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America's own Andrey Januarevich Vyshinsky, Eric Holder, and his minions at the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) are maneuvering for an amnesty for homosexuals to mirror the Department of Homeland Security's amnesty for illegal aliens under age 31. The BIA recently remanded to U.S.
Gene Healy is vice-president of the Cato Institute and therefore an open borders guy—he's fine with illegal immigrants being allowed to stay. However, he's also the author of "The Cult of the Presidency," and therefore he does not approve of Obama's unconstitutional amnesty.
The Contra Costa Times immigration reporter tried his liberal best to present both sides of the Obamnesty, including the downer of more workers being unleashed on jobless citizens. (California statewide unemployment in May was 10.8 percent, so joblessness is a big concern here.)
But Matt O’Brien’s questionable attempt at “fair and balanced” was neither. The piece starts out with emotional stories from several young illegals and their dreams for the future. One version in the San Jose Mercury posted a sympathetic photo of one, Fiona Cruz.
For the other side, the reporter interviewed CIS’s excellent researcher Steve Camarota, and cited a couple relevant quotes. But O’Brien followed Camarota’s reasonable analysis with an immediate refutation beginning: “Those are assumptions many economists don’t hold. . .”
However, the most egregious element was the omission of young citizens who already struggle to find jobs. Why are their dreams for the future not considered worthy? How hard would it have been for the reporter to go to a local campus or unemployment office to find Americans who cannot find work?
The media constantly barrages the public with tearful stories of illegal aliens, as in this case. But young Americans, whose parents have obeyed the law and paid the taxes, are not even an afterthought to liberal journalists.
For that reason, I propose a new visa category for journalists to increase diversity in the newsroom and educate current scribblers about what the rest of America faces. Fifty thousand new journalist immigrants should do nicely for a start.
Immigration reprieve means thousands of new workers in California, By Matt O’Brien, Contra Costa Times, June 19, 2012
Chris Hayes argues in his new book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, the real reason that blacks and Hispanics are making so little progress over the generations at qualifying on their own merit for selective academic institutions is because rich whites are hogging all the test prep.
"Many people who came here illegally are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn't feed our families," he writes in An American Son, which was released Tuesday.
Rep Schweikert versus Rep Quayle: Sad - but a silver lining?
...Accompanied Only by Mug Shots of White Suspects from Unrelated, Out-of-Town Misdemeanors
Mugs in the news
Defendant: Suzi Schmidt [above, left]
( Lake Villa Police Department photo / June 13, 2012 )
I'll respond at length to Jared Taylor's anti-miscegenation essay in a day or two ─ I'm a little backed up & preparing for a road trip. In the meantime, VDARE.com readers might want to chew over this post by blogger Half Sigma on the just-released Pew report about Asian Americans. Sample:
Here’s a new word for your diverse vocabulary: “charla.” It’s Spanish and means a Q&A session with an immigration lawyer. The one pictured below was put on in Houston, courtesy of Catholic Charities, which routinely acts as an active anti-sovereignty enabler of lawbreaking aliens.
As expected, Mexico’s Presidente Calderon was thrilled with his pal Obama’s pre-election amnesty reversal. More freebies for illegal Mexicans on the US taxpayer’s tab means more disposable income to be sent home to Mexico as remittances. El Presidente likes that just fine.
The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business Republicans.
Congressman David Schweikert (AZ-5th)
I admire Satoshi Kanazawa's lively intelligence, although I'm not totally persuaded to trust every idea he comes up with. From The Economist:
... less intelligent people are better at doing most things. In the ancestral environment general intelligence was helpfuhelpful only for solving a handful of evolutionarily novel problems.
It's being reported all over that that Obama's unconstitutional administrative amnesty is polling welll:
This is an excerpt from the official memo from Janet Napolitano on Obama's unconstitutional Administrative Amnesty. You can read the whole thing as a PDF on the DHS site. Link via Stanford Law School Fellow William Baude, who describes it as "short on legal specifics".
Sean Trende writes in RealClearPolitics on why Obama's Administrative Amnesty is a bad thing for Obama—for reasons that we've been talking about for more than ten years, and that we call the Sailer Strategy. (This is an excerpt, and the links in it are Trende's)
1) Latinos are underrepresented in swing states. While the Latino vote is frequently portrayed as a critical voting bloc, in truth it is concentrated in only a few swing states with just a handful of electoral votes. The only states where Latinos make up more than 10 percent of the electorate are: Arizona (16 percent of the electorate in 2008), California (18 percent), Colorado (13 percent), Florida (14 percent), Nevada (15 percent), New Mexico (41 percent), and Texas (20 percent).
Of these, only Colorado, Florida, and Nevada are swing states; New Mexico and Arizona are at best borderline swing states. In Florida, the Latino vote largely (though decreasingly) comprises voters of Cuban descent and is therefore atypical of other Latino electorates.
So in the end, we’re talking about Colorado and Nevada as the states where this is likely to produce dividends of any size, for a total of 15 electoral votes.
2) There is a trade-off here. Fifteen electoral votes could still be crucial in a close election. But here’s the rub: The analyses that focus only on the potential effect among Latino voters miss half of the equation: The potential effect among white voters.
I’ve made this point before, but consider the case of Arizona. For many liberal commentators, the silver lining to
Ross Douthat has been a columnist The New York Times since 2009: I doubt he will be there much longer.
In The Media and Obama’s Immigration Gambit June 18, 2012 Douthat has the temerity to question the political wisdom behind the Obama Youth Amnesty and – even more heretical – he does so by thinking in terms of race:
Hispanics were still only about 10 percent of the electorate four years ago, whereas whites without college degrees were almost 40 percent. This meant that even though Obama won about 67 percent of Hispanics and only 40 percent of white working class voters, he still won millions more working class white votes in total — and needs to win at least some
Aaron Renn makes an interesting argument in City Journal: