "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons."

Elvira Arellano has decided that her son will remain in Chicago with an immigration activist while she stays -- who knows for how long -- in Mexico. Chicago is where the television stations and newspapers photographers are. That is where he is needed most.

Expect many more of these sob stories of people willing to use their own children to break the law and get away with it.

Mark Steyn's Must-Read for Today

Why isn't there any sanctuary in America FROM violent illegal immigrants?

I'll give you the short answer:

Democrats run America's cities and they want the votes of the illegal aliens more than they want safety and security for American citizens.

Lindsay Graham: Bigot

Wonder if that's what Dubya will say now that the founder of Grahamnesty has chickened out:

The fallout experienced by Graham following his wholehearted endorsement of amnesty for illegal aliens and his conspicuous pandering to La Raza was extensive. According to an Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion poll, 63% of his constituents disapproved of his support for S.1639. His approval rating plummeted to 31% and campaign contributions critical for the senator's re-election in 2008 ground to a halt. The blogosphere responded with a proliferation of "Dump Lindsey Graham" websites, with one displaying a Lindsey Graham countdown clock. In response, a Graham spokesman commented with flagrant disdain that "Lindsey Graham has never governed by the polls - real or bogus - and is not about to start now." The spokesman added that well-informed South Carolinians, who constituent the majority of state residents, support the provisions of the "immigration reform proposal." It was evident to many South Carolinians that their senator was placing the interests of Hispanic supremacist, illegal alien support groups above that of lawful American citizens and that he refused to respectfully engage his constituency in a reasonable debate on the problems of illegal immigration and border security.


Apparently the backlash and political implications for Graham were significant enough for him to reconsider his position and co-author with Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill. Last Friday, the Senate passed the $3 billion in emergency spending for immigration and border enforcement. The Graham-Pryor amendment stipulates that the U.S. government must achieve full operational control over the U.S.-Mexico border. It requires an increase in the number of border patrol agents for a total of 23,000, allocates funding for 45,000 detention beds to end "catch and release" procedures that set illegal aliens free for lack of detention space, and calls for the acquisition of four unmanned aerial vehicles and 105 ground-based radar and camera towers. Further, the amendment provides for the expedited removal of illegal aliens. It also addresses visa overstays by requiring detention under Department of Homeland Security provisions and allows local law enforcement to obtain immigration status information in sanctuary cities, municipalities that have adopted a non-cooperative stance with federal immigration enforcement laws. In a complete volte-face, Graham said that he likened the passing of his amendment to "having been robbed 12 million times and finally getting around to putting a lock on the door." He is now advocating better electronic employee verification systems, merit-based entry requirements and assimilation programs that include learning English.

The only conviction Senators have is the conviction that they must be reelected.

More Bush Administration Incompetence

Michael Chertoff whines about having to do his damned job.

Michelle Malkin wonders how this will hurt the credibility of the Department of Homeland Security.

What credibility?

The only organization with any credibility defending this nation consistently throughout her history is the U.S. military.

All these government bureaucrat military wannabes do is soak up money, air, and attention.

Next time we send our National Guard troops to the border, here's an idea---turn 'em loose to capture the illegal alien invaders, then charter a bunch of buses for a one-way trip to Mexico City.

And if Vincente Fox has the cojones to complain, take away his foreign aid.

I mean, it's not as if Fox is stupid enough to leave his country's southern border undefended, right?

And while we're at it, disband Homeland Security and fold Immigration Enforcement into DoD.

Yeah, We'll Get Right on That 12 Million New Background Checks for Z-Visas

Right after we clear the 100,000 backlog background checks.

Of course, government being incompetent, your taxpayer-funded unionized drones will simply pencil-whip the background checks to "solve" this problem.

Wonder why we don't trust them?

Goodbye Melting Pot

Multiculturalism + welfare state = Balkanized America:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.

More and more of this country is becoming foreign territory. It used to be this would be a temporary condition as success depended upon assimilation. Now that we've decided celebrating diversity means not requiring English be spoken or even learned (thanks, "bilingual" ed) and have graciously elected to allow perpetual dipping into the public treasury for the lazy and illiterate, we can look forward to the riots to come when our largesse is no longer possible on a scale commensurate with the sense of entitlement we've so carefully nurtured.

How different than when my grandfather came over!

Of course, he came to AMERICA, so we're talking apples and oranges here.

Border Fences Keep Jihadists Out Too

A point lost on the "maverick senator" and his cowboy sidekick:

“America is still the land of opportunity,” Senator John McCain recently said. “And we’re not going to erect barriers and fences.”

Unlucky us.

Along with Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy, the Arizona Republican cosponsored immigration legislation currently crawling through the Senate. McCain should recognize that without a barrier or fence, the U.S./Mexican frontier will continue to welcome Islamic extremists pledged to America’s doom.

How many more terrorists have to infiltrate our southern border before we elect to run the risk of offending people who don't belong here and are not citizens?

Why Open Borders Are Incompatible with the Welfare State

Robert Rector reminds people who should know better of what ought to be obvious:

The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels. Low-skill immigrants become natural recipients in this process. On average, low-skill immigrant families receive $30,160 per year in government benefits and services while paying $10,573 in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of $19,587 that has to be paid by higher-income taxpayers.

There is a rough one-to-one fiscal balance between low-skill immigrant families and upper-middle-class families. It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low-skill immigrant family. Even Julian Simon, the godfather of open-border advocates, acknowledged that imposing such a burden on taxpayers was unreasonable, stating, “immigrants who would be a direct economic burden upon citizens through the public coffers should have no claim to be admitted” into the nation.

There is also a political dimension to the transfer state. Elections in modern societies are, to a considerable degree, referenda on the magnitude of future income redistribution. An immigration policy which grants citizenship to vast numbers of low-skill, low-income immigrants not only creates new beneficiaries for government transfers, but new voters likely to support even greater transfers in the future.

The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power. Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account. This is particularly problematic with regard to low-skill immigrants. Within an active redistributionist state, as Friedman understood, unlimited immigration can threaten limited government.

Many libertarians respond to this dilemma by asserting that the real problem is not open borders but the welfare state itself. The answer: dismantle the welfare state. The libertarian Cato Institute pursues a variant of this policy under the slogan, “build a wall around the welfare state, not around the nation.” Borders should be open, but immigrants should be barred from accessing welfare and other benefits.

But in practice, pursuit of these dual libertarian goals of opening borders and ending the redistributionist welfare state often leads to contradictions. The current Senate “comprehensive” immigration-reform bill, supported by the Cato Institute, actively demolishes existing walls between illegal immigrants and government benefits, granting some 12 million illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs.

It also substantially increases the future flow of low-skill immigrants and gives them access to welfare and transfer programs. Far from building a “wall around welfare,” this legislation levels existing walls, builds a highway to Fort Knox, and shovels billions in taxpayer funds into the pockets of immigrants who entered this country illegally.

In a recent debate with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, I pointed out this paradox. Griswold replied that the key was to grant amnesty and open borders now and work on “building a wall around welfare” at some point in the future. The weakness of this response should concern all those interested in limiting the size of government.

While most open-border libertarians proclaim a desire to dismantle both borders and the welfare state, in practice what they offer is open borders today and a vague (and almost certainly illusory) promise to end the welfare state in the indefinite future. As Milton Friedman understood, open-border enthusiasts have the sequence wrong: Opening borders with the redistributionist state still intact will result in a larger and more confiscatory government. In response to libertarians who propose to open borders and dismantle the welfare state, practical conservatives should answer: “Go ahead. Dismantle the welfare state. As soon as you’ve got that finished, let us know, and then we’ll talk about open borders.”

Politicians are bottom-feeding scumsuckers who buy votes with other people's money. Giving amnesty to illegal aliens guarantees an even greater majority of people voting themselves other people's money. The more poor people we have, and the fewer wealthy people, the closer the collapse of the welfare state becomes.

We're already seeing this with social security, which will collapse when hordes of rich Baby Boomers start cashing those checks and there aren't enough of us poor benighted working drones making enough money to support their tummy tucks and chin lifts. Adding a bunch of unskilled and uneducated labor to the other side of the welfare equation will only bankrupt us faster.

Border Control? Why Bother?

Because Al Qaeda wants to kill us, and they don't give a rat's @ss if we speak Spanish or celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

The Immigration Bill Fraud

Mark Steyn:

I don't know whether this sham of a bill is dead or just resting ''in the shadows'' like a fine upstanding member of the Vampiric-American community. But, if it rises on the third night to stalk the land once more, I would advise its supporters to go about their work more honestly. First of all, the only guys ''living in the shadows'' are the aides of American senators beavering away out of the public eye to cook up this legislation and then present it as a fait accomplis to the citizenry (if you'll forgive the expression). That is an affront to small-r republican government, and, if intemperate hectoring mediocrities like Trent Lott and Lindsay Graham don't understand that, then their electors should give them a well-deserved lesson.

Second, the bill's supporters should stop assuming the bad faith of their opponents. On Fox News the other night, I was told by NPR's Juan Williams, ''You're anti-immigrant!'' Er, actually, I am an immigrant -- one of the members of the very very teensy-weensy barely statistically detectable category of ''legal immigrant.'' But perhaps that doesn't count anymore. Perhaps, like Colin Powell's blackness, it's insufficiently ''authentic.'' By filing the relevant paperwork with the United States government, I'm not ''keepin' it real.''

I wouldn't presume to speak for the millions of Americans who oppose this bill, but it's because I'm an immigrant myself that I object to the most patent absurdity peddled by the pro-amnesty crowd. The bill is fundamentally a fraud. Its ''comprehensive solution'' to illegal immigration is simply to flip all the illegals overnight into the legal category. Voila! Problem solved! There can be no more illegal immigrants because the Senate has simply abolished the category. Ingenious! For their next bipartisan trick, Congress will reduce the murder rate by recategorizing murderers as jaywalkers.

Back in the real world far from those senators living in the non-shadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America's immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room. Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That's not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. It's certainly not enough time for any meaningful background check. Under political pressure to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' the immigration bureaucracy will rubberstamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There's never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency.

America has an illegal immigration problem in part because it has a legal immigration problem. Anyone who enters the system exposes himself to an arbitrary, capricious, whimsical bureaucracy: For example, one of the little-known features of this bill is that in order to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' millions of legal applicants are being hurled back into outer darkness. Law-abiding foreign nationals who filed their paperwork in the last two years would be required to go back to their home countries and start all over again. Not only does this bill reward law-breaking, it punishes law-abiding.

The people who are truly ''anti-immigrant'' are the folks who want to send that immigrant from Slovenia or Fiji who applied in May 2005 back to the end of the line. But then ''comprehensive immigration reform'' is about everything but immigration, including subverting sovereignty and national security. Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, the aforementioned Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government's ''visa express'' system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications -- ''Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA'' -- that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

All the above passed through the U.S. legal immigration system. And, whether they were detained, rejected, approved or posthumously approved, in the end it made no difference. Because U.S. immigration had no real idea who these men were.

Well, flying airliners into skyscrapers is just one of those jobs Americans won't do, Mr. Steyn.

Enforcement of the Law Works Whenever Tried

Just ask Ike.

Linda Chavez Forgets the First Rule of Hole Climbing

Stop digging.

I suppose its too much to ask of today's Republican leaders to stop accusing conservatives of racism, but since they want to act like Democrats in all other ways....

The Great Divorce

George W. Bush has driven conservatives beyond the point of forgiveness with his immigration bill nonsense. I think this will hurt Giuliani, McCain, and Romney as the base is in no mood to support anything but a rock-ribbed conservative for the GOP presidential nod the next time around.

When Hugh Hewitt criticizes a Republican president, you know the White House has botched things somewhere. He supported Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination, for God's sake!

Dubya Divides

There he goes again.

That's okay, Mr. President---I'm sure Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will be there for you the next time you need political support to win the war.

Vincente Fox will be, anyway.

Permanent Temporary Workers and Other Immigration Abominations

Immigration "reform" is a realm where Orwellian Newspeak is the lingua franca:

As to the first, economist Philip Martin, one of the world’s top scholars in this field, draws these three lessons from our experience with guestworker programs:

1. “There is nothing more permanent than temporary workers.”
2. “The availability of foreign workers distorts the economy.”
3. “Employers invest in lobbying to maintain the program, not in labor-saving or back-saving alternatives.”

The first point is especially pertinent. Didn’t it occur to anyone why Ted Kennedy was agreeing to something that the labor movement has been fighting against since it won passage of the Alien Contract Labor Act in 1885? He knows perfectly well that guestworker programs always lead to increased immigration, both from “temporary” workers who don’t leave and from parallel flows of legal and illegal immigration sparked by the program. Our most recent experience was the “Bracero” program, which imported Mexican farm workers until it was abolished in 1964. During the 22 years the program lasted, annual Mexican immigration — permanent immigration, leading to citizenship — grew from little more than 2,000 to as high as 61,000, for total permanent settlement of more than a half-million Mexicans. This compares with a total of only a million or so Mexican men who actually took part in the Bracero program. During that same period, arrests of Mexican illegal aliens totaled 5.3 million, more than the 4.6 million admissions of guestworkers (some representing the same men multiple times).

Germany had the same experience with its postwar “gastarbeiter“ program for Turkish and other workers. When it was discontinued after the 1973 oil embargo, the government expected the “temporary” workers would complete their contracts and go home, because of the supposedly “circular” movement of such people, going back and forth between Germany and Turkey (the same story that today’s guestworker boosters are telling about Mexicans). Instead, the “temporary” workers not only stayed, they brought their families, too, causing Germany’s foreign population to nearly double over the next 25 years.

Sen. Kennedy knows this full well — one more indication that Ted Kennedy negotiating with Republicans over immigration is like Gary Kasparov playing an elementary-school chess team. In fact, a congressional source tells me that last year Rep. Howard Berman (career grade of F from Americans for Better Immigration) was privately trying to persuade skeptical Democrats to agree to a guestworker program with the promise that, after all, they’d never really have to go back.

How's this sound instead: temporary workers must skip every other cycle. If you're here on a six month temporary visa, you can't renew it until you return home for six months.

This helps ensure that employers are using the system for what it was intended---to ease temporary labor shortages.

God forbid we actually expect temporary workers to be, you know, temporary.

Son of Illegal Immigration Roundup

Why family reunification is stupid:

But, hey, no worries. Hillary and Barack have foolproof rationales for their proposed reforms. Introducing an amendment to extend unlimited marriage-based family unification from American citizens to green-card holders, Clinton said, “For those who often speak about family values, this is your opportunity to match your rhetoric with your action.” (Some Christian pro-family groups weren’t sure if Clinton might be right.) For his part, Obama is joining with New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez to offer a series of amendments designed to quickly gut, and eventually eliminate, the merit-based point system supposedly designed to replace family unification as the center of our immigration policy (eight years from now — assuming the already-beseiged point system won’t have to face a Clinton or Obama administration). As Obama puts it: “How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”

Here we arrive at one of the central difficulties of America’s immigration debate. Mention immigration and many of us conjure up hallowed memories of our ancestors passing through Ellis Island — and of America’s stirring, centuries-long immigration success story. America’s melting-pot is unquestionably one of this country’s great historic triumphs.

Yet the reality of that achievement too easily blinds us to the fact that not all immigration stories end happily. In an era when the assimilationist ethos has been challenged by multiculturalism, when travel, telephones, and satellite dishes continuously link immigrants with homes half-way round the world, and when the cultural gap between immigrant and host cultures can turn into a chasm, we cannot take immigration success for granted.

Nor can pro-family Christians be properly accused of hypocrisy for thinking twice about promoting Asian or Middle-Eastern family values — if those values are radically different from their own. Polygamy? Cousin marriage? Extended clans held together by transnational arranged marriages? If anything these practices (encouraged by permissive family-reunification policies) are seriously undermining Western family values in Europe. Yet neither the pro-family lobby — nor anyone else in America — seems to understand the cultural disaster family-reunification laws have wrought in Europe. After all, Europeans themselves are only just now waking up to the uncomfortable truth.

It's like inviting yourself over to a stranger's house for dinner, then demanding your brother, sisters, and Uncle Chuey get free grub too. Illegal immigrants sure have one part of assimilation licked: a highly-developed sense of entitlement.

Why the "nativist" ad hominem argument is absurd:

But Gerson’s column is flawed on another front as well: It recycles open-borders bromides that have nothing to do with the truth. In warning against a rejection of amnesty, Gerson states: “If the Republican Party cannot find ways to appeal to natural entrepreneurs, with strong family values, who are focused on education and social mobility, then the GOP is already dead.”

What planet is Gerson living on? Far from being “focused on education,” Hispanics have the highest drop-out rate in the country — 47 percent nationally, and far worse in heavily Hispanic areas. Schools in illegal-immigrant-saturated southern California spend enormous sums trying to persuade Latino students to stay in school and study, without avail. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 40 percent of Hispanics graduate, and those students who do finish school come out with abysmal skills. A controversial high school exit exam in California would require seniors to correctly answer just 51 percent of questions testing eighth-grade-level math and ninth-grade-level English in order to receive a diploma. Naturally, immigrant advocates have fiercely opposed this all-too-meager measure for school and student accountability. The California Research Bureau predicts that the exam will result in a Hispanic graduation rate of below 30 percent.

Behind Hispanic educational failure rate lies an apathy towards learning, as the Manhattan Institute’s Herman Badillo argues in One Nation, One Standard. Hostility towards academic achievement is higher among Hispanics than among blacks. Factor in gang involvement and teenage pregnancy, and the Hispanic drop-out rate looks almost inevitable. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a whopping 15 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants may not qualify for the proposed amnesty because of their criminal records, according to the Wall Street Journal. Gerson’s claim of a culture “focused on education” is pure delusion.

Gerson’s hackneyed invocation of Hispanic “family values” is equally laughable. Nearly 50 percent of all Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, compared to 24 percent of white children and 15 percent of Asian children. Black out-of-wedlock births are higher — 68 percent — but the black population is not growing rapidly. And the fertility rate among unmarried Hispanic women is the highest in the country — over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women. The Hispanic teen-fertility rate also far outstrips other groups. Among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. As conservative policymakers such as Gerson should know, there is no better predictor of future social pathologies than out-of-wedlock childrearing.

Low levels of education and high levels of illegitimacy help explain why, contrary to Gerson’s myths, Hispanics are not showing the “social mobility” of other immigrant groups past and present, as Harvard’s George Borjas has documented and City Journal’s Steve Malanga has reported.

I suppose the "nativists" of the WWII generation ought to have sat by until Uncle Adolf got good and ready to goosestep down Broadway. After all, what made American culture superior to good ol' Teutonic Germany? Nazis worked hard. They believed in education. Who were those Germanophobes to slaughter thousands of Americans on behalf of some outmoded abstract ideology and jingoism? How dare we criticize the Huns when we were oppressing the Tuskegee Airmen? Was it really that hard to learn a little German and maybe celebrate Hitler's birthday?

Our illegal immigrants aren't Nazis, but they aren't Americans. Why must Americans learn their language? Why must Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo and their other holidays? Why must Americans assimilate into and accommodate their culture? Why should we willingly do what we fought WWII and other wars NOT to do?

Instead, we just toss out American citizenship as though it were gutter-bound garbage:

This is not some tiny asterisk in immigration policy; hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have benefited from TPS and its antecedents, most of them Central American, but with smaller groups of people from all over the world also getting in on the act. Although the formal mechanism for granting Temporary Protected Status was created by the 1990 Immigration Act, that was really just an example of Congress “bowing to reality,” in Michael Chertoff’s evocative phrase — the executive branch had been inventing ways of not enforcing immigration law for decades, using Orwellian formulations like “Extended Voluntary Departure” or “Deferred Enforced Departure.” (Several years ago I traced the development of this insidious practice; see here.)

The government’s site says “TPS does not lead to permanent resident status,” and strictly speaking, that is correct; the attorney general can terminate it, at which point the people in question revert to their original status — i.e., in most cases go back to being illegal aliens. But in practice, TPS is renewed as many times as necessary to ensure that no one is deported. Only in the smallest of cases, involving a few dozen or at most a few hundred people, has this “temporary” status actually been ended without everyone getting a green card, and as far as I know, no one has ever been made to leave because they lost TPS.

Earlier this month, the “temporary” status of 230,000 Salvadorans, 78,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans was extended by another 18 months — the Salvadorans have had this “temporary” status for six years, and the Hondurans and Nicaraguans for eight years. The explanation for the extension offered by Emilio Gonzalez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is a gem: “Although Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador have made significant progress in their recovery and rebuilding efforts, each country continues to face social and economic challenges in their efforts to restore their nations to normalcy. This 18-month extension reflects the United States’ commitment to continue assisting our Central American neighbors on their road to recovery.” It’s not obvious what “normalcy” is supposed to mean in this context, since all three countries remain in their normal state of being hapless third-world kleptocracies, but the point is clear — the Bush administration will not make these illegal aliens go home, no matter what.

The most extreme case is that of several thousand Liberians, who received “temporary” status in 1991 and had it renewed regularly ever since. Their TPS is set to expire in October — definitely, for sure, this time, though that’s what Janet Reno said nearly ten years ago.

Our experience with TPS leads to only one possible conclusion: Once an illegal alien gets legal status, no matter how “temporary,” he’s here for good. Sponsors of the Senate’s amnesty bill know this full well.

Better that than be called a "nativist", I guess.

How do you say that in Spanish? Guess we'll find out.