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The Beltway is buzzing over President Obama's likely nomination of Thomas E. Perez as the next head of the U.S. Department of Labor. But when Americans find out whom Perez has lobbied for most aggressively over the course of his extremist leftwing social justice career, they'll be wondering which country Obama's pick really plans to serve.

Press accounts describe Perez, currently the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil rights division, as a "tireless advocate of worker and civil rights." The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez was a former special counsel for the late illegal alien amnesty champion Sen. Ted Kennedy.

During the Clinton years, Perez worked at the Justice Department to establish a "Worker Exploitation Task Force" to enhance working conditions for ... illegal alien workers. While holding down his government position, Perez volunteered for Casa de Maryland. This notorious illegal alien advocacy group is funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants (totaling $5 million in 2010 alone from Maryland and local governments) and radical liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute.

That's in addition to more than $1 million showered on the group by freshly departed Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez's regime-owned oil company, CITGO.

As I've reported previously, Perez rose from Casa de Maryland volunteer to president of the group's board of directors. Under the guise of enhancing the "multicultural" experience, he crusaded for an ever-expanding set of illegal alien benefits, from in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students to driver's licenses and tax-subsidized day labor centers. Casa de Maryland opposes enforcement of deportation orders, has protested

The conclave to elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor begins today (March 12). As a traditional Catholic and an American patriot, I am mildly hopeful about the liturgical and theological outcome—but, frankly, not optimistic about the implications for the immigration debate.

Just over ten years ago, (January 22, 2003), the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] and the bishops of Mexico sent a Pastoral Letter to Catholic parishes throughout the US and Mexico entitled, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope. Complete with footnotes and definitions, it amounted to a Treason Lobby vade mecum, a blueprint that, for all its Biblical injunctions, primarily sought the amnesty of untold millions of illegal aliens currently in the US—the majority of whom are Mexican nationals (and nominal Catholics).

As VDARE.com readers are well aware, Amnesty attempts were twice defeated in Congress during the second term of President George W. Bush. But now the Obama Administration has made “comprehensive immigration reform”—the cowardly code word for amnesty—a top priority in its second term. The GOP Establishment is in obvious disarray and appears willing to cave on core issues, including amnesty.

And, as if prompted by the Obama Administration, on the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), the USCCB's Migration and Refugee Services Committee, which is headed by Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles—himself a Mexican immigrant—launched a postcard campaign calling on Congress to pass bills that

provide a path to citizenship for undocumented persons in the country; preserve family units as a cornerstone of our national immigration system; provide a legal path for low-skilled immigrant workers to come and work in the U.S.; restore due process protections to (illegal) immigrants, and address the root causes of migration, caused by persecution and economic disparity.

As a Catholic, I can only say sadly that it is all too understandable why critics see the USCCB merely as a wing of the Democratic Party. (Of course, the leaders of many Protestant denominations have taken positions on immigration similar to the Catholic Bishops—and their parishioners have responded in similar ways to their Catholic brethren, by rejecting them.)

Within USCCB, the current President, Timothy Cardinal Dolan of the New York Archdiocese, has become the “go-to guy” in articulating the Church's position on immigration.

In February, 2012, upon returning from Rome where he had received his red hat as a cardinal, Dolan was quoted by the NY Times in which he said:

[H]e first wanted the church to be more effective locally and nationally in its outreach to immigrants, particularly Latinos, who are no longer in Catholic schools in the numbers they once were.

“The church has been the engine of welcoming people, caring for them and getting them settled as happy, productive citizens who are loyal citizens and loyal Catholics,” he said. “It bothers me that for the first time in American Catholic history, we may not be responding well to the needs of immigrant children in our Catholic schools.”

Cardinal Dolan Sets Agenda for Return to New York, By Sharon Otterman, February 20, 2012

On his own Diocesan blog, Dolan wrote

"Comprehensive immigration reform" is a logical, long-overdue expression of the true "sentiment in our national soul...of welcome and embrace to the immigrant."[Immigration Reform, April 27th, 2010]

(Appallingly, Dolan is now being mentioned as the next Pope—for example

At the recent left-libertarian Students for Liberty Conference, Ann Coulter called a room full of libertarian students “P*ssies” for constantly talking about drug legalization.

In response, the famously verbose young libertarian movement took to its home base on the internet to bash her. But, true to form, it cowardly dodged her main question.

Coulter asked:

We’re living in a country that is 70-percent socialist, the government takes 60 percent of your money. They are taking care of your health care, of your pensions. They’re telling you who you can hire, what the regulations will be. And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, ‘Oh, but we want to legalize pot.’ You know, if you’re a little more manly you would tell them what your position on employment discrimination is. How about that? But it’s always ‘We want to legalize pot.’

Coulter’s jibe hits especially hard because she is clearly referring to one person in particular—Rand Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky.

During his campaign for the Senate, Rand Paul plainly stated the axiomatic libertarian position on employment discrimination–namely, that businesses should have the right to exercise freedom of association in defiance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But within hours, Paul reversed himself and performed a ritualized grovel. And during his maiden speech on the Senate floor, Paul took care to bash Kentucky statesman Henry Clay for not backing abolitionism.

Since entering the Senate, Paul has made sure to appeal to powerful constituencies within the conservative movement. He's taken a strong stand in defense of traditional marriage. He was even rebuked by the head of the Family Research Council for joking that he didn't think President Obama's position on marriage “could get any gayer.”

Unlike his father, he has made his peace with the neoconservatives, declaring “An attack on Israel will be treated as an attack on the United States.”

Paul also aggressively pressed Hillary Clinton during the Senate hearings on Benghazi. The scion of an “isolationist” Congressman emerged as an almost Jacksonian nationalist.

Even Senator Paul's advocacy of defense cuts fit  in with the Beltway Right's new focus on limiting spending.

Many libertarians were becoming uneasy with Senator Paul’s regression into seemingly standard Republicanism.

However, Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster on Wednesday has brought home his libertarian base and established him as a national leader. Paul held the Senate floor, and America’s attention, by demanding the Obama Administration answer whether the President has the right to use drones to kill Americans on American soil. He was initially joined by Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, but over the course of the day also won support from Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and Reince Priebus.

Even libertarian critics disgusted with Rand's respectability have expressed their support. Paul finds himself the head of a bipartisan coalition in defense of civil liberties. [#StandwithRand | The libertarian moment has arrived – thanks to Rand Paul, by Justin Raimondo, AntiWar.com, March 8, 2013]

The Treason Lobby's favored Republican sons, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, neatly fell into the trap. They attacked Rand Paul and his “impressionable libertarian kids.”

The Amnesty duo, of course, were literally dining with President Obama during Rand's filibuster.

Conservatives hungry for confrontation reacted with fury against McCain and his Mini-Me. Rush Limbaugh slammed them as the “old guard playing footsie with Obama” while Paul was making a stand.

Rand Paul's political masterstroke nailed down conservatives, brought home libertarians, and embarrassed (and intrigued) liberals.

In response, Paul is being refreshingly frank (for a politician) about his plans to exploit his position to run for President in 2016.

Only one obstacle remains on the horizon—the battle over amnesty. How Rand Paul handles this determines whether he will be the Republican favorite for the nomination…or just another false start. There is both cause for hope—and cause for despair.

Rand Paul took strong implicit stances on the immigration issue during his campaign. According to spokesperson Jesse Benton in 2010:

Rand Paul will secure our border by any means needed as our current open border is a threat to national security and economic well-being.

Paul made the common sense observation that Mexican immigrants

As you read through a book, as the pages clock by, hints of the author’s underlying attitudes accumulate until, by halfway through the thing, you have a clear picture of those attitudes.  In the case of a certain type of author—a person with not much power of imagination or self-examination—you may have a clearer picture of his attitudes than he has himself.

So with  Immigration Wars, the new book by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick.  I just got through reading the book on Kindle: the square brackets in what follows refer to locations in the Kindle text.

Yes, there are two authors there, and you can speculate for yourself about who did how much of the writing. But, given that Jeb Bush is an ambitious politician, and that now is about the right time for ambitious politicians to lay down markers for the 2016 election, I doubt there is a single sentence here that Jeb Bush didn’t sign off on—whether he actually wrote the book or not. So I am blaming him for it.

So what insights into this possible 2016 presidential candidate do we get from  Immigration Wars? 

The main one I got: Jeb Bush just doesn’t like Americans very much.

Immigration boosterism always has a whiff of this about it.  “Jobs Americans won’t do”—because they are too spoiled and lazy!  “Skill shortages”—resulting from Americans being too dumb! 

Bush packs both of those into a single sentence:

It is essential that we have an ample supply of workers both for labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want and for highly skilled jobs for which there are inadequate numbers of Americans with the skills to fit them. [1207]

Business-wise we’re not up to much, either: “Like most immigrants, Hispanics are tremendously entrepreneurial.” [2206] As opposed to those dull, risk-averse non-Hispanic and non-immigrant Americans!

 As VDARE.com readers know, this last assertion is demonstrably untrue.  Indeed, Bush’s book abounds in long-debunked falsehoods—so much so that, by fifty or so pages in, the well-informed commentator can’t resist doing a search on “44 percent.”  Yep, there it is!—“Whereas Republicans had won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote …” [2067] 

When not telling outright porkies, Jeb Bush offers assertions superficially friendly to his case, while omitting taboo-related explanatory factors: 

El Paso, Texas, is one of the nation’s three largest safe cities. [990] 

Yes, because the black population is unusually low: 2.8 percent, only a tad higher than Salt Lake City’s 2.5 percent.

The deficiencies of us actual citizens of the U.S.A. are even spiritual.

Immigrants are unlikely to be complacent about the freedom and opportunity that for them previously was only a dream and was gained only through great effort and sacrifice.  Our nation constantly needs the replenishment of our spirit that immigrants bring. [834]

The accumulating impression left by Jeb Bush: Americans are not much good for anything.  Only immigrants, with “their energy, vitality, talent, and enterprise” [992] can overcome the lassitude, torpor, mediocrity, and complacency of the native-born.

We get a revealing metaphor here, one that

American college campuses are the most fertile grounds for fake hate. They're marinated in identity politics and packed with self-indulgent, tenured radicals suspended in the 1960s. In the name of enlightenment and tolerance, these institutions of higher learning breed a corrosive culture of left-wing self-victimization. Take my alma mater, Oberlin College. Please.

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student getting interested in conservative politics, the Right was going through a “crack-up” [™R. Emmett Tyrrell] after the demise of Communism and the then-recent defeat of George H.W. Bush. This was disrupting the conservative coalition that had existed for roughly two decades.

Books such as David Frum’s Dead Right and Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement examined the various factions of the right and laid out what they stood for. Personally, I wasn’t drawn to conservatism because of the flat tax or missile defense systems. Instead, I was living in an extremely anti-white PC environment at my liberal college and was looking to join a resistance movement.

Needless to say, I identified with the paleoconservative wing of conservatism as exemplified by Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Jared Taylor, Paul Gottfried and the writers gathered around Chronicles magazine. These hard men spoke truth to power on issues of race and had no desire to make peace with those who supported Affirmative Action, multiculturalism and other anti-white trends.

Of course, the paleos lost—but not before giving the GOP and the Conservative Establishment a scare with the presidential campaigns of Buchanan and the intellectual firepower of the Chronicles crowd and sympathetic journalists such as Joe Sobran and Peter Brimelow (then still with National Review).

Republicans and Establishment Conservatives have long since given up any pretense of opposition to Affirmative Action and multiculturalism—let alone immigration. Indeed, they are often now on the wrong side of these issues. Thus all their current presidential contenders for 2016—Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush—support Amnesty.

Needless to say, folding like origami on these issues has not helped the GOP win elections. Nor has it prevented a further rift within the dwindling number of those who still call themselves conservative.

The 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held March 14-16 in the Washington D.C. area. Those who cannot attend will miss out on seeing a Who’s Who of Amnesty supporters like Rubio, Paul and Bush along with conservative heavyweights such as Francesca Chambers, Chelsi Henry and T.W. Shannon.

Who? I’ve never heard of the last three either. But they are black—so, of course, they are featured speakers at CPAC. Presumably, they are there to hector white College Republican types during the panels on how to attract minority voters and “A Roundtable Discussion on The Future of the Movement: Winning with Generation X/Y.”

But the main buzz around this year’s CPAC is the exclusion of GOProud, a gay Republican group that had exhibited at past CPACs (and, according to one person I know who attended, was harassing gay marriage opponents).

This caused MSNBC’s token Republican, S.E. Cupp [Twitter] to publicly boycott the event. Another house conservative, Jennifer Rubin [email her]of the Washington Post, cheered her on, citing Cupp’s “political courage.” CPAC damages itself and the GOP, February 27, 2013

Yet real courage would be challenging the opinions and views of their leftist employers. Attacking supposedly fellow conservatives will only enhance the job security of these two specimens of what Sam Francis called “the harmless persuasion.”

Not to be outdone, National Review Online posted several columns attacking CPAC’s decision to exclude GOProud, and also a perhaps-related move to not invite New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. In a conclusive demonstration that NR is no longer in any sense a Catholic magazine, an editorial titled “CPAC’s Empty Chairs” proclaimed:

Conservative opinion on the intersection of homosexuality and politics is not monolithic, especially among the college-aged set that makes up the better part of CPAC attendees. And a gathering that hopes to speak for the conservative movement will be better equipped to do so if it represents the overlapping gamut of views included in it.

Jonah Goldberg chimed in, criticizing CPAC for acting as a “border guard”

A number of “Hispanic Republicans” a.k.a. professional ethnics/ Treason Lobby shills recently launched what is obviously an orchestrated guilt-by-association smear of CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA and immigration patriots in general on the grounds that that they are all secretly eugenicists, pro-abortion, “nativists” etc. etc.

• Mario H. Lopez, (email him) president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, invoked the ghosts of Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Sir Francis Galton, and Margaret Sanger to smear FAIR’s Dan Stein, VDARE.com columnist Donald A. Collins, and Dr. John Tanton—a real-life immigration patriot hero whom VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow described in Alien Nation ., echoing Robert E. Lee, as “a citizen who has taken up arms for his country.” [Hijacking Immigration?, Human Life Review, Fall 2012]
• Linda Chavez [Email her] echo-chambered Lopez in in her Creators Syndicate column, saying that immigration patriots, because of these fantasized associations with “pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and assisted suicide” ideas, constitute Strange Bedfellows For Conservatives. In the New York Post this became the Anti-immigration lobby’s ugly roots. [February 8, 2013].

Ms. Chavez, a former member of the Young People's Socialist League, is at best a neoconservative but she gets to lay down the law.

• Bob Quasius [Twitter] the white guy at “Café Con Leche Republicans” is attacking Ann Coulter with many references to dead nativists, and makes a drive-by attack on Charles Murray, who is allegedly “hardly a credible source on demographics” because of the familiar accusations of racism which are (a) unfounded, and (b) irrelevant to credibility since Murray doesn’t just assert demographic facts, but always provides data.

Of course, this is an old, tired argument for Conservatism Inc. immigration enthusiasts—for our Washington Watcher’s documentation and debunking, see here. Even National Review’s immigration beards have been induced to whimper—see Krikorian and O’Sullivan here and here.

All the current smearers are Hispanic, even Quasius. (Well, actually he’s married to a Hispanic woman, and makes a living, GOP-campaign consultant style, by running Café Con Leche Republicans and whining about “Hate.”)

They apparently are Republicans. And they say they’re conservatives. But they’re favoring radically transformative levels of legal and illegal immigration, a program supported by the worst elements of the hard Left—including the current President of the United States.

So, if we’re looking at motives, here are the “ugly roots” of immigration enthusiasm:

• Communists

The 1965 Immigration Act replaced the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which was an anti-Communist bill. The breakdown of the McCarran-Walter Act was a major objective of the Communists, as Congress heard in testimony in 1965, and pro-Communist writers are still gloating over its defeat. See, more recently, Communist Party Resolves: Immigrant rights is a struggle for democracy, CPUSA website, May 27, 2010.

• Socialists

Mexico is a much more socialist country than the United States, and more immigration will tend to make the US more socialist. American socialists know this [ Socialism and Immigrants’ Rights, By Teddy Shibabaw, SocialistAlternative, June 22, 2010] and perhaps, once again, we should include the current President of the United States in their number. Elected with the votes of many Hispanic legal