October 14, 2011
October 14, 2011
Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow 
Rohrabacher Is Right: The DREAM Act Amnesty Means Affirmative Action Privileges For Illegals
Last Wednesday, shortly before the House passed the
DREAM Act, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher
said on the House Floor:
"I rise in
opposition to the Affirmative Action Amnesty Act, or
otherwise known as the DREAM Act"
Rohrabacher continued:
"If an illegal immigrant, if this act passes, if an
illegal immigrant happens to be of a racial or ethnic
minority, which the vast majority of illegal immigrants
are, that individual, as soon as legal status is
granted, will be entitled to all the education,
employment, job training, government contract, and other
minority preferences that are written into our federal
and state laws. As a result, the DREAM Act would not
only put illegal immigrants on par with American
citizens, but would in many cases put them ahead of most
American citizens and legal immigrants. So those voting
for this so-called DREAM Act are voting to relegate the
position of non-minority American citizens to behind
those who are now in this country illegally."
[Senate
vote on DREAM Act set for next week, by
Mizanur Rahman,
Houston Chronicle,
December 9, 2010]
As you can imagine, the usual lefties screamed
"racism".
The OC Weekly
blogged "Dana
Rohrabacher Finally, Openly Appeals to His Skinhead
Constituents in Attacking DREAM Act".
Media Matters repeated
demanded a
"Political correction" without actually pointing to
anything he said being untrue. The
American Prospect's Adam Serwer
called the
remark "fairly
blatant attempts to exploit white racial resentment".
The Washington
Monthly,
suddenly interested in the GOP electoral success,
called it "Another
Setback for Republicans' Minority Outreach."
Of course, what none of them mentioned is that what
Rohrabacher said is true.
According to the
There is nothing in the DREAM Act barring the amnestied
illegal aliens from racial preferences. So increasing
the percentage of
non-Asian minorities entering the pool for college
admission will put them at an advantage over white and
(in some cases)
Asian American citizens.
Instead of getting outraged at Rohrabacher, we should be
asking why immigrants are given racial preferences.
Even many liberals are opposed to this policy.
Black
Harvard Professor
Orlando Patterson [Email
him] wrote that
"It is ridiculous…that all persons of
so-called Hispanic ancestry are considered
disadvantaged minorities" [The
Ordeal Of Integration, 1998, p. 193] Former
MALDEF Board member
Lawrence Fuchs called
affirmative action for immigrants a
"historical accident for which there is no possible
justification." [What
do immigrants deserve? By Lawrence R. Fuchs,
Washington Post, January 29, 1995] (Both remarks quoted in Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
In July, Democratic Senator
Jim Webb (VA)—who signed the cloture petition for
the DREAM Act—wrote an op-ed for the
Wall Street Journal arguing that
"America still
owes a debt to its
black citizens, but
government programs to help
all 'people of color' are unfair."
Senator Webb
argued that while Affirmative Action programs should
continue for American blacks, they should not be
extended other non-white groups. He noted:
"Many
programs allow
recently arrived immigrants
to move ahead of
similarly situated whites
whose families have been in the country for generations.
These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more
they have grown, the less they have actually helped
African-Americans, the
intended beneficiaries of
affirmative action as it was originally conceived."
[Diversity
and the Myth of White Privilege, by James Webb,
Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2010]
Personally, I am one of those extremists who believes
that Americans should be judged by their merit
regardless of race. However, if we must have Affirmative
Action, it makes sense for both practical and moral
reasons to limit it to the descendants of American
slaves.
African Americans make up only 12% of our population.
While the costs of preferences are great for even a
small percentage of the population (Peter Brimelow and
Leslie Spencer
estimated the cost of quotas in 1991 at 225 billion
dollars) this policy is manageable.
However, Hispanics are already make up a larger
percentage of the population than blacks. If immigration
continues at its present rate, Whites are expected to be
a minority by the year 2042.
Despite attempts to justify affirmative action based on
an intrinsic need for
"diversity",
it is still largely seen by both the public and its
beneficiaries
as
a form of compensation for slavery and Jim Crow.
In 2004, the New
York Times reported on a study by black Harvard
Professor
Henry Louis Gates (later of
Gates-Crowley infamy,) and
Lani Guinier, which noted only a
"third of the [black]
students were from families in which all four
grandparents were born in this country, descendants of
slaves. Many argue that it was students like these,
disadvantaged by the
legacy of
Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism,
poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as
principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in
university admissions." The bulk of Affirmative
Action came from the children of African and West Indian
immigrants, were biracial, or in some cases (like
Barack Obama)
both.
The NYT noted
that this trend appeared at schools across the country.
It noted:
"Researchers at Princeton University and the University
of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement
of minority students at 28 selective colleges and
universities (including theirs, as well as Yale,
Columbia, Duke and the University of California at
Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students
identified themselves as immigrants, as children of
immigrants or as mixed race."
[Top
Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
by Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson,
New York Times,
June 24, 2004]
At the very least, the vast majority of these African
immigrants are here legally. However, the DREAM Act will
go a step further and reward those who broke into our
country with preferences.
In 1999, neoconservative Nathan Glazer wrote
"African Americans are at the heart of the issue.
Certainly, Hispanics or Latinos are also beneficiaries
of group-sensitive (one
cannot say for them "race-sensitive") policies, and
this is almost as seriously disputed as preferences for
blacks. Yet it is clear that race-sensitive policies
began in the 1960s primarily because of the
near absence of blacks on
American college campuses, and because of the
unfolding civil-rights revolution… the fact is that
blacks, not Hispanics or other groups, have posed the
key dilemma for American society since its origins. The
Constitution, which had to take account of the large
population of black slaves, did not have to take account
of Hispanics; the Civil War was not fought to free
Hispanics; the key
post Civil War amendments to the Constitution were
not passed because of the condition of Hispanics or with
their circumstances in mind."[The
case for racial preferences
(PDF),
By Nathan Glazer,
Public Interest, Spring 1999]
Naturally, Black-White relations was the "key
dilemma" when America was an essentially bi-racial
society, prior to the 1965 Immigration Act.
However, four years after Glazer wrote those laws,
Hispanics surpassed blacks in population in
Meanwhile, congressmen like
Luis Gutierrez are
threatening civil disobedience if the
bill doesn't pass.
Hispanic immigration is at the "Heart of the issue" of Affirmative Action. The granting of amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who will get preferences over white American Citizens should be at the heart of the opposition to the DREAM Act.
"Washington Watcher" [email
him] is an anonymous source Inside The
Beltway.
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