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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; reform</title>
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		<title>Immigration Wars</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/immigration-wars/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=immigration-wars</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/immigration-wars/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:40:23 +0000</pubDate>
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				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[border]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sessions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246545</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An all-star panel takes on America's immigration crisis at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Immigration Wars,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113190066" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Sen. Jeff Sessions:</strong> For 40 years really, the American people have been right and just in pleading with their Congress to create a lawful system of immigration that&#8217;s fairly enforced and that serves the national interest.  It&#8217;s the politicians and the establishment that one time after another, that it always succeeded somehow in keeping the will of the people from being effectuated.  It&#8217;s just amazing.  I said in 2007 we&#8217;d offer amendments and they would offer things that would pass and we&#8217;d offer things, it wouldn&#8217;t pass, and I finally realized this was the test.  If it worked they wouldn&#8217;t pass it.  If it wouldn&#8217;t work, they&#8217;d pass it.  You&#8217;ve seen that, Louie, I know, and the bills that come through. If they&#8217;re moving and got a lot of support you&#8217;d read it carefully and there&#8217;s one loop hole after another and it doesn&#8217;t work.  So first the American people are right, decent and just in making that demand of their government.</p>
<p>Are we a sovereign nation or not?  A sovereign nation controls its borders.  If you have laws it should set forth criteria for entry that are objective and ascertainable and they ought to be followed.  People who apply that don&#8217;t qualify should not get in, and those who qualify should get in.  This is the right way America&#8217;s always thought about its business, and that&#8217;s the way we ought to do now, and that&#8217;s the biggest problem we&#8217;ve got.</p>
<p>The executive amnesty is one of the most breathtaking things I&#8217;ve seen since I&#8217;ve been in Washington.  I do believe it is a constitutional crisis.  It&#8217;s an overreach.  It&#8217;s an attempt by the President to do what a lot of liberal federal judges used to do.  This is the way they explain it.  Well, Congress won&#8217;t act, so I have to act.  When if Congress votes and rejects a bill, it is active.  It has made a decision.  This idea that just because you won&#8217;t pass the bill I want I&#8217;m now able to do it through my executive powers, is so far from the heritage of America, the constitutional order that we&#8217;re so proud of and served us so well is just beyond my comprehension.  So I hope people will push back on that.</p>
<p>So in the first executive amnesty that we probably did not hammer enough with the American people, the people that were here illegally now up to 30/31 years of age, they are given an I.D. card with a Social Security number and it says work authorization across the top of it.  Now the law of the United States is you enter the country unlawfully businesses cannot hire you, they commit an offense, and you&#8217;re not able to work.  Simple enough, first thing you do is you come to a country illegally you don&#8217;t let people start extracting money from the country and so that deal was a presidential overreach, really.  Because the President doesn&#8217;t have the power to authorize somebody to work in contravention of established law passed by the Congress of the United States.  He&#8217;s the chief executive officer.  He&#8217;s supposed to see the laws are enforced, not violate them by the millions, and now he&#8217;s talking about 5 to 6 million more, all of which would put us in a position I think of just collapsing any moral integrity that we have in the legal system.</p>
<p>So if the President, the chief executive, the prosecutor appoints immigration officers and ICE officers, if he just basically says, not only are we not going to deport anybody anymore, we are just gonna give you the right to work in the country, then I think we&#8217;ve reached a point in immigration law that&#8217;s really dangerous.  I just think it&#8217;s, the American people that need to know the enormity of it. And what about the people who didn&#8217;t get it? So there&#8217;s 11 million here, and now we do 5.  Is anybody going to deport the other 5 million?  Oh, you didn&#8217;t get in somehow, you didn&#8217;t make the cut?  There&#8217;s no plan to deport anybody else.  They&#8217;re not going to deport anybody else.</p>
<p>Then finally I would mention this point, and the polling data is very strong on it. Asked a simple question.  Should, at a time of high unemployment, millions of people unemployed, should we attempt to get our people working rather than bringing in people from abroad to take the jobs?  And this is an 80 percent polling number.  I mean we&#8217;ve got to get our people working.  Wages are down since 2000, wages are down about $3,000.00, median household income, $2,300.00 for a family since 2009.  This is not a healthy trend out there.  Dr. Borjas at Harvard has studied this meticulously and has demonstrated how much of that was caused by this very large, unprecedented historically, flow of immigrants into our country.  We are at about the highest level we have ever been and it&#8217;s continuing upward.  So I wanted to say that.</p>
<p>Republicans stopped it.  Not all Republicans, but Republicans did stop it.  You guys in the House, Louie and John, and the others were just heroic because they were trying to pass this thing and they just stood up and read the bill, fought back and were able to stop it right before we recessed for the election and I pleaded with them to also pass language that would block funding to execute the executive amnesty.  So you have to have money to buy I.D. cards, to process all these people.  Congress has the power of the purse.  We barred the President from spending any money to close Guantanamo Bay and he can&#8217;t close Guantanamo Bay because it cost money to close it.  And we do that all the time, every defense bill has things in it like that and other bills to do too, so we should simply say to the President &#8212; so the House passed it right before they left and I think it was a significant factor in the Senate elections that our candidates were demanding of Democrats, why are you blocking simple legislation that would block this President from executing an unlawful order?  And that exit polling that Louie mentioned showed that 80 percent of the American people opposed executive amnesty, who voted in this last election. 80 percent. And so the way it would work in my mind, you fund an entire government of the United States or a portion of it and you simply say also, but you can&#8217;t spend any money to execute the President&#8217;s dream of unlawful amnesty.</p>
<p>Finally it was a near run thing, Louie.  I really think it would have been bad, bad, bad had that bill passed without other things happening as it did on the your, and John&#8217;s leadership and others over there.  It was a battle, there was a lot of courage, there was a lot of pressure came on.  The last day they made Congress stay another day, people had their planes hooked up ready to fly and you all just shut it down and helped, I believe, put us in a position to preserve the rule of law.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> Thank you, Senator.  Congressman Fleming</p>
<p><strong>Rep. John Fleming: </strong>Yes, thank you.  It was great to be with you here for my first freedom session.  First word about my two friends and colleagues to my left, Louie Gomer talks about speaking truth to power but trust me I&#8217;ve been there many times.  He really does speak truth to power.  Yeah, absolutely.  Sometimes I slink down because I&#8217;m afraid something&#8217;s going to get thrown, but he&#8217;s very courageous when it comes to that, and his great leadership.  He really does, he&#8217;s often times, may times, if not all the time, ahead of many of us in the House when it comes to where we&#8217;re going and what we need to do to stop that forward motion.  Senator Sessions, vanguard on this and many other subjects, if you know anybody from Alabama you know just how highly respected Jeff Sessions is, so much so that I believe you didn&#8217;t have an opponent for your recent reelection.  And members of the House, and I have a lot of good friends from Alabama, we kind of work together as kind of a southeastern &#8212; they all look to Jeff Sessions for leadership, so he continues to be a vanguard on this and many other issues.</p>
<p>You may recall Milton Friedman, the famous 20<sup>th</sup> century economist.  He really said it best.  He said you can have open borders, but you can&#8217;t have a welfare system.  Now you can have a welfare system but you can&#8217;t have open borders, and that&#8217;s playing out today because really these were no problems until our welfare system, the infrastructure was put in place about 1965.  That&#8217;s when we began to have border problems.  Now it&#8217;s true that we all come from immigrants in one or way another, but the way it worked traditionally in America is it was the best and the brightest.  The people who were willing to take the risk who came here for greater opportunity, and still many do.  But what we also find is two important factors.  No. 1, if they don&#8217;t find that opportunity they find a very comfortable safety net system here, upon which to stay.  The other thing is that folks who immigrate here today, most of them come from countries where they look to the government.  That&#8217;s their tradition, is the government takes care of him.  Now when it destroys their civilization, when it destroys their economy, they look for another place to go and where do they come? They come here.  But then what you see is a progressive lowered standard of living.  Well, have we have seen that?  Well look at California today.  California today is not the California that we knew a generation ago and it&#8217;s going down rapidly, so these are all important factors.</p>
<p>Now Senator Sessions, we are pretty sure, is going to be our next budget chairman in the Senate and he will tell you that back in 1997 when we had the last balanced budget, two thirds of our budget was discretionary spending.  That is what we plan to spend each year on defense and on our agencies and departments out there, things that we could cut spending or increase spending from year to year.  Only a third was what we call automatic pilot spending, which is of course entitlement spending, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare and all of these things.  Today it&#8217;s reverse.  It&#8217;s almost two thirds built in infrastructure spending which we can&#8217;t change from year to year and the other third is discretionary and it&#8217;s shrinking rapidly.  The point being that if you were entitled to a benefit we have to pay you whether we have the money or not.  We don&#8217;t plan that spending and so if we continue to grow our entitlement society we will eventually completely displaces discretionary spending and our ability to amount a defense, a common defense and to operate our government.  Remember we&#8217;re $18 trillion in debt and so there&#8217;s no way we can have open borders, accepting peoples with our arms open, allowing them then to fall back on our safety net system and think that we&#8217;re ever, ladies and gentlemen, going to balance our budget.  It just isn&#8217;t going to happen.  So it&#8217;s important that we get honest about the situation.  We do have a right to have sovereign borders; we do have a right to ask of people who come here that they carry their own weight.  Otherwise this nation, as we know it, not because we dislike them, not because we&#8217;re xenophobic, but only because there&#8217;s only so much taxpayers can do to support people from other nations who come here.  Many of them now when they come they refuse to learn our culture, they refuse to learn our language, they refuse to have or build the skills necessary to be successful in America. And as a result of that, that&#8217;s just an economic reality we have to understand, and if we&#8217;re going to remain the only super power in the world and our rightful place in leadership around the world, for what is good and what is generous, and to keep this world a peaceful place, we can&#8217;t allow our economic situation and the opportunities that come from that to diminish.</p>
<p>So I look forward to responding to questions as well but I think it&#8217;s important that we understand that there really is a serious economic issue behind this that even Republicans seem unable to understand.  I understand why Democrats want to do this.  Because as immigrants come into this country, they&#8217;re going to vote.  Usually they&#8217;re going to vote two to one Democrat.  I understand why they do it.  I don&#8217;t understand why Republicans want open borders and amnesty.  We hear that maybe it&#8217;s the Chamber of Commerce that somehow businesses want cheaper labor.  I&#8217;m a business owner; I have 500 employees still today in my private business.  I can tell you I&#8217;m not interested in that.  I want to have good American workers who are skilled and trained.</p>
<p>And finally I will tell you that we actually had a debate about a year ago.  Cato Institute said that it&#8217;s going to help our economy to really have open borders and amnesty.  Okay fine, then Robert Rector, who as you may recall from the Heritage Foundation, the guy who led the effort to put work requirements into Welfare, Welfare reform under Clinton that really dramatically improved the situation in those days, which since have been wiped away by President Obama.  And we have a debate between the two and Robert Rector went through line by line and in great detail to show how open borders are going to destroy our economy and our future and our opportunities that we hope are going to leave a better nation to our children.  The Cato Institute every time their answer was this, we have computer models that tell us that it&#8217;s going to make our economy better.  Well folks you can make a computer model say anything you want, it&#8217;s always garbage in and garbage out.  So once again thank you and I look forward to this important discussion.</p>
<p><strong>Moderator: </strong>Thank you Congressman.  And Mike Cutler</p>
<p><strong>Michael Cutler: </strong>It&#8217;s absolutely a pleasure to be here and a privilege to share the stage with three true leaders in the Congress.  For all the complaints we hear about Congress we do have some real good guys and Jeff Sessions in particular.  I&#8217;m going to tell a quick anecdote and then we&#8217;re going to get into what I want to say, but after 911 I started doing everything in my power to try to wake people up to the immigration issues, the immigration component to the terror attacks.  The ashes landed on my home.  My neighbors died and I had testified four and a half years earlier before a House Immigration Subcommittee Hearing on the nexus between visa fraud, immigration benefit fraud and terrorism.  Yes we had two terror attacks in &#8217;93 and it was because of those two failures of the immigration system that those attacks were possible.  And my wife and I &#8212; as you know, if you&#8217;re married you know how the back and forth goes &#8212; kept thinking, well, what are you doing? You&#8217;re spending all this time and effort and it&#8217;s going nowhere.</p>
<p>And I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times back in &#8217;07 that I had testified before three House and one Senate hearing about comprehensive reform.  And I wrote a commentary with bleary eyes and I decided to rename it.  I&#8217;m working on my candor, but you tell me if I&#8217;m being successful.  I called it the &#8220;Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act.&#8221;  I think we&#8217;re getting somewhere but I think Senator Sessions liked it so much that he quoted me on three separate occasions.  The last time you did this, Senator, I got a frantic phone call from one of the 911 family members, a former New York City police officer whose son-in-law was obliterated on 911.  I&#8217;m getting a little choked up.  He said Mike, quick, put the TV on and go to C-SPAN.  I said, Bruce, I&#8217;m in my car, I can&#8217;t.  He said shut up and listen and he held the phone next to his TV and there was Senator Sessions from the floor of the United States Senate quoting me by name, urging his colleagues to take my advice and telling them that I had referred to comprehensive reform as the &#8220;Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act.&#8221;  My wife gets into the car, I&#8217;m in Brooklyn, and she looks at me and says, &#8220;Are you okay?&#8221;  I said, &#8220;Why?&#8221;  She said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve never seen that weird look on your face.&#8221;  I said, &#8220;You mean more than usual?&#8221; and she said, &#8220;What happened?&#8221; and I told her the story, and a couple of days later &#8212; so many people love to plagiarize and we&#8217;ve all experienced it, but not Senator Sessions.  This man is a class act from square one to whatever square you want to go to, sent me a certificate to commemorate this.  So this package comes, my wife opens it, it&#8217;s from Washington and her eyes get bigger and bigger and bigger and she turns to me and says, &#8220;My gosh, do you see what this is?&#8221;  I said, &#8220;Yes.&#8221;  I said, &#8220;Are we done arguing?&#8221;  She said, &#8220;Yes,&#8221; and she ran out and framed it and it hangs on the wall in my home and I want to thank you for that, Senator.  So when I heard I was going to be here and I heard that Senator Sessions was going to be here, I said, &#8220;Well, I hope I get to see him,&#8221; never thinking that I would have the privilege of sharing the stage with these three amazing leaders, so I thank all of you for all your dedication and hard work on our behalf.</p>
<p>Our immigration laws are not a single issue, but a singular issue because they impact every challenge and threat that America faces today.  I started working for the INS in 1971 as an immigration inspector at Kennedy Airport.  Did that job for four years, for one of the four years I was assigned as an adjudications officer doing the marriage interviews, like you&#8217;ve seen in the movies. And when I worked with the law firm retained by Governor Jan Brewer to defend that state against the outrageous lawsuit over SB1070, I said that for that four-year period that I had that inspector&#8217;s badge I had my eye to the peep hole on America&#8217;s front door.  Houses come equipped with doorbells, peepholes and door locks so we make certain not to allow people into our homes to pose a threat to our safety or wellbeing.  Why in the world shouldn&#8217;t the United States as a minimum do that for us and our nation today?</p>
<p>I happen to be registered as a Democrat, I&#8217;ve always voted as an Independent.  I think anybody who votes a straight party line without paying attention to who the person is, is an idiot.  I have campaigned for conservative Republicans.  I don&#8217;t care if you&#8217;re with the Hopping Kangaroo Party, there&#8217;s only one question for me in this day and age.  Do you stand with America and do you stand with Americans?  I became a special agent in 1975.  In 1976 I tripped over a PLO plot to blow up an Israel oil refinery.  Thank God we prevented it.  For the balance of my career I had a wonderful relationship with the Israeli National Police.  It was my introduction to the nexus between immigration and international terrorism.  1988 I was assigned to the Unified Intelligence Division of DEA as the first INS agent assign to that position and in &#8217;91 I became a senior special agent with the Drug Task Force, Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force.  I spent the next ten years there.  And I want you to understand something, with all the nonsense about the arrest statistics &#8212; I was on with Neil Cavuto and Neil said, &#8220;Well, if arrests are down it means that there&#8217;s fewer here,&#8221; and on and on and on.  I said, Neil, I don&#8217;t trust the arrest statistics and it&#8217;s just not the Mexican border.  I don&#8217;t know why we&#8217;re so fixated on that one border.  I wrote an article for Front Page Magazine.  I&#8217;m honored to be a columnist for Front Page, and I called the border security the immigration colander.  This notion that if we halfway, kind of, sort of plug one hole in the bottom of the colander that you use to drain pasta that now we can use it as a bucket to carry water is nuts.  We are a country of 50 border states.  In fact there&#8217;s an excellent film that just came out by the Tea Party Patriots.  I&#8217;m very pleased to be in it, Jeff Session, Louie Gohmert are also in that film, and it&#8217;s called the &#8220;Border States of America,&#8221; and they borrowed my tag line, the subtitle is &#8220;Every State is Now a Border State.&#8221;  See, we have 50 border states.  Any state with an international airport, any state that has access to our coastline, any state that lies along the northern or southern borders are all border states.  Now when aliens run our borders they don&#8217;t come by the way Neil Armstrong went to the moon.  They&#8217;re not coming to stand on our side of the border, plant a flag, grab a couple of rocks and go home.  They&#8217;re headed for the rest of the country, and people that are evading the inspection process know they&#8217;re excludable, and we&#8217;ll get into it in one moment about who we&#8217;re trying to exclude and who we&#8217;re supposed to exclude, but I said to Neil, this notion of figuring out who&#8217;s here based on arrest statistics is kind of like trying to take attendance by asking people not present to raise their hand.  It doesn&#8217;t work.</p>
<p>You want to know if the border is secure, do you want a really great solid metric that can&#8217;t be screwed around with?  Look at the price and availability of heroin and cocaine. Those poisons are not produced inside the United States.  Every gram of heroin, every gram of cocaine present in the United States provides graphic evidence of a failure of border security and they fund the cartels, the proceeds, those proceeds fund terrorism.  Those proceeds are funding the people who want us destroyed and those drugs are a big part of the violent crime we&#8217;re facing in cities across America and in destruction of American lives. So let&#8217;s come back to a primary idea.  America&#8217;s immigration laws and America&#8217;s borders exist for two primary reasons.  Protect innocent lives and the jobs of American workers.  What is unreasonable about that?  And now you mention the 911 Commission, so I want to read two quick sentences, and this is from the 911 Commission Staff Report on terrorist travel, and you should know that I provided testimony to the 911 Commission.  I&#8217;ve arrested several terrorist in my career in fact.  This is to be found in the preface, the very beginning of the 911 Commission Staff Report.  These are the agents and attorneys who worked with the 911 Commission.  It starts out by saying,</p>
<blockquote><p>It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country.  Yet prior to September 11 while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal.  Indeed even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. Visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy.  We believe for reasons that we discussed in the following pages that it must be made one.</p></blockquote>
<p>Now I want you to know on 911 there were 26 visa waiver countries.  They warned us that the way that visas were processed created vulnerabilities.  Today we have 38 visa waiver countries. Chili became number 38 March 31 of this year in large measure of pressure being applied by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they created a program known as the Discover America Partnership.  They&#8217;ve joined with hotel hospitality travel industries, and they&#8217;re pushing for it and they&#8217;re spending a ton of money.  Isn&#8217;t it nice to know that the people responsible for room service are now making national security decisions for the United States of America?  Think about it.</p>
<p>Now this is on Page 98 of that 911 Commission Staff Report:</p>
<blockquote><p>Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or imbed themselves in the United States if they&#8217;re operational plans were to come to fruition.  As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status [think of the DREAMers] or applying for asylum after entering.  In many cases the act of filing for immigration benefits sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated.  Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials and execute an attack.</p></blockquote>
<p>The DREAMers are not even being interviewed, folks.  We&#8217;re giving identity documents to people who could be as old as 31 years of age and the magic word is &#8220;I came in when I was 15.&#8221;  They&#8217;re in.  There&#8217;s no field investigations. What could possibly go wrong? Please understand what we&#8217;re talking about. And when I&#8217;m accused of being anti-immigrant I&#8217;ll end by saying this, and I hope you guys have some great questions so we can go further with the conversation, but let me tell you something: If you look at how bad it is right now, if we go down this path of providing these documents and we allow ourselves to be intimidated &#8212; when people say to me you&#8217;re anti-immigrant, there&#8217;s a very easy answer.  I am pro enforcement.  The same laws that tell us who to kick out and who to keep out also tell us who to let in.  Every year this country admits more than a million lawful immigrants, more than the rest of the world combined.  Every year this year provides naturalization, citizenship, to more than a half-million new citizens.  These are the laws that I support, that I enforced and administered for 30 years.  How in the world can you be anti-immigrant when you support the laws by which we admit more immigrants legally than the rest of the world and we are now admitting more foreign workers legally entitled to work in the United States each month than the number of new jobs we&#8217;re creating?  My suggestion is this, rather than create jobs, we need to liberate our jobs and get Americans back to work.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Rep. Louie Gohmert: </strong>I can&#8217;t emphasize it enough. You heard me, you&#8217;ve heard everybody up here.  John Fleming and I border, we share the Louisiana-Texas line and he&#8217;s an MD. Wouldn&#8217;t you have loved to have a doctor with his demeanor?  He&#8217;s brilliant.  His integrity is impeccable.  You&#8217;ll never tempt him to break his word, to be dishonest, and I can&#8217;t tell you what an honor it is to serve with a guy like that.  Just methodical, brilliant and impeccable integrity.  And then Mike has said many times, and it&#8217;s caught on big, but every state is a border state, and some of us, I think everybody up here, is pushing to have an analysis done of the enterovirus strain, that all of a sudden just appeared in all these different states at the same time.  It happened to be states where ironically our health and human services department shipped people without proper bedding medically all over the country and then all of sudden this enterovirus that&#8217;s killed more people in the U.S. than Ebola.  It is a danger, and then quickly, just so you understand, even though we have a lawless President, there are people that believe in following the law that are still able to come up with ways to enforce it around our President.  Spent many days and nights on the border in the last months, and you&#8217;ve seen on the news there&#8217;s a place, Anzalduas Park, south of McCallen.  There&#8217;s a big park on the Mexican side, a park on the American side, and people buy guys on jet skis to bring them across, and I&#8217;ve seen several guys do that.  The last one was a Chinese national.  Why he was there, but anyway, he paid them to bring them across.  But each time they come across a constable &#8212; they don&#8217;t come if they see any border patrol trucks or anything, but they come across and then all of a sudden the constable appears and arrests them.  And so I asked the constable, I&#8217;ve seen you do this a number of times.  You know after the Supreme Court case in Arizona, case said you can&#8217;t, local and state law enforcement, can&#8217;t enforce federal law.  I&#8217;m thrilled that you&#8217;re doing that &#8212; and they turn them over to the border patrol &#8212; but what&#8217;s your basis since the Supreme Court said that?  And the constable said, &#8220;Did you pay $4.00 to get in the park?&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Yeah,&#8221; and he said they didn&#8217;t, they&#8217;re trespassing.</p>
<p><strong>Moderator: </strong>Thank you, Congressman Gohmert.  We&#8217;re going to start the questions.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>I&#8217;m Bob Lawn. I&#8217;m from California, and my question is, just direct to the panel is, I&#8217;d like to, instead of talking about policy, I agree with policy, but I&#8217;d like you to talk about strategy.  We know that Barrack Obama doesn&#8217;t care about policy.  He only cares about winning the presidency for the next Democrat and that the reason that he&#8217;s doing what he&#8217;s doing is to activate the Hispanic base &#8217;cause he knows that they often don&#8217;t vote, but the one thing that activates them is that you can, everybody&#8217;s distracted by this issue, and I wonder what things can be done by Republicans to strategically tell people in the Hispanic base or find ways to counter his tactics in this situation?  He knows that we will come in and talk policy and do what we do in order to turn off that base.  Are there ways for us to let the Hispanic American voters who have Hispanic heritage know that we care about them and kind of counter what he&#8217;s trying to do?</p>
<p><strong>Moderator: </strong>And just again to save time I&#8217;m going to ask our Republican Congressmen and Senator here to caucus and pick one of them to answer that question, just to save time.</p>
<p><strong>Rep. John Fleming: </strong>Apparently I&#8217;ve been chosen for that.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Cutler: </strong>Congatulations.</p>
<p><strong>Rep. John Fleming: </strong>Let me first of all say that the thing we haven&#8217;t done as Republicans and what we should do really as Americans is attack the myth that we have to be pro-amnesty, pro-open borders in order to win elections.  The data doesn&#8217;t support that.  Even when you, and Louie was quoting this a few moments ago, if you ask the immigrants, people who are here already, they don&#8217;t want to be displaced by other immigrants.  What&#8217;s important to them is again kitchen-table issues just like everything else, so somehow somebody has gotten into the heads of Republicans, again I told you, Democrats, we know why they&#8217;re doing what they&#8217;re doing, but we need to get Republicans turned around on this issue to say look, this is not popular with the American people, it&#8217;s not even popular with recent immigrants and that what we really need is, again, a nation where people can have jobs and an economy again and get off this idea that we have to have open borders to win elections and that we&#8217;ll never get a President again.  That is absurd, folks.  Just look at the pyramid we have today.  We have more Governors, more State Houses than we&#8217;ve ever had in probably a hundred years.  We have the largest House majority than we&#8217;ve had since 1929 or 8, it depends on what number you land on, and in the Senate we&#8217;ve regained just in a few short years.  The American people are with us on these issues. &#8230; I&#8217;ll toss this, but I really think that&#8217;s a myth.  I think that people of color are with us as well.  We just don&#8217;t recognize it.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Cutler: </strong>I just want to take 30 seconds.  You know it&#8217;s amazing that the same journalists who jump up and down and talk about race, politics and police officers that profile, when you can say that everybody who&#8217;s last name is Rodriguez thinks and votes the same way, or every Jew thinks and votes &#8212; I&#8217;m Jewish.  I get crazy when I hear this.  It&#8217;s an insidious form of racism and profiling and they need to be talked about, and by the way, immigration laws don&#8217;t distinguish by race, ethnicity or religion and the members of the ethnic immigrant communities, Russian, Asian, Latino, Caribbean, doesn&#8217;t matter, they&#8217;re at the greatest risk from illegal immigration because that&#8217;s where the gangsters and the fugitives set up shop, set up houses of prostitution and peddle narcotics.  If you want to win their votes, tell them the truth, that this is about protecting them.  The grounds for exclusion are aliens with dangerous diseases, mental illness, convicted felons, human rights violators, war criminals, spies and terrorists.  Who do you want living next door to you if we fail on that mission?</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert: </strong>During those nights I&#8217;ve spent down on the border, I was talking to an Hispanic Border Patrolman, and this is follow up to what you&#8217;re saying, and you&#8217;ve heard there are so many tens of thousands of children that come across unaccompanied &#8212; not a single child, young child, ever comes across unaccompanied. I&#8217;ve watched them separate after they get over to our side, but they don&#8217;t cross that river unaccompanied. But this Border Patrolman said we&#8217;ve got all these form questions we ask, and he said, I will ask, we&#8217;re supposed to ask, why did you leave your home country, Guatemala, El Salvador, and come here, and he said over 90 percent of the time they say to get away from gang violence. And he said since I speak better Spanish than a lot of them I don&#8217;t let them get away with it and I bear down on them and I say, now you may find some Gringo that buys that stuff, but you and I, you paid a gang to bring you into this country, so don&#8217;t tell me you came to escape gang violence, and he said then of those 90 percent that say that, 90 percent of them say well, you&#8217;re right, but we were told to say we&#8217;re coming to escape gang violence.  They know the game and we need to get engaged.</p>
<p><strong>Moderator: </strong>Thank you Congressman and thank you everybody for attending today.</p>
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		<title>Obama &#8216;Solves&#8217; Immigration Crisis by Ordering &#8216;Shields Down&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michael-cutler/obama-solves-immigration-crisis-by-ordering-shields-down/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-solves-immigration-crisis-by-ordering-shields-down</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michael-cutler/obama-solves-immigration-crisis-by-ordering-shields-down/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:11:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Cutler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246041</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The catastrophic impact Obama's immigration power grab will have on America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/6364423ec44b012d660f6a70670060f2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246042" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/6364423ec44b012d660f6a70670060f2-417x350.jpg" alt="6364423ec44b012d660f6a70670060f2" width="311" height="261" /></a>That we live in a perilous era is hardly a headline &#8212; this is a well established fact.  America and Americans face an existential threat posed by terrorist organizations.  Additionally, huge quantities of heroin and cocaine have flooded across our borders, smuggled by pernicious drug trafficking organizations that have set up shop in communities across the United States.  There is a strong nexus between narcotics trafficking and narcotics use and crime, especially violent crime.</p>
<p>The tens of billions of dollars, the annual proceeds from the drug trade, flow into the coffers of transnational drug trafficking organizations and international terrorist organizations.</p>
<p>Finally, our nation&#8217;s economy continues to falter and struggle as do tens of millions of American workers and their families find that their incomes shrink as their expenses rise as more foreign workers enter the United States each month than the number of new jobs that are being created.</p>
<p>All of the above-noted issues have a clear nexus to failures of our nation to secure its borders and enforce the immigration laws effectively.  In point of fact our immigration laws were enacted with two primary goals, protect American lives and the jobs of American workers.</p>
<p>In point of fact, our borders and our immigration laws are supposed to shield America and Americans.  Given all of the threats and challenges confronting America and Americans those shields should never be more important.  However, you would never know it to listen to the President and, frankly, to all too many of our nation&#8217;s politicians from both sides of the political aisle in Washington and on the state and local levels.</p>
<p>On November 20, 2014 President Obama went before the cameras at the White House and laid out his plans to unilaterally “fix” the broken immigration system.  That there are millions of illegal aliens present in the United States indicates that our immigration system is failing.  That terrorists have been able to enter the United States and embed themselves in the United States provides further evidence of failures of the immigration system.  Consider, if you will, that the Tsarnaev brothers were able to gain lawful entry into the United States and apparently game the political asylum program. This provides a graphic example of a failure of that component of the immigration system.</p>
<p>“The Social Contract” published my article in its Summer 2013 edition, on how fraud in the political asylum program currently enables our enemies to see in America&#8217;s compassion, weakness. The title of my article was <span style="color: #386eff;"><a href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_23_4/tsc_23_4_cutler.shtml">&#8220;Political Asylum: Where Compassion and National Security Intersect.&#8221;</a></span></p>
<p>What has never been explained, by President Obama or others who claim that the immigration system is <i>broken,</i> is how their proposals will greatly reduce the number of illegal aliens present in the United States.  What has never been explained is how the proposed “fixes” will create integrity to the processes by which aliens are granted visas or immigration benefits such as gaining lawful immigrant status or United States citizenship.  These are critical issues that were identified by the 9/11 Commission.</p>
<p>Traditionally when laws are violated our leaders call for enhanced enforcement efforts to combat and deter the crimes.  Because of concerns about those who have trespassed on New York City landmarks, Senator Chuck Schumer has proposed that a law be enacted that would subject those trespassers to a period of imprisonment of five years rather than the maximum of one year currently on the books.  He stated in part:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>“While individuals like this (trespassers) may have meant no harm, their acts put commuters and first responders at risk,” Schumer said. “They also inspire copycats who may have much more evil plans in mind.”</i></p>
<p><i>Critical infrastructure is defined by the Patriot Act as systems and assets so vital to the U.S., that the incapacity or destruction to them would have a debilitating effect.</i></p>
<p><i>“That would be a bridge, a power plant, the air vents to one of our tunnels,” Miller said.</i></p>
<p><i>Miller and Schumer said </i><a href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/10/13/sen-schumer-proposes-bill-to-make-trespassing-on-critical-infrastructure-a-federal-crime/"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>the new legislation</i></span></a><i> will help serve as a deterrent.</i></p>
<p><i>“When stunts like this occur, the New York City trespassing law has a maximum of one year and it’s often three months,” Schumer said. “That’s not enough punishment to deter this behavior. It’s time to change that.”</i></p>
<p><i>Schumer said this legislation is based on another federal law protecting railroads.</i></p></blockquote>
<p style="color: #011480;"><span style="color: #000000;">His statements were reported upon in an October 14, 2014 CBS News report, <a href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/10/14/mayor-de-blasio-heads-to-d-c-for-meetings-on-nyc-security-and-counter-terrorism/">&#8220;Mayor De Blasio Heads To D.C. For Meetings On NYC Security And Counter-Terrorism.&#8221;</a></span></p>
<p>However, Senator Chuck Schumer has been the staunchest advocate for providing a pathway to United States citizenship to illegal aliens who have trespassed on America by running our nation&#8217;s borders and evading the crucial screening process conducted by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors at ports of entry.  This serves to encourage, not deter, aliens to run our nation&#8217;s borders.</p>
<p>Where our broken immigration system is concerned, the obvious questions not being asked or answered is, “Where is the deterrent?”  “How is the lack of integrity in the immigration adjudications program being addressed?”</p>
<p>President Obama&#8217;s tone has been defiant, claiming that if members of Congress wanted to stop him from taking his actions that they should pass an immigration bill that he agreed with.  It was a stunning statement especially considering that Obama was a constitutional law instructor.  On numerous previous public appearances he made it clear that he did not have the authority to act alone to take the actions that he is now taking to deal with immigration.  Yet, for reasons never articulated, he has now made it clear that he will now do what he had previous claimed he lacked the legal authority to do.</p>
<p>He has also never explained how his actions would curtail future illegal immigration or address the recommendations and findings of the 9/11 Commission.  But then, these are critical questions that virtually no journalists have ever asked or members of the Republican Party have ever addressed, either.</p>
<p>Obama is attempting to extort immigration legislation by using the sort of “strong arm” technique of Tony Soprano rather than the conciliatory and constitutionally mandated technique befitting the President of the United States, who leads the most powerful democratic republic on the planet.</p>
<p>While the media has fixated on the procedural issues of whether or not what Obama is promising (threatening?) to do is within the bounds of his legal authority as the President of the United States, what has never been discussed to any great degree is the other procedural question &#8212; how would USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) implement this massive amnesty program involving millions of illegal aliens with even a sliver of integrity?</p>
<p>On November 30, 2013 Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) posted my commentary, <span style="color: #011480;">&#8220;Political Asylum Fraud: Where America&#8217;s Compassion Becomes Vulnerability&#8221;</span>that was predicated on a hard-hitting report posted by ABC News on November 20, 2013, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-terrorists-country-refugees/story?id=20931131"><span style="color: #386eff;">&#8220;Exclusive: US May Have Let &#8216;Dozens&#8217; of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees.&#8221;</span></a></p>
<p>The number one priority of the government of the United States is national security and, with it, public safety.  How on earth could the administration successfully administer that program in a manner that would not undermine national security and public safety?  Let us remember that America&#8217;s borders and immigration laws are its shields, its first line of defense and last line of defense against international terrorists, transnational criminals and other foreign nationals whose presence in the United States would undermine national security, public safety, public health or otherwise compromise the well-being of America and Americans.</p>
<p>On September 10, 2014 the New York Post published a disturbing report, <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/09/10/homeland-security-we-cant-stop-isis-from-coming-into-us/"><span style="color: #011480;">&#8220;Homeland Security: We can’t stop ISIS from coming into US.&#8221;</span></a></p>
<p>Here is an important quote from this report:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>‘Terrorists could be just one visa-free flight away from arriving in the United States.’</i></p>
<p><i>-Rep. Candice Miller</i></p>
<p><i>Members of Congress cited estimates that 12,000 foreigners have traveled to Syria to engage in the civil war, including more than 1,000 Europeans and more than 100 Americans, with a dozen Americans believed to be fighting alongside ISIS.</i></p>
<p><i>“ISIS is a threat to the United States and to the people of the United States,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).</i></p>
<p><i>“We may be reminded on 9/11 the count was approximately 19 who created the most heinous terrorist attack, killing more than 3,000.”</i></p>
<p><i>One Frenchman who trained with ISIS went to Brussels to murder four people at a Jewish museum in May, authorities say.</i></p>
<p><i>State Department and Homeland Security leaders said they’ve been working diligently with the tools at their disposal, including constantly upgrading border security procedures, reviewing the terror watch list and vetting visas.</i></p>
<p><i>“Though we currently have no credible information to indicate that ISIL is planning to attack the homeland, we remain concerned in the long term that their access to Westerners … will allow them to plan and coordinate attacks in the US,” Lasley said.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>On November 10, 2014 Newsweek published a report about how the CIA is unable to effectively vet just 5,000 Syrians who claim to be moderates who want to help fight ISIS.  Realize that these are people who are in their country of citizenship and the CIA is able to conduct in-person interviews and are able to conduct investigations in the towns and villages where these people live, yet the vetting process is a disaster.  If it is virtually impossible to effectively screen 5,000 Syrians within their own country, how on earth could USCIS properly vet 5 million or, likely, many more aliens in the United States without an interview or field investigation?</p>
<p style="color: #011480;"><span style="color: #000000;">The Newsweek article, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/21/moderate-rebels-please-raise-your-hands-283449.html">&#8220;Inside the CIA&#8217;s Syrian Rebels Vetting Machine,&#8221;</a> begins with this passage:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><i>Nothing has come in for more mockery during the Obama administration’s halting steps into the Syrian civil war than its employment of “moderate” to describe the kind of rebels it is willing to back. In one of the more widely cited japes, The New Yorker’s resident humorist, Andy Borowitz, presented a “Moderate Syrian Application Form,” in which applicants were asked to describe themselves as either “A) Moderate, B) Very moderate, C) Crazy moderate or D) Other.”</i></p>
<p><i>After Senator John McCain allegedly posed with Syrians “on our side” who turned out to be kidnappers—a report later called into question—Jon Stewart cracked, “Not everyone is going to be wearing their ‘HELLO I’M A TERRORIST’ name badge.”</i></p>
<p><i>Behind the jokes, however, is the deadly serious responsibility of the CIA and Defense Department to vet Syrians before they receive covert American training, aid and arms. But according to U.S. counterterrorism veterans, a system that worked pretty well during four decades of the Cold War has been no match for the linguistic, cultural, tribal and political complexities of the Middle East, especially now in Syria. “We’re completely out of our league,” one former CIA vetting expert declared on condition of anonymity, reflecting the consensus of intelligence professionals with firsthand knowledge of the Syrian situation. “To be really honest, very few people know how to vet well. It’s a very specialized skill. It’s extremely difficult to do well” in the best of circumstances, the former operative said. And in Syria it has proved impossible.</i></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="color: #386eff;"><a href="http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Monograph.pdf">The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel</a></span>was prepared by the staff that assisted the 9/11 Commission.  The preface of that document began with this paragraph:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.&#8221;</i></p></blockquote>
<p>That report also detailed numerous examples of instances where terrorists not only made use of visa and immigration benefit fraud to enter the United States, but to also embed themselves in the United States. Page 47 of this report noted:</p>
<blockquote><p>“<i>Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.”</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It is significant to note that the Seasonal Agricultural Program, also known as the Special Agricultural Program (SAW), were major components of the 1986 amnesty and that New York&#8217;s then-Congressman Chuck Schumer was one of that program&#8217;s major architects even though there were absolutely no farms in his congressional district when he concocted it.</p>
<p>This paragraph is found on page 98 of the report, under the title “Immigration Benefits”:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The program that the administration is about to create violates the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission yet, incredibly, this issue is never raised in the mainstream media or members of either political party in either the House of Representatives or the Senate.</p>
<p>While Obama and others have stated that the program being by the administration would involve five million illegal aliens, there is no assurance that humongous as that number is might not quickly swell to double or triple that number.  In 1986 the Reagan administration predicted that roughly one million illegal aliens would participate in the amnesty program that was a part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. By the time that the bureaucratic dust had settled between 3.5 and 4 million aliens had gained lawful status.</p>
<p>While the majority of these illegal aliens are not likely to have serious criminal histories or affiliations with terrorist organizations, the sheer magnitude of this program would create a monstrous haystack in which some truly deadly needles will easily be able to conceal themselves.  Because of the huge number of applications that will likely be filed, there would be no capacity to conduct routine face-to-face interviews with the applicants.  There would be no capacity to conduct routine field investigations to seek to verify information contained in the applications.</p>
<p>Furthermore, because of the huge number of applications and relatively sparse numbers of USCIS adjudications officers, applications will need to be processed quickly.  This raises yet another area of concern.  It takes just minutes for an adjudications officer to approve an application but may take hours, days or even weeks for those adjudicators to deny an application.  Adjudications Officers will be required to process a minimum number of applications per day or week to satisfy the standards established in their evaluations which are prepared periodically.  This will force these dedicated employees to be pressured to approve the great majority of the applications that they are given to adjudicate.</p>
<p>On November 1, 2013 CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization posted my commentary: <a href="http://www.capsweb.org/blog/speed-kills-uscis">&#8220;Speed Kills at USCIS”</a></p>
<p>USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) is the woebegone division of the DHS that would be tasked with administering this program. As it is, this beleaguered and inept agency cannot keep up with its workload without “rubber-stamping” approvals on many applications where this slipshod approach enables fraud to often go undetected.  It only takes minutes for an Adjudications Officer to approve an application for a benefit such as lawful status or citizenship, but it may require hours or days to deny an application.</p>
<p>The adjudications officers will be pressured to “get to yes” as was reported by the media about instructions given to these USCIS officials.  Furthermore, their evaluations contain productivity requirements (quotas).  A diligent adjudicator will find his/her career imperiled for not meeting quotas that all but preclude denying more than a very few applications.</p>
<p>I wrote an article about the plight of these officials in my article for CAPS, <a href="http://www.capsweb.org/blog/immigration-bon-bon-factory"><span style="color: #011480;">&#8220;The Immigration Bon Bon Factory.&#8221;</span></a>  In my piece I noted that a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbNcQlzV-4"><span style="color: #011480;">hilarious episode of &#8220;I Love Lucy&#8221;</span></a> found the hapless Lucy and her comedic side-kick Ethel working in a candy factory and were assigned to wrap morsels of bon bons. They were unable to keep up with the pace of candy hurtling at them on a conveyor belt that started slowly but quickly accelerated to warp speed.  They were warned that if they failed to keep pace with the candy they would be fired.  To keep from losing their jobs they began stuffing the candy down their clothing and eating them, but to no avail.</p>
<p>While the situation Lucy and Ethel found themselves in were designed to entertain their audience, there is nothing amusing about the plight of the employees of USCIS or what it means for national security.</p>
<p>This is not just speculation on my part but is, in fact, based on the current reality in terms of how the hundreds of thousands of applications for DREAMERS are being adjudicated now.  Indeed, the approval rate for the DREAMERS under the DACA (Deferred Action- Childhood Arrivals) Program now exceeds 95%.</p>
<p>Because of this illegal aliens, who, for reasons only known to them, evaded the inspections process that is supposed to prevent the entry of aliens whose presence would be problematic for America and Americans, will see an opportunity to secure lawful status and official identity documents by committing fraud that is most likely to go undetected.  Aliens will be able to succeed in lying about their identities, including potentially their true countries of citizenship.  They will also likely be able to successfully make false claims concerning their dates and methods of entry into the United States.</p>
<p>That these aliens evaded the inspections process is all but ignored in the media and in the statements made by our supposed political leaders.  Aliens who run our borders entered the United States by evading the inspections process conducted at ports of entry by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors that is supposed to prevent the entry of aliens into the United States whose presence would be dangerous to the safety and well-being of America and Americans.</p>
<p><span style="color: #011480;"><a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182">Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182</a></span><span style="color: #0d2f87;"> </span>enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded. Among these classes are aliens who suffer from dangerous communicable diseases or extreme mental illness. Additionally convicted felons, human rights violators, war criminals, terrorists and spies are to be excluded, as well as aliens who would seek unlawful employment thus displacing American workers or driving down the wages of American workers who are similarly employed and aliens who would become public charges.</p>
<p>It should be obvious that aliens who evade that inspections process do so because they know that they belong to one or more categories of aliens who are to be prevented from entering the United States.  What is not obvious about these aliens is any information as to what would prevent them from being lawfully admitted.  There is no way to readily determine their true identities or backgrounds.  This means that they may successfully lie about their countries of citizenship as well as their names and dates of birth.  Their is no way to even know when or how they actually entered the United States.</p>
<p>The National Review Online posted an article that coincided with the New York Post Post article, <b> </b><span style="color: #011480;"><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/389829/isis-fighters-getting-caught-coming-across-us-mexican-border-jim-geraghty">&#8220;ISIS Fighters Getting Caught Coming Across the U.S.-Mexican Border?&#8221;</a></span></p>
<p>Here is the text of this relatively short and disconcerting report:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>From the midweek edition of the </i><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/newsletters"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>Morning Jolt</i></span></a><i>:</i></p>
<p><b><i>Say What? ‘At Least Ten ISIS Fighters Have Been Caught Coming Across the Border’</i></b></p>
<p><i>Rep. </i><a href="http://hunter.house.gov/"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>Duncan Hunter</i></span></a><i>, Republican of California, does not seem like a nut job or prone to wild exaggerations. But </i><a href="http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2014/10/stunner-rep-duncan-hunter-r-ca-ten-isis.html"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>last night he said something that should make jaws drop</i></span></a><i>:</i></p>
<p><b><i>Van Susteren:</i></b><i> Hold on. Stop for one second.</i></p>
<p><b><i>Hunter:</i></b><i> They are going to be bombing American cities coming across from Mexico.</i></p>
<p><b><i>Van Susteren:</i></b><i> Let me ask a question. You say that they are coming in the southern border, which changes all the dynamics Do you have any information that they are coming in through the southern border now?</i></p>
<p><b><i>Hunter:</i></b><i> Yes.</i></p>
<p><b><i>Van Susteren:</i></b><i> Tell me what you know.</i></p>
<p><b><i>Hunter:</i></b><i> At least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the border in Texas.</i></p>
<p><b><i>Van Susteren:</i></b><i> How do you know that?</i></p>
<p><b><i>Hunter:</i></b><i> Because I’ve asked the border patrol, Greta.</i></p>
<p><b><i>Van Susteren:</i></b><i> And the border patrol just let’s ISIS members come across the border?</i></p>
<p><b><i>Hunter:</i></b><i> No. They caught them at the border. Therefore, we know that ISIS is coming across the border. If they catch five or ten of them, you know that there are going to be dozens more that did not get caught by the border patrol. That’s how you know. That’s where we are at risk here, is from ISIS and radical Islamists coming across the border. Once again, they don’t have a navy, air force, nuclear weapons. The only way that Americans are going to be harmed by radical Islam — Chairman Dempsey said the same thing. He said that’s where the major threat is here, that’s how these guys are going to infiltrate through America and harm Americans.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Providing millions of illegal aliens with lawful status and official identity documents would not provide a deterrence to millions of aspiring illegal aliens from around the world and with the abject lack of integrity to the process, could potentially wind up with the additional consequences of providing terrorists with official identity documents in false names.</p>
<p>Mr. Obama&#8217;s plans could be the ultimate bad news.</p>
<p>Given the foregoing, Star Trek&#8217;s Captain James T. Kirk would likely command, “Shields up!”</p>
<p>Incomprehensibly, Mr. Obama is ordering just the opposite and the focus of attention of the media and politicians from both parties is solely on whether or not the President&#8217;s executive orders are constitutional, certainly a major issue.  However, what is being ignored is the impact this will have on our nation and our citizens in this particularly perilous era.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> interview with <strong>Michael Cutler</strong> on <strong>“The Immigration Crisis”</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pXthT43Cbok" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>To Amnesty 5 Million</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/to-amnesty-5-million/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-amnesty-5-million</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:55:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[address]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[television]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245773</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The lawless Obamnesty has arrived.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245774" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama2-450x281.jpg" alt="President Obama Delivers Remarks On Executive Action Immigration Reform" width="388" height="242" /></a>Ignoring the brutal, historic slap-down angry American voters gave his party this month, President Obama unveiled plans for a unilaterally imposed amnesty that will shield an estimated 5 million illegal aliens from deportation.</p>
<p>Whether Republicans, now in possession of a thunderous mandate to fight Obama tooth and nail, will fight this despotic usurpation of the lawmaking powers of Congress remains to be seen.</p>
<p>Obama doesn&#8217;t care. He is pressing on, hoping to fill America with millions of new Democrat voters. And he&#8217;s going to kill American jobs in the process.</p>
<p>&#8220;We expect people who live in this country to play by the rules,&#8221; said the president. The address from the White House came yesterday, which just so happened to be Revolution Day (also known as Civil War Day) in Mexico.</p>
<p>&#8220;We expect those who cut the line will not be unfairly rewarded,&#8221; the president continued. Yet Obama went on to propose just such a reward in the form of a special &#8220;deal&#8221; for unlawful immigrants:</p>
<blockquote><p>So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens or illegal residents. If you register, pass a criminal background check and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.</p></blockquote>
<p>Strangely, Obama, who routinely flouts the Constitution, still acknowledges some limits to his power. The deal, he said, does not apply to recently arrived illegal aliens or illegals who have yet to sneak into the country.</p>
<p>&#8220;It does not grant citizenship or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive,&#8221; Obama said. &#8220;Only Congress can do that. All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.&#8221;</p>
<p>Whether the benefits illegal aliens receive are as generous as benefits that citizens receive is beside the point. Illegal aliens are already eligible for extensive benefits from the government and Obama is a big believer in getting poor people addicted to welfare. No serious person believes illegals won&#8217;t have access to social programs.</p>
<p>In the address Obama played semantic games. What he&#8217;s doing is not an amnesty, he said:</p>
<blockquote><p>Amnesty is the immigration system we have today. Millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time. That’s the real amnesty, leaving this broken system the way it is. Mass amnesty would be unfair.</p></blockquote>
<p>The former part-time adjunct constitutional law lecturer has it wrong. A failure to enforce a law isn&#8217;t tantamount to amnesty. Amnesty is an official governmental act of forgiveness that excuses a violation of the law. Being in a state of legal limbo in which law enforcement hasn&#8217;t yet called your number isn&#8217;t the same as amnesty.</p>
<p>Nor is the immigration system broken, at least not in the way Obama means.</p>
<p>When progressives say the system is broken, they mean it is functioning in a less than optimal manner, failing to capture every single prospective illegal alien available to wade across the Rio Grande or walk across the nation’s largely undefended border with Mexico. To them, immigration policy is a taxpayer-subsidized get-out-the-vote scheme for Democrats and the best reform they could imagine would be to abolish America’s borders altogether. Obama&#8217;s new amnesty plan is a step in this direction.</p>
<p>It is also a profoundly cynical move that rewards lawbreaking and begets future immigration amnesties. It will spell electoral death for the Republican Party in coming years because Latinos, who are believed to comprise the bulk of the illegals, have traditionally shown a strong preference for the Democratic Party and its left-of-center public policies. The amnesty for 5 million illegals is likely just the beginning. The government recently issued a procurement order seeking a contractor to make as many as 34 million immigration documents over the coming five years.</p>
<p>During his address, Obama quoted the Book of Exodus, saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger &#8212; we were strangers once, too. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.</p></blockquote>
<p>But the immigrants in question are not the legal immigrants of the past who followed the rules when they came to this country. They are invaders who broke the law and who continue to break the law by being here. America is not, nor has it ever been, a nation of illegal immigrants.</p>
<p>To qualify for relief from deportation, individuals will have to register with the government, pass criminal and national security background checks, pay their taxes, and pay a processing fee, according to a White House handout. Applications can&#8217;t be filed until early next year.</p>
<p>Parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents as of the date of the announcement are eligible, provided that they are not &#8220;enforcement priorities&#8221; and have been present in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2010. Also eligible are individuals who arrived in this country before Jan. 1, 2010 and before turning 16 years old, regardless of how old they are now. Processing times for certain categories of green card applicants will be accelerated. Recent arrivals who entered the country after Jan. 1 of this year will not be eligible to apply.</p>
<p>Obama lapdogs were ecstatic about the planned amnesty.</p>
<p>Echoing Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) who absurdly compared Obama&#8217;s executive order to the Emancipation Proclamation, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked, &#8220;Does the public know that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order?&#8221;</p>
<p>Except that the Emancipation Proclamation freed categories of slaves, innocent people victimized by an abhorrent institution, not illegal aliens who took it upon themselves to invade the country and abuse the goodwill of Americans. The only thing the two executive orders have in common is that a president signed them.</p>
<p>Republicans are deeply split on the amnesty issue so anyone expecting Republican lawmakers to give Obama a well-deserved rhetorical mauling two weeks after the GOP crushed Democrats in midterm elections will be disappointed in coming days. That&#8217;s not what the emasculated party of Lincoln does because it is terrified of being called racist for opposing the nation&#8217;s first (half) black president.</p>
<p>Despite running a virtually content-free campaign, on Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning at least 53 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 244 out of 435 seats. In the new year Republicans will control at least 31 state governors&#8217; mansions and at least 68 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska&#8217;s legislature has only one chamber). In at least 23 states Republicans will control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Democrats can make the same claim about only 7 states.</p>
<p>The election was arguably, depending on the psephological metrics used, the worst showing for the Democratic Party in its history.</p>
<p>Despite the newly enfeebled status of the Democrats, the House GOP&#8217;s response was predictably weak. Instead of righteously inveighing against the grave threat that Obama&#8217;s actions pose to the republic, on Twitter the official House Republican feed meekly exhorted the president to cooperate with them.</p>
<p>&#8220;We need a real fix, not a quick fix. Let&#8217;s fix our broken immigration system together,&#8221; read one GOP tweet. Another said, &#8220;Mr. President, stop acting alone. Let&#8217;s work together.&#8221; Maybe the GOP&#8217;s communications professionals would like to roast some s&#8217;mores and sing Kumbaya with the president.</p>
<p>And Obama must be quaking in his jackboots. Even after six years of getting beaten to a pulp, constantly sucker-punched by the nation&#8217;s Alinskyite president, congressional Republicans still aren&#8217;t anywhere close to grasping what he really is. They continue to treat Obama as if he&#8217;s a legitimate, sincere president who actually wants to do what&#8217;s best for America. They foolishly believe Obama cares about his falling public approval numbers and his presidential legacy. They refuse to acknowledge that he is a radical revolutionary figure hellbent on destroying, or in his own words, fundamentally transforming, the U.S. They actually seem to think Obama is interested in negotiating with them to find policy solutions that benefit the country. Many elected GOPers appear not to have an inkling that embracing amnesty is the same as signing a death warrant for the Republican Party.</p>
<p>House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who supports amnesty in principle but is under intense pressure from conservative lawmakers, is trying to put down a rebellion in his own House GOP conference. Although Obama has previously protested that he is not a king or an emperor, &#8220;he&#8217;s sure acting like one,&#8221; Boehner, who may face a challenge to his speakership in January, said yesterday.</p>
<p>Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was characteristically vague.</p>
<p>&#8220;If President Obama acts in defiance of the people and imposes his will on the country, Congress will act,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Retiring Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told <i>USA Today</i> earlier this week that Obama&#8217;s amnesty could spark civil unrest. &#8220;The country&#8217;s going to go nuts, because they&#8217;re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president, and it&#8217;s going to be a very serious situation.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re going to see &#8212; hopefully not &#8212; but you could see instances of anarchy &#8230; You could see violence,&#8221; Coburn said. Obama will be behaving like &#8220;an autocratic leader that&#8217;s going to disregard what the Constitution says and make law anyway.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Instead of having the rule of law handling in our country today, now we&#8217;re starting to have the rule of rulers, and that&#8217;s the total antithesis of what this country was founded on,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Here&#8217;s how people think: Well, if the law doesn&#8217;t apply to the president &#8230; then why should it apply to me?&#8221;</p>
<p>House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/393119/hal-rogers-obama-republican-mark-krikorian"><span style="color: #0433ff;">appears to have taken the wrong lesson</span></a> from the electoral bloodbath this month that set Democrats back 150 years. Although voters delivered the message that they want Obama stopped, Rogers interprets the election as a mandate for surrender.</p>
<p>&#8220;I believe a major consequence of this election is a loud and clear mandate from the American people for Washington to stop the gridlock, work together across ideological lines and start producing real accomplishments on their behalf,&#8221; Rogers wrote in an op-ed.</p>
<p>Rogers wants Congress to pass a long-term funding bill called an omnibus appropriations bill before the government&#8217;s authority to spend money expires on Dec. 11. It would keep the government operating for the rest of the federal fiscal year which runs to Sept. 30, 2015.</p>
<p>There will be &#8220;an extraordinary amount of work to do when the new Congress convenes in January &#8230; but there simply won&#8217;t be the political bandwidth available to address these pressing issues if Congress is bogged down in old battles and protracted to-do lists.&#8221;</p>
<p>Some Republicans have proposed defunding the parts of the government that would process amnesty-related paperwork.</p>
<p>Separately, Rogers has made the absurd suggestion that Congress approve a big, all-encompassing spending bill now and then rescind amnesty-relating funding next year. Rescissions happen but they&#8217;re relatively rare. Why bother giving Obama a green light to proceed with the amnesty now in the hope of slamming on the brakes in the new year?</p>
<p>The real problem with enacting an omnibus spending bill, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/393119/hal-rogers-obama-republican-mark-krikorian"><span style="color: #0433ff;">according to</span></a> Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is that such a funding measure &#8220;would enable Obama to complete his lawless amnesty scheme.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rogers insists that the amnesty cannot be stopped through the appropriations process.</p>
<p>It would be &#8220;impossible to defund President Obama&#8217;s executive order through a government spending bill,&#8221; House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing said yesterday, explaining that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is funded by user fees.</p>
<p>It is a facile, easily disproved argument. USCIS, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is part of the federal government. It was created by Congress and Congress can do anything it wants to it. It can give it money, take money away from it, give it a spanking, or order it to stand on one leg and bark like a dog.</p>
<p>In a development overshadowed by the unveiling of the amnesty, DHS <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/20/us-usa-ebola-immigrant-protection-idUSKCN0J41JS20141120"><span style="color: #0433ff;">announced</span></a> yesterday that it will grant &#8220;temporary protected status&#8221; to up to 8,000 people from the Ebola-afflicted African countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. These visitors may apply for work permits for 18 months. Unlike ordinary recipients of temporary protected status, these Ebola refugees will not be allowed to travel to their home countries and then return to the U.S., in order to prevent the spread of Ebola.</p>
<p>Or so the story goes. If Obama can find a way to let them stay in the U.S., he&#8217;ll do it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>You Can’t Reform Islam Without Reforming Muslims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/you-cant-reform-islam-without-reforming-muslims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=you-cant-reform-islam-without-reforming-muslims</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/you-cant-reform-islam-without-reforming-muslims/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2014 04:55:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[modernize]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[quran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243473</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Islam hasn’t changed because Muslims don’t want it to.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/quran1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243476" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/quran1-450x253.jpg" alt="quran" width="320" height="180" /></a>Every few years the debate over reforming Islam bubbles up from the depths of a culture that largely censors any suggestion that Islam needs reforming.</p>
<p>But Islam does not exist apart from Muslims. It is not an abstract entity that can be changed without changing its followers. And if Islam has not changed, that is because Muslims do not want it to.</p>
<p>Mohammed and key figures in Islam provided a template, but that template would not endure if it did not fit the worldview of its worshipers. Western religions underwent a process of secularization to align with what many saw as modernity leading to a split between traditionalists and secularists.</p>
<p>The proponents of modernizing Islam assume that it didn’t make the jump because of Saudi money, fundamentalist violence and regional backwardness. These allegations are true, but also incomplete.</p>
<p>If modernizing Islam really appealed to Muslims, it would have taken off, at least in the West, despite Saudi money and Muslim Brotherhood front groups. These elements might have slowed things down, but a political or religious idea that is genuinely compelling is like a rock rolling down a hill.</p>
<p>It’s enormously difficult to stop.</p>
<p>Muslim modernization in the West has been covertly undermined by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, but for the most part it has not been violently suppressed.</p>
<p>It suffers above all else from a lack of Muslim interest.</p>
<p>Muslims don’t spend much time fuming over a progressive mosque that allows gay members or lets women lead prayers. Such places occasionally exist and remain obscure. They don’t have to be forcibly shut down because they never actually take off. The occasional death threat and arson might take place and the average ISIS recruit would happily slaughter everyone inside, but even he has bigger fish to fry.</p>
<p>The best evidence that Muslim modernization has failed is that even the angriest Muslims don’t take it very seriously as a threat. The sorts of people who believe that Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent or that Israel is using eagles as spies have trouble believing modernizing Islam will ever be much of a problem.</p>
<p>They know instinctively that it will never work. Instead Muslims are far more threatened by a cartoon mocking their prophet for reasons that go to the heart of what is wrong with their religion.</p>
<p>Islam is not an idea. It is a tribe.</p>
<p>Talking about reforming the words of Islam is an abstraction. Islam did not begin with a book. It began with clan and sword. Even in the modern skyscraper cities of the West, it remains a religion of the clan and the sword.</p>
<p>The left has misread Islamic terrorism as a response to oppression when it is actually a power base. It is not the poor and downtrodden who are most attracted to the Jihad. Instead it is the upper classes. Bin Laden wasn’t a pauper and neither are the Saudis or Qataris. Islamic terrorism isn’t a game for the poor. It becomes the thing to do when you’re rich enough to envy the neighbors. It’s a tribal war.</p>
<p>To reform Islam, we can’t just look at what is wrong with the Koran or the Hadiths. We have to ask why these tribal calls for violence and genocide, for oppression and enslavement, appealed to Muslims then and why they continue to appeal to Muslims today.</p>
<p>The modernizers assume that Western Muslims would welcome a reformation of Islam. They are half right. The reformation that they are welcoming is that of the Wahhabis trying to return it to what it was. It’s hard to deny that ISIS touches something deep within Muslims. The gay-friendly mosques don’t.</p>
<p>Understanding Islam only in terms of the Koran makes it seem as if Muslims are unwillingly trapped by a tyranny of the text, when the text is actually their means of trapping others into affirming their identity.</p>
<p>There is no reforming Islam without reforming Muslims. The reformers assume that most Muslims are ignorant of their own beliefs, but even the most illiterate Muslim in a village without running water has a good grasp of the big overall ideas. He may hardly be able to quote a Koranic verse without stumbling over it, he may have added local customs into the mix, but he identifies with it on a visceral level.</p>
<p>Its honor is his honor. Its future is the future of his family. Its members are his kinfolk. Like him, it ought to have been on top; instead it’s on the bottom. Its grievances are his grievances.</p>
<p>The rest is just details.</p>
<p>The progressive diverse mosque is the opposite of this tribal mentality. It is the opposite of Islam. Its destruction of the tribe is also the destruction of the individual. The Western Muslim who already has only a shaky connection to the culture of his ancestral country is not about to trade Islamic tribalism for anonymous diversity. Islam tells him he is superior. The progressive mosque tells him nothing.</p>
<p>Whether he is a Bangladeshi peasant watching soccer matches on the village television or a Bangladeshi doctor in London, it is the violent, racist and misogynistic parts of Islam that provide him with a sense of worth in a big confusing world.</p>
<p>That is how Islam was born.</p>
<p>Islam began in uncertain times as empires were tottering and the old ways were being displaced by strange religions such as Judaism and Christianity, when its originators mashed bits of them together and then founded their own crazy wobbly murderous empire built around a badly plagiarized religion.</p>
<p>It was horrible and terrible for everyone who wasn’t a Muslim man, but it worked.</p>
<p>Islam is less of a faith and more of a set of honor and shame responses. It’s a cycle of oppression and victimhood. It’s the assertion of identity by people who see themselves as inferior and are determined to push back by making themselves superior. The responses are familiar. We saw it in Nazi Germany as the defeated nation became a master race by killing and enslaving everyone else.</p>
<p>But it’s not those at the bottom most driven by such dreams. It’s the desert billionaires who have money, but no culture. It’s the Western Muslim doctor who still feels inferior despite his wealth. It’s a merchant named Mohammed with a lot of grudges who claims an angel told him to kill all his enemies in Allah’s name.</p>
<p>It’s Islam. And it’s Muslims.</p>
<p>The things that we believe, bad or good, reflect the bad or good inside us. When Muslims support killing people, it’s simplistic to assume that they are robotically following a text and will follow any other text slipped in front of their faces, instead of their passions and values. Religions may make people kill, but it starts when people make religions kill.</p>
<p>The good devout Muslim may kill because the Koran tells him to, but he would not do so if the Koran’s justifications of violence did not speak to him on a deeper level. The Nazis were following orders, but they wouldn’t have followed them if Nazism didn’t connect with their fears, hopes and dreams.</p>
<p>The text is only half the problem. The other half is in the human heart.</p>
<p>Reforming Islam is not a matter of crossing out certain words and adding others. Religions carry a powerful set of values that appeal to people on a deep level. To change Islam, we would have to understand why its ugliness still speaks to Muslims. To change it, we have to change them.</p>
<p>When we talk about reforming Islam, what we are really talking about is reforming Muslims.</p>
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		<title>Is the Islamic State the Islamic &#8216;Reformation&#8217;?</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2014 04:40:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Tariq Ramadan]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[What if this is as good as it gets? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-14-at-2.34.22-PM1.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243083" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-14-at-2.34.22-PM1-358x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-10-14 at 2.34.22 PM" width="310" height="303" /></a>The self-declared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has shocked the world with its brutality. The British Prime Minister David Cameron, along with other Western leaders, claims that the Islamic State has “<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/10/david-cameron-on-eid-al-adha-islamic-state-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-great-religion-of-islam-a-religion-of-peace"><span style="color: #0433ff;">nothing</span></a> to do with the great religion of Islam, a religion of peace.” The former British PM Tony Blair states that IS’ ideology is “<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/tony-blair-islamic-states-ideology-based-in-a-complete-perversion-of-the-proper-faith-of-islam"><span style="color: #0433ff;">based</span></a> in a complete perversion of the proper faith of Islam.”</p>
<p>Notice that both the current and a previous British Prime Minister say virtually the same thing as Tariq Ramadan. He is a Swiss writer of Egyptian origin and is a Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University in Britain. Tariq Ramadan suggests that the Islamic State is ”<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2014/10/tariq-ramadan-isil-not-islamic-2014101015462542487.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">not Islamic</span></a>.”</p>
<p>Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Banna&#8217;s stated goal was the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate. We now have an Islamic State under the leadership of a Caliph. You could therefore argue that ISIS have fulfilled the original promise of Hassan al-Banna. What Tariq Ramadan is in effect saying is that: &#8220;The Islamic State have fulfilled the promise of my pious Muslim grandfather. Yet this has nothing to do with Islam.&#8221;</p>
<p>The slick Islamic infiltrator Tariq Ramadan has always reminded me of the deceiving manipulator Grima Wormtongue from Tolkien&#8217;s novel <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. It is no wonder that Western ruling elites are clueless about the true nature of the Islamic threat when we allow people such as Ramadan to be treated as experts on Islam in prestigious Western universities and advise Western authorities on matters related to Islam.</p>
<p>Saying that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam or Islamic teachings is false. ISIS propagandists quote authentic Koranic verses or respected hadith literature in favor of their actions. Yes, texts can be interpreted in different ways, but some interpretations have a stronger foundation than others do. A rubber band can be stretched up to a certain point, but not forever. Likewise, texts can be read in several ways, but they are not infinitely elastic.</p>
<p>Maybe what the militant members of the Islamic State are doing is not the only way to interpret Islamic religious texts. Maybe. What should worry us, however, is that it is a perfectly <i>legitimate</i> way to interpret Islamic texts.</p>
<p>The Islamic State now has many supporters, also in Western countries. Their atrocities resonate with quite a few Muslims who recognize something similar from Islamic history. In the earliest days of Islam, Mohammed and his companions raided and pillaged their opponents, massacred and beheaded non-Muslims, enslaved their children, raped their women and forced them to be sex slaves. Suggesting that it has nothing to do with Islam, when militant Muslims today directly copy the behavior of their Prophet as described in Islamic sources, is not credible.</p>
<p>Western leaders and commentators are often shockingly ill-informed about Islam. Tony Blair, then still Britain’s Prime Minister, wrote about Islam for the influential magazine <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62271/tony-blair/a-battle-for-global-values"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Foreign Affairs</i> </span></a>in its January 2007 issue. This quote sums up the breathtaking cluelessness of Western leaders:</p>
<p><b>&#8220;</b>To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance. Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.”</p>
<p>Some observers suggest that Islam needs to be reformed. Yet it is arguable that we have already witnessed an Islamic Reformation, and that ISIS/the Islamic State represents a culmination of this process.</p>
<p>In 2007 I published an essay with the title <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/05/fjordman-do-we-want-an-islamic-reformation"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Do we want an Islamic Reformation? </span></a>The question of whether Islam can be reformed largely hinges upon one’s definition of “Reformation.” This is often implicitly taken to mean something along the lines of “peaceful, non-sharia-based with respect for individual choice, freedom of speech and the freedom to criticize and leave your religion.” In other words: “Reform” is vaguely taken to mean less Islam, or at least less traditional sharia laws, and no violent Jihad.</p>
<p>However, several observers argue that there are similarities between Martin Luther and the Christian or Protestant Reformation in sixteenth century Europe and the reform movement started by Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab in the Arabian Peninsula in the 18<sup>th</sup> century. Wahhab’s alliance with the family of Muhammad bin Saud led to the creation of Saudi Arabia. Using its massive oil wealth, paid for by non-Muslims, that country has for generations funded strict sharia-based Islamic movements worldwide. This Islamic revivalist movement is at the base of the present-day Salafist movement.</p>
<p>Although the Reformation was a turbulent period, it paved the way for more tolerance and religious freedom in Christian Europe over the long run. Christians could return to the example as contained in the Gospels of an early age where Jesus, the founder of their religion, and his disciples led a largely peaceful movement separate from the state. Muslims can find a similar example only in the Mecca period. however, as long as the writings from the very violent Medina period remain in force, when Islam was a state run on religious laws, a return to an “early, Golden Age” of Islam will mean a return to sharia and Jihad violence. As such, one has to ask whether an Islamic Reformation would be desirable from a non-Muslim point of view. The likely answer to that question is no.</p>
<p>There is arguably a direct line from the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to the Islamic State. The Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb was one if the ideological inspirators for Osama bin Laden&#8217;s Jihadist terrorist network al-Qaida. The Islamic State (ISIS) is an offshoot of al-Qaida that has fulfilled the Muslim Brotherhood&#8217;s desire for a new Caliphate.</p>
<p>If a &#8220;Reformation&#8221; is meant to be a return to the earliest days of the religion, as Martin Luther and John Calvin wanted to achieve in Christian Europe, then what we are looking at now may well be the Islamic Reformation. Seen in this light, al-Qaida and the Islamic State are the culmination and logical conclusion of the Islamic Reformation. This Islamic revival and return to the earliest days of Islam has led to Jihadist terrorism, beheadings, large-scale massacres and mass enslavement because that was what early Islam was all about.</p>
<p>Right now, there are few signs that the unrest in much of the Islamic world will end any time soon. The brutal attacks on non-Muslims in the Middle East continue. The terror warnings about militant Muslims in the West are growing increasingly alarming. Since the Jihadist attacks of September 11 2001, the situation has deteriorated. We now face an extremely well funded terrorist organization in the form of the Islamic State. Through their control over substantial territory and several oil fields in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State has access to far more money and resources than al-Qaida ever did during their time in Afghanistan up until 2001.</p>
<p>The historian Dominic<i> </i>Sandbrook worries that the ongoing disintegration of the Middle East could get even worse and more violent in the years ahead. He warns that ”<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2732268/The-coming-apocalypse-Last-week-historian-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-wrote-damning-critique-West-s-failure-halt-Islamic-fanatics-Now-savage-murder-confirmed-worst-fears-looks-future.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">We have</span></a> lived through some of the bloodiest years in human history. But the really frightening thing is that the worst may be yet to come.”</p>
<p>The former Chief of the Australian Army, Professor <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2720431/The-100-years-war-Islam-Dire-warning-former-Australian-military-chief.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Peter Leahy</span></a>, has warned of a century-long war against Islamic militants. Several other commentators indicate that the unrest in many parts of the Islamic world and the Jihadist threat ensuing from it could continue for decades. Even in the very unlikely event that a peaceful version of Islam should emerge at some point in the future, this process would likely take generations.</p>
<p>Regardless of outcome, we are in all likelihood facing many years of continued instability in the Islamic world. This is intensified by the high birth rates in some Muslim countries. Some of this unrest is already spilling into other regions. Several European cities have experienced riots involving Muslim immigrants. Western intelligence agencies warn that the number of militant Muslims and potential Islamic terrorists is so large that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of them all.</p>
<p>It is immensely irresponsible of Western leaders in this situation to continue Muslim immigration. Yes, part of the damage has already been done, but that is no excuse for doing nothing. A firefighter does not let the entire neighborhood burn down just because one house has caught fire. If damage limitation is the only thing we can do at this point, then let us at least do that. When militant Muslims are threatening to behead us, it is simply no longer acceptable to continue mass-importing people from unstable Muslim societies.</p>
<p>Muslim immigration in every form to all European and Western nations needs to be suspended, and any practice of sharia laws banned. Western governments who fail to do this are failing to protect the basic security of their citizens. They should be held accountable for that failure.</p>
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		<title>An Islamic &#8216;Council of Nicea&#8217;</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 04:25:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joe Herring and Dr. Mark Christian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Instead of apologizing for Islam, demand Islamic reform.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/conp.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-242961" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/conp.jpg" alt="conp" width="284" height="177" /></a>Christianity and Judaism have a great deal in common, not the least of which is compassion for their fellow man and the institutional capacity to take the steps required to express that compassion in daily life.</p>
<p>It is this reverence for the individual that led both traditions to reform themselves over the centuries, eliminating anachronistic practices while maintaining fidelity to their faith. It is an ongoing process, obviously, but it is a process to which both religions are fully committed – and have been for more than a thousand years.</p>
<p>Islam in this regard is an outlier. In the 1400-odd years of Islam, there has never been a “reformation.” The religion forbids it. It is no accident that the oft-touted contributions of Islam to the world mostly came before Islam demanded dominance in all things.</p>
<p>After the Mongol sacking of Baghdad, Islam reacted by retrenching inwardly. Science was no longer science, it was only Islamic science. Economics became Islamic economics, as rules proliferated for everything in order to demonstrate adherence to the faith and resistance to the <em>infidel</em>.</p>
<p>Truthfully, Islam was better off in practice in the 10<sup>th</sup> Century than it is today. It is clear that Islam, like cigarettes, stunts your growth.</p>
<p>Now, adherence to tradition is not a bad thing on its own. In fact, tradition is the repository of the world’s “institutional knowledge,” enabling successive generations to build on the work of their predecessors.</p>
<p>Sometimes, though, new information is discovered and it becomes necessary to revisit those traditions to re-evaluate their utility for present and future generations. The idea of self-government is one such example.</p>
<p>Tradition held that some people had the right to rule other people, and this tradition was accepted and enforced for millennia until the radical experiment of individual sovereignty, which found its greatest expression in our own United States.</p>
<p>So it is with religious tradition as well. Christianity is built upon Judaism &#8212; indeed it wouldn’t exist without it &#8212; but it isn’t opposed to Judaism for those who wish to practice it. Many centuries ago, the enmity between Jews and Christians began fading with the passing of each successive generation until today it exists only as an aberration to be ridiculed and denounced whenever it appears.</p>
<p>This illustrates the internal narrative of the Western psyche. Our minds operate in a manner consistent with liberty because our minds have been developed in the presence of liberty, both political and religious.</p>
<p>We are capable of reform, because we are always seeking the better mousetrap. We look at life as a challenge, not just to survive it, but to improve it. To leave it better than we found it.</p>
<p>A mind shaped by Islam generally finds such attitudes to be anathema. Islam is in continual conflict because Islam is possessed of an impossible idea – to preserve all of creation as it existed in 632 A.D., the year Mohammed died.</p>
<p>Given the changes that have wracked the earth since that date, is it any wonder Islam is “out of sorts&#8221;? Ask yourself, how difficult would it be to conduct your daily business if you had to reconcile your actions with the cultural norms of the early Middle-Ages?</p>
<p>In Christianity, the Church has held ecumenical councils, realigning Church doctrine with new information and greater understanding of both the natural world and the people who inhabit it. These councils also addressed heresies that had sprung up in the Church, definitively establishing what is canonical and what is apocryphal.</p>
<p>In Catholicism, the Council known as Vatican II was the most recent “re-founding” of the Church. Pope Paul VI described the need for the Council in this way –</p>
<blockquote><p>“…the problems of the 1960s stemmed from the Church holding to the best values which had come to maturity over the previous two centuries, despite the fact that <em>these values were born outside the Church</em>, yet they could find their place – after being purified and corrected – in the Church’s view on the world.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The Pope was referring to the Enlightenment philosophies of science and reason. In the previous two centuries, Man had slowly crawled out from the cave of mysticism to stand blinking in the sunlight of a world he previously had only seen through the stained-glass windows of the Church.</p>
<p>Reason would emerge as a complement to Scripture – and vice-versa – while the understanding of oneself and one’s role in the world evolved into an individual pursuit, rather than a purely collective one directed by religious tradition.</p>
<p>Faith made peace with reason and a careful balance was struck between secularism and religion, between the sovereignty of God over all, and the sovereignty of Man over himself. A difficult balance to be sure, but one that is essential to the survival of both Church and individual liberty.</p>
<p>There is no such mechanism for a similar introspection in Islam, and the resultant calcification of the religion has rendered it incapable of peaceful coexistence in the modern world.</p>
<p>Pope John XXII called this process of re-evaluation <em>aggiornamento</em> – the adjustment of religion according to the facts of the world in which it lives. This is not to be confused with secularizing the Gospel or the elevation of humanism above God as many opponents of Vatican II charged, but rather represented recognition that immutable truths can arrive from sources beyond the Church, and that God doesn’t restrict the delivery of His wisdom only to men in robes and sashes.</p>
<p>Throughout, Islam has held a fierce resistance to all things non-Islamic. Around the time of the Western Enlightenment, Muslims&#8217; brutal practices had rendered them largely unwelcome anywhere in Europe (certainly not in any significant numbers), and their incessant raiding necessitated their subjugation by the more developed and cosmopolitan powers of the earth.</p>
<p>Islam now appears to have reached a point in history where it has been behind for so long adherents can’t bring themselves to admit it. Sort of like the guy who trips over his own feet, then tries to pass it off by saying, “I meant to do that.”</p>
<p>Islam needs a Vatican II. Actually, Islam needs a Council of Nicea (the 4<sup>th</sup> Century meeting in what is now modern-day Turkey) that codified Christian doctrine. Islam has never convened anything like a Council of Nicea. Indeed, Muslims have never really admitted to having a problem, which we all know is the first step in finding a solution.</p>
<p>Whether the Islamists themselves or their mewling apologists among the liberal intelligentsia care to admit it, Islam must reform, or be subjugated yet again.</p>
<p>Instead of apologizing for Islam, it is time for our leaders to demand of Islam that which we ourselves have already done –<em> aggiornamento</em> – the adjustment of our religion according to the facts of the world in which it lives.</p>
<p><a href="http://globalfaithinstitute.org/about/dr-mark-christian/"><em>Dr. Mark Christian</em><em> MD</em><em> </em></a><em>was born and raised a devout Sunni Muslim, with strong ties to the Egyptian military and The Muslim Brotherhood, but later ditched Islam and followed Jesus Christ. He is the Co-founder of the </em><a href="http://globalfaithinstitute.org/"><em>Global Faith Institute.</em></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.abrahamstentradio.com/about-the-hosts/">Joe Herring</a> is a writer and analyst who frequently advises policy makers at all levels of government.  He is the Press/Public Relations Director for <em><a href="http://globalfaithinstitute.org/support-gfi/">Global Faith Institute</a> </em>and the host of <a href="http://www.abrahamstentradio.com/">Abraham&#8217;s Tent radio show</a>.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Dr. Mark Christian</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discuss </em><span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title " dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood in the American Heartland"><em><strong>Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood in the American Heartland</strong>:</em> </span></p>
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		<title>Bracing for Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/bracing-for-amnesty-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bracing-for-amnesty-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:57:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[executive order]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Immigration]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237233</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The end of summer may mean the end of America's borders. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/obama-angry.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-237255 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/obama-angry-450x304.jpg" alt="obama-angry" width="278" height="188" /></a>Amnesty is coming &#8212; big time.</p>
<p>Americans need to brace themselves for a huge new wave of Obama-led lawlessness because the president is planning what a top schemer in the White House calls a “very significant” executive action on immigration after the summer.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly this means some kind of amnesty for illegal aliens is in the works over and above what Obama has already done, the Constitution and public fury notwithstanding.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s &#8220;planned executive orders&#8221; would give legal status &#8220;to another 5–6 million illegal immigrants,&#8221; <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gop-senator-obama-effectively-end-immigration-enforcement_797415.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said</span></a> Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R-Alabama). &#8220;This would effectively end immigration enforcement in America.&#8221;</p>
<p>Leftist congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) <a href="http://tiny.iavian.net/2mlx"><span style="color: #0433ff;">boasted Friday</span></a> that the Obama administration could unilaterally provide legal status to as many as 5 million illegals. The lawmaker said he planned to meet with White House officials “to negotiate additional terms and avenues the president can use” through executive action.</p>
<p>“I think we can get 3 or 4, maybe even 5 million people,” Gutiérrez said.</p>
<p>The news comes as Americans grow increasingly angry over the border crisis that has been <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/062514-706233-texas-border-immigration-wave-orchestrated-by-administration.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">staged and carefully choreographed</span></a> by the far-left levelers of the Obama administration. Flames of discontent are <a href="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/07/25/a_massachusetts_immigration_revolt"><span style="color: #0433ff;">flickering</span></a> even in places like Lynn, Massachusetts, long a Democratic Party bastion, as local residents grow weary of the seemingly unending influx of illegal aliens that they are hard-pressed to feed, house, and clothe. As many as an estimated 10,000 people <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/07/26/hundreds-attend-anti-illegal-immigration-rally-beacon-hill/tEgyzS5TE5Z6YiI8VBP6aP/story.html?"><span style="color: #0433ff;">protested</span></a> illegal immigration outside the Massachusetts legislature in Boston over the weekend.</p>
<p>Because a U.S. Senate-approved immigration package has very little chance of passing the House, Obama has decided yet again to usurp the power of the Congress and make law, a clear violation of the Constitution and an impeachable offense.</p>
<p>But instead of getting serious about border security, the Obama administration views the ongoing invasion by gang members, criminals, and other illegal immigrants from Central America as an opportunity to dynamite what remains of the nation&#8217;s southern border. He doesn&#8217;t care that plenty of illegal aliens, many of them children, are dying in the act of crossing the border. They are mere collateral damage in the pursuit of so-called justice.</p>
<p>Borrowing a catch-phrase popular among Alinskyite community organizers, Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer said Friday that the crisis confers &#8220;broad permission&#8221; to act. The president intends to do an end-run around the &#8220;broken Congress&#8221; and move forward after consulting with Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Security Jeh Johnson, said Pfeiffer whose official title is Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor.</p>
<p>Obama wants to make sure that whatever he does is on “solid legal footing” and has maximum impact, Pfeiffer said. Pro-illegal alien groups like the National Council of La Raza want Obama to stay deportation proceedings for millions of illegals and place those people on a so-called path to citizenship consistent with an immigration reform bill approved by the Senate but stalled in the House, the <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/monitor_breakfast/2014/0725/Obama-will-take-executive-action-on-immigration-after-summer-adviser-says"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Christian Science Monitor</i></span></a> reports.</p>
<p>Pretending he&#8217;s interesting in the well-being of the Grand Old Party, Pfeiffer implied Republicans will take heat from voters if they oppose the Obama scheme.</p>
<p>Republican lawmakers will have to make a decision, he said: “Are they going to go back and try to pass comprehensive immigration reform – [after] which the president will rip up whatever executive action he does the day they pass that? Or are they basically going to set themselves up for the next two and a half years here to be arguing to elect a Republican in order to deport all these people?”</p>
<p>Pfeiffer threw out the red herring of impeachment, as if risk-averse Republicans in the Senate would ever convict Obama of what the Constitution calls &#8220;high crimes and misdemeanors&#8221; and remove him from office.</p>
<p>“The president acting on immigration reform will certainly up the likelihood that [Republicans] would contemplate impeachment at some point,” said Pfeiffer in an effort to drum up donations to the Democrats&#8217; war chest.</p>
<p>House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said he has no interest in initiating the impeachment process.</p>
<p>“This is a fundraising exercise for Democrats,” said Boehner aide Michael Steel. “It is telling, and sad, that a senior White House official is focused on political games, rather than helping these kids and securing the border.&#8221;</p>
<p>Steel wasn&#8217;t just shooting from the hip. The <a href="http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/26/dccc-raising-money-suggestion-obama-impeachment-im/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Washington Times</i></span></a> reports that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) immediately began begging supporters for money after Pfeiffer&#8217;s statement. The email suggested that Boehner&#8217;s planned lawsuit against Obama for overstepping his constitutional authority &#8220;could lead to the impeachment of President Obama.&#8221;</p>
<p>Left-wing activists secretly <a href="http://tiny.iavian.net/2mlr"><span style="color: #0433ff;">plotted</span></a> with Obama at a June 30 White House meeting, <i>Time</i> reports:</p>
<blockquote><p>They hope [Obama's] decision will offer relief to a significant percentage of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. &#8216;He seems resolute that he’s going to go big and go soon,&#8217; says Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-reform group America’s Voice.</p></blockquote>
<p>An incredibly awful <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/amnesty-and-the-attack-on-american-workers/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reform bill</span></a> approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate last year is languishing in the Republican-controlled House. Open borders advocates hope lawmakers move on the legislation in the lame duck session of Congress that is expected to follow the November election.</p>
<p>Sen. Sessions previously described the measure as “dangerous,” saying it will devastate America’s labor marketplace and “guarantee” the country will have to grant “another amnesty” in the future.</p>
<p>In a time of unremittingly high unemployment, record food-stamp dependency, and economic stagnation, a minimum of 11 million illegal immigrants would immediately be given Social Security cards that would allow them to compete for government and blue collar jobs. The legislation puts “tremendous pressure” on the job market and makes it harder for workers to find jobs and leave welfare programs, according to Sessions.</p>
<p>Although amnesty remains deeply unpopular among the American public at large, the activist Left wants the low-ball estimate of 11 million illegal aliens present in the U.S. to be processed because they see them as future Democratic voters. In addition, many labor unions, such as SEIU (which has executives focused solely on immigration issues) see today’s illegals as future union members. Business lobbies favor amnesty because they crave the cheap, largely unskilled labor.</p>
<p>The Left’s goal with the current immigration bill, which a Heritage Foundation study found would lard $6.3 trillion onto the nation’s budget deficits over the coming 50 years, is the same as with most of its major policy initiatives over the past half century: To destroy the American system.</p>
<p>As this writer has opined previously, the radicals’ goal is to use immigration to subvert the American system, just as it has been since the 1960s when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) shepherded reform of that era’s comparatively sensible immigration laws through Congress. The goal is to import Third World tyranny by flooding America with people who don’t share Americans’ traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets. This would force changes in American society. Latinos are particularly hard to win over to the Republican side because they tend to be ideologically aligned with big-government solutions traditionally associated with Democrats.</p>
<p>An added benefit, from the Left’s perspective, is such a sweeping amnesty would destroy once and for all the Republican Party. Any new bleeding-heart voters it brings into the party will not even come close to offsetting the all-but-certain exodus of fed-up conservatives that enactment of the legislation would spur. Among those disgruntled Republican-leaning voters are the same people whose failure to vote in November 2012 helped to deprive GOP candidate Mitt Romney of the presidency.</p>
<p>Democrats, on the other hand, know with much greater certainty that the legislation will secure more votes for their party. “This legislation is all about the Democrats bringing in new voters who will assure them of a permanent leftist majority,” Paul Mirengoff has written.</p>
<p>President Obama is, of course, a master thespian.</p>
<p>To low-information voters, Obama must now seem like he is coming to the rescue, nipping a growing problem in the bud.</p>
<p>In fact he created all of this political theater, this manufactured border crisis, precisely so he could solve it. And the Radical-in-Chief doesn&#8217;t care how many people get hurt or killed as a result of his malevolence.</p>
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		<title>How Amnesty Will Harm U.S. Support for Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/how-amnesty-will-harm-u-s-support-for-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-amnesty-will-harm-u-s-support-for-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jul 2014 04:30:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BDS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236958</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An overlooked consequence of the changing composition of America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/bds-580x433.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236962" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/bds-580x433-450x335.jpg" alt="bds-580x433" width="317" height="236" /></a>The more patriotic Jewish Americans may see connections between the latest Gaza uprising and the onslaught of unaccompanied alien children at our southern borders. The waves of Qassam rockets hitting Beersheva and Ashdod and the waves of illegal aliens coming over into Texas and Arizona have posed respective existential threats to Israel and the US for years and the challenge is getting increasingly serious. Although the BDS movement hasn’t died down in the US, <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;frm=1&amp;source=web&amp;cd=4&amp;ved=0CCwQFjAD&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.haaretz.com%2Fnews%2Fdiplomacy-defense%2F1.606557&amp;ei=SIfOU4SoMNTLsASD-oJA&amp;usg=AFQjCNGxqBAyqpeQj7soTO8eq4uMvNhpag&amp;bvm=bv.71198958,d.cWc"><span style="color: #0463c1;">polls</span></a> showing continued American support for Israel’s efforts in Gaza no doubt provide reassurance to most American Jews. But depending on how the US manages its southern borders in the years ahead, broad support for Israel may not always be a sure thing.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The number of Hispanics in America, both legal and illegal, has almost <a href="http://www.agencypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/140.gif"><span style="color: #0463c1;">quadrupled</span></a> since the last census in 2010. The level of support for Israel among this rapidly-expanding demographic, however, is at polar opposites with groups like traditional <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/the-israel-project-american-hispanics-are-the-most-hostile-toward-israel-1.412851"><span style="color: #0463c1;">conservatives</span></a>, the strongest supporters of Israel in the US, outside American Jews. A 2011 poll covered by the Israeli press found that nearly <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/poll-nearly-50-of-hispanic-americans-believe-u-s-too-supportive-of-israel-1.352409"><span style="color: #0463c1;">50 percent</span></a> of Hispanics thought the ‘US was too supportive of Israel.’ These results should have acted as a “wake-up call” according to the Jewish organization that commissioned it. Jewish advocacy groups in general, however, like Bend the Arc or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), continue to <a href="http://www.jta.org/2014/07/09/news-opinion/united-states/jewish-groups-call-on-obama-to-welcome-the-stranger"><span style="color: #0463c1;">support</span></a> amnesty for illegal aliens, including the latest wave we’ve seen. Whether groups such as these are paying close attention to the long-term effects of their lobbying is doubtful.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The recent waves of unaccompanied alien children have arrived mostly from <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Guatemala-becomes-latest-country-to-recognize-Palestine-309410"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Guatemala</span></a>, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/26/us-honduras-palestine-idUSTRE77P7AX20110826"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Honduras</span></a> and <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/130510/el-salvador-establishes-diplomatic-relations-palestine-authori"><span style="color: #0463c1;">El Salvador</span></a>, countries that have each made moves in the face of US and Israeli opposition to recognize Palestine as a sovereign, independent state – <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/palestinians-win-statehood-status-us-objections/story?id=17837415"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Mexico</span></a> has also made similar moves – Meanwhile, opinion <a href="http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbccntryview/backgrounder.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">polls</span></a> in other Hispanic countries, such as Brazil, Chile and Argentina, show Israel to be about as popular as North Korea and Iran. Kenya, India and Russia, countries that have very large Islamic populations and a history of poor relations with Israel, are generally <a href="http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbccntryview/backgrounder.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">shown</span></a> to be more supportive than most Latin American countries – Although polling in <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.591154"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Venezuela</span></a> could not be located, just recently that country pledged to send the Palestinian Authority 240,000 barrels of oil, presumably as an act of solidarity.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As the Hispanic population and its share of the electorate continues to lurch forward, American Jews, especially those committed to open-borders, should pay greater attention to this issue. Apart from Bill Kristol, Jewish immigration-restrictionists don’t have wide profiles. Former American Jewish Congress director and senior analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), <a href="http://njjewishnews.com/article/4321/activist-blasts-jewish-groups-on-immigration#.U8280ElZSP8"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Stuart Steinlight</span></a> has warned open-borders Jewish groups that continuous waves of Hispanics will “erode Jewish political clout” in this country. Groups like HIAS, according to Steinlight, are fronted by “unelected, aging plutocrats” who are actually working against Jewish interests by “pushing to let in more and more Muslims.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Although Steinlight and CIS are frequently targeted by the <a href="http://forward.com/articles/179296/jews-unite-behind-push-for-immigration-reform/?p=all"><span style="color: #0463c1;">pro-amnesty</span></a> Anti-Defamation League (ADL), that organization found in a 2002 poll that the levels of anti-Semitism in the US was highest among Hispanics and <a href="http://archive.adl.org/anti_semitism/2002/as_survey.pdf"><span style="color: #0463c1;">triple</span></a> the rate found among Whites.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Other figures have noted the potential long-term threat to Israel from America’s immigration policy. Following Obama’s 2012 re-election, Michael Freund, ex-communications director for Prime Minister Netayahu, wrote an <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Fundamentally-Freund-Time-for-Hispanic-hasbara"><span style="color: #0463c1;">op-ed</span></a> in <i>The Jerusalem Post</i> demanding that, due to the ‘changing face of America’, Israel must “launch a comprehensive and coordinated Hasbara, or public diplomacy, campaign that makes Israel’s case to Hispanics directly and ‘en Espanol.’”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Whether a PR campaign could be so successful is unclear. The four decades-old Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Hispanic activist organization with a long history of pushing for open-borders, <a href="http://www.nationalmecha.org/archives/2012/03/national_mecha_endorses_palestinian_boycott_call_against_israel.php"><span style="color: #0463c1;">endorsed</span></a> the BDS movement in 2012.  Their announcement was made on <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/land-day-and-cesar-chavez-day-latin-youth-association-endorses"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Cesar Chavez Day</span></a>, which happens to fall on ‘Palestinian Land Day.’</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In a report on Hispanic and Palestinian solidarity, the anti-Zionist website <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/how-latino-activists-are-standing-israel-lobby/13225"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Electronic Intifada</span></a> profiled Gabriel Camacho of the open-borders American Friends Service Committee who said he was inspired after a trip to the West Bank to start a new activism project: a presentation called “Two Walls, One Struggle: a structural comparison of colonization, territorial loss, and racist aggression in Mexico and Palestine.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Electronic Intifada’s report concludes, “[a]s long as Latinos in the US are subjected to racial profiling, the deportation of undocumented loved ones, and the effects of colonialism in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and in the southwest states, comparisons will be made between Latinos and Palestinians.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In pushing for increased immigration and amnesty for illegals, such a comparison could become increasingly mainstream. Some American Jewish groups may need to begin asking themselves just what they’re advocating and who they’re really advocating for.</p>
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		<title>Immigration &#8216;Reform&#8217;: Engineered Destruction of the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michael-cutler/immigration-reform-engineered-destruction-of-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=immigration-reform-engineered-destruction-of-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 04:45:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Cutler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The plan to reduce "wage inequality" by making Middle America poorer -- while the super rich pocket the difference. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/silicon-valley_01.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236784" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/silicon-valley_01-356x350.jpg" alt="silicon-valley_0[1]" width="274" height="269" /></a>Periodically so-called “buzz words” and “buzz phrases” become fashionable.  Of late, the concept of “wage equality” has been bandied about by members of the administration, politicians and some media personalities.</p>
<p>In point of fact, on July 15, 2014, the publication “Mail Online” published a report with a self- explanatory title:  <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2693496/Americas-rich-richer-thought-Top-1-percent-actually-control-37-percent-U-S-wealth-surveys-skewed-elite-households-dont-respond.html"><span style="color: #011480;">&#8220;America&#8217;s 1 percenters are even richer than we thought: Richest actually control 37 percent of U.S. Wealth&#8221;</span></a></p>
<p>It has been said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  Similarly, the term wage “equality” is an emotionally evocative term that is viewed as something good and worthwhile to achieve.  Generally this is the proper perspective, but of course it is important to pose some significant questions.  For example, “How will equality be attained?”  It is also critical to understand what baseline will be established for achieving equality.  (Will wages be increased or will some wages be decreased to bring about this change?  If, in fact, some wages will be lowered, whose wages will be lowered?)</p>
<p>Finally, as we will see, sometimes inequality in wages may not be a bad thing, after all.</p>
<p>Before we consider the words many politicians use, we would be wise to consider two important quotes from George Orwell, the author of “1984” and other significant literary works.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #323333;"><i>&#8220;Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.&#8221;</i></p>
<p><i>“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Having been forewarned let us now consider the definition of “equality.”</p>
<p>The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines equality this way:</p>
<blockquote><p><b>equal·i·ty</b></p>
<p><i>noun</i> \i-ˈkwä-lə-tē\</p>
<p>: the quality or state of being equal : the quality or state of having the same rights, social status, etc.</p></blockquote>
<p>The term equality is often equated with fairness and an entire government agency, the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) was established to combat discrimination against protected groups of workers who are treated disparately (unequally) because of factors such as race, religion, gender, disabilities or age.</p>
<p>Even young children inherently understand the concept of fairness &#8212; think of how many times a frustrated child is likely to complain bitterly that something or someone is “not fair!”</p>
<p>Recently various talk shows have discussed how the top one percent of Americans control a huge amount of wealth.  Last week, the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> posted a video, &#8220;<span style="color: #011480;"><a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-john-oliver-income-inequality-last-week-tonight-20140714-story.html"><i>John Oliver tackles income inequality on</i> <i>&#8216;Last Week Tonight&#8217;</i></a>&#8220;</span><i> </i>in which Oliver spent considerable time on this issue.</p>
<p>America has made great strides to create a level playing field to provide all people with equal protection under our laws &#8212; indeed, the goal of the civil rights movement and the laws it inspired was to provide equal protection under our laws for all people, especially black Americans, going back to the issue of slavery, with equal treatment in the criminal justice system, where employment opportunities and where housing issues are concerned.</p>
<p>In short, equality has taken on the cloak of being, as the saying goes, “As American as apple pie.”  Simply uttering the word “equality” evokes the emotional image of an American flag billowing in a gentle breeze with a clear blue sky serving as a backdrop.</p>
<p>Obviously if “equality” is good, “inequality” is bad.  In <i>most</i> situations this is certainly true.</p>
<p>However, when Obama and other politicians, as well as talk show hosts, bring up wage inequality, they don&#8217;t ever discuss whose salaries will be used as the baseline against which paychecks should be compared as efforts are made to eliminate or reduce wage inequality.  People tend to see and hear what they want to see and hear.  It is akin to a Rorschach or inkblot test where the test subject is supposed to describe what they see in a blotch of ink.</p>
<p>The question that is never asked (or answered) is, “What groups are to be made more equal?”  Today the average CEO of major corporations often earn salaries that are hundreds of times greater than the wages paid to the workers earning the least money in those corporations where, just a few decades ago, this disparity in wages was far smaller.  It is naïve and, indeed, wishful thinking to believe that the push for “wage equality” is about narrowing the gap between the CEOs of most companies and the other employees of those companies, thereby expanding the middle class and increasing the standard of living for American middle class workers and their families.</p>
<p>In point of fact, the goal of the majority of advocates for the reduction of “wage inequality” is exactly the opposite: to <i>lower</i> the wages of American middle class workers and greatly reduce the gap between the middle class Americans and Americans living below the poverty line.</p>
<p>You will find proof of this in the prepared testimony provided by Alan Greenspan, when he testified before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee five years ago.  We will get to his testimony shortly.  His statements unequivocally dispel any doubt about the true goal of reducing wage inequality, the engineered destruction of America&#8217;s middle class.</p>
<p>The American Dream is inextricably linked to a vibrant and upwardly mobile middle class.  The incentives for the creation of the middle class are created by an element of wage inequality.  If this is confusing, consider that it is expected that generally, more highly skilled or educated workers should expect to earn more money than their lesser educated or skilled counterparts in the workforce.</p>
<p>This makes perfect sense and has, for generations, provided a strong incentive for American students, spurring them on to remain in school to obtain college degrees and even graduate degrees.  This is why most people think of the money, time and effort expended in pursuit of advanced degrees or enhanced skills as an important investment in their futures.  You could say that this is a case of “learn more to earn more.”</p>
<p>Where prospects for Americans, even those with the advanced degrees, achieving the “American Dream” in this economic era are concerned, a four-word phrase sums it up concisely:</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t count on it!</p>
<p>In December 2011 “Dan Rather Reports” aired a disconcerting hour-long report, <span style="color: #011480;">“<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeoBWzIRuic">No Thanks for Everything”</a></span> which reported on how highly educated and experienced American computer programmers are being replaced by programmers from India.</p>
<p>On May 15, 2007 a four-minute <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU"><span style="color: #0d2f87;">infuriating video</span></a> was aired on &#8220;Lou Dobbs Tonight&#8221; on CNN. It features an immigration lawyer&#8217;s conference in which lawyers were being coached to <i>&#8220;</i><span style="color: #9d1e1c;"><b><i>not find</i> <i>qualified U.S. workers</i></b></span><i>!&#8221; </i>The lecturer is identified in the video as being Lawrence M. Lebowitz, the Vice President of Marketing for the firm of Cohen &amp; Grigsby.</p>
<p>The Winter 2014 edition of the quarterly journal, “The Social Contract” published my extensive article on the devastating impact that Comprehensive Immigration Reform would have on the middle class and on the economy of the United States.  My article was entitled: <a href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/twentyfour-two/tsc_24_2_cutler.pdf"><i>&#8220;American Dream Being Sold at Auction &#8211; America’s Middle Class to Be Put on Endangered Species List&#8221;</i></a></p>
<p>Middle class workers and the working poor are clearly getting hammered by the current importation of foreign workers.  In life there are winners and there are losers.  If American workers &#8212; especially middle class workers &#8212; are losing, and losing big, someone must be winning.  The question is simple, “Who benefits from open borders and failures to enforce the immigration laws?</p>
<p>The Spring 2012 edition of  “The Social Contract,” contains a lengthy article which I wrote that was entitled, <a href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_22_3/tsc_22_3_cutler.shtml"><span style="color: #011480;">“Immigration: The Modern Day Gold Rush.”</span></a><span style="color: #011480;">  </span>In my article I attempted to answer that question as to who the big winners are.  Who are those who are literally and figuratively making out like bandits by the current circumstances.  You might be surprised to find out how many are feeding at that trough.  While it is obvious that employers who hire illegal aliens or who game the system to bring in foreign workers with visas that enable them to work in the United States for wages that are far lower than those Americans would be paid, there are others whose ability to profit financially and/or acquire political power might not be so readily apparent.</p>
<p>The list of these profiteers includes banks and money remitters who become the silent partner of every person who moves money from the United States to foreign countries.  It includes immigration attorneys who not only represent aliens but employers who seek to hire foreign workers.  Labor unions looking for more members, which translates into more union dues and more political leverage, are certainly on board with this concept, as are the National Chamber of Commerce and many but not all local Chambers of Commerce.  Schools are eager to bring in foreign students and at present the GAO estimates that there are some 10,000 schools that are authorized to file the appropriate applications to enable foreign students to come to the United States.</p>
<p>The list goes on &#8212; but I think you get the point.</p>
<p>Facilitating the entry of still more foreign workers and more foreign students would create still more devastation for American workers and their families but would greatly increase the wealth of the super wealthy who are at the absolute top of the economic food chain in America.</p>
<p>On August 30, 2013 “Business Insider” published a Reuters news article: <i><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on-intelligence-2013-8?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed:+businessinsider/warroom+(War+Room)">&#8220;Poverty Stresses The Brain So Much That It&#8217;s Like Losing 13 IQ Points</a>.</i>&#8221;</p>
<p>The title of that alarming report makes it clear that poverty often becomes self-perpetuating.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding these facts, many corporate executives are eager to import foreign workers and foreign students, apparently to lower wages and increase corporate profit. This is seemingly the driving force behind the assertions by such individuals as Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg, that there are not enough high-tech workers in the United States and that the United States must import entrepreneurs if America is to remain successful. What no one seems to have noticed is that they themselves are all native-born American citizens. Additionally, while Elon Musk, the founder of Pay-Pal, the Tesla car company and Space-X, was born in South Africa, he was provided with lawful status in the United States, providing clear evidence that this component of the immigration system already in place works. However, the lack of integrity and ability to weed out fraud in work-based visas all too often provides aliens with visas they would not have been granted if the fraud had been uncovered.</p>
<p>The infamous bank robber, Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks said simply, “That’s where the money is!” Today CEO’s seek to find employees oversees in Third World countries because that where the cheap labor is.</p>
<p>Now we need to consider how the concept of reducing “wage inequality” was used deceptively by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, in his <a href="http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/greenspan_testimony_04_30_09.pdf"><span style="color: #386eff;">prepared testimony</span></a> when he addressed a hearing conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security conducted a hearing on April 30, 2009 on the topic:  <span style="color: #386eff;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?action=like&amp;app_id=46744042133&amp;channel=http://static.ak.facebook.com/connect/xd_arbiter/V80PAcvrynR.js?version=41">&#8220;Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do It and How?&#8221;</a></span></p>
<p>While many disclaimers we hear on television commercials are recited by announcers sounding ever more like auctioneers, making it all but impossible to actually hear the verbal equivalent of small print, Alan Greenspan&#8217;s way of delivering the bad news is to speak in a droning, syrupy, monotone voice.  Greenspan&#8217;s sentences are often structured to further obfuscate what he is saying as are the words he carefully selects.</p>
<p>During his testimony at that hearing, Greenspan spoke of the advantages to the employment of foreign workers &#8212; both illegal aliens, as well as high-skilled aliens admitted into the United States &#8212; with visas that enable them to take the high-tech jobs.  In fact, he called for greatly increasing the number of highly skilled (and educated) foreign workers.</p>
<p>In this excerpt from his testimony, it is clear that he understands what most Americans want, but he could not care less:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>There are two distinctly different policy issues that confront the Congress. The first is illegal immigration. The notion of rewarding with permanent resident status those who have broken our immigration laws does not sit well with the American people. In a recent poll, two-thirds would like to see the number of illegals decreased.</i></p>
<p><i>But there is little doubt that unauthorized, that is, illegal, immigration has made a significant</i> <i>contribution to the growth of our economy. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, it accounted for more than a sixth of the increase in our total civilian labor force.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Greenspan glossed over the significant costs on state and local governments and minimized the issue of wage suppression.  When people are among the working poor, every cent they earn counts.  He noted the imposition of significant costs on some state and local governments, but what is significant is that corporations will make more money even as they off-shore their manufacturing facilities and their profits to minimize labor costs, violate safety and environmental laws and standards and certtainly dodge paying taxes in the United States.</p>
<p>This should surprise no one.   What level of empathy would you expect of someone who could complain about too much money being paid to middle class workers (<i>the privileged elite </i>as he referred<i> </i>to them)?</p>
<p>This is precisely the position he took when he went on to support the claims that had been made by Bill Gates at a previous hearing that the United States needs to admit far more high-skilled workers into the United States.  Here is how Greenspan&#8217;s testimony addressed this issue:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>First, skilled workers and their families form new households. They will, of necessity, move into vacant housing units, the current glut of which is depressing prices of American homes. And, of course, house price declines are a major factor in mortgage foreclosures and the plunge in value of the vast quantity of U.S. mortgage-backed securities that has contributed substantially to the disabling of our banking system.</i></p>
<p><i>The second bonus would address the increasing concentration of income in this country.  Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It is beyond belief that Greenspan could refer to American middle class workers as the “privileged elite” or that such an outrageous statement could be made at a Senate hearing and go unreported.  Yet this is precisely what happened.</p>
<p>Most people equate Comprehensive Immigration Reform with a massive amnesty for unknown millions of illegal aliens who have violated America&#8217;s borders and immigration laws that are <i>supposed</i> to protect American lives and the jobs of American workers, thereby creating a national security nightmare.</p>
<p>What is generally not known is that among the provisions of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the legislative betrayal of American citizens, is that it would provide for a huge increase in the number of H-1B visas for high tech workers and a provision that would, for the very first time, permit the spouses and adult children of H-1B visa holders to be granted Employment Authorization Documents (EAD&#8217;s) that would give these nonimmigrant family members as much right to any job as an American worker.</p>
<p>Greenspan said that American workers should no longer be shielded from foreign competition.  This is a key area of “reform” that this legislation would deliver.  Under the current immigration laws, <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182"><span style="color: #011480;">Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182: (Inadmissible Aliens)</span></a> enumerates various categories of aliens who are to be prevented from entering the U.S.  The list of excludible classes of aliens includes aliens who suffer dangerous communicable diseases, severe mental illness, fugitives from justice, aliens who are convicted felons, spies, terrorists, war criminals, human rights violators, and others whose presence would undermine national security and/or public safety.</p>
<p>This section of law also addresses the issue of protecting the jobs, wages, and working conditions of the American worker. Here is the relevant portion of this section of law:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>(5) Labor certification and qualifications for certain immigrants</i></p>
<p><i>(A) Labor certification</i></p>
<p><i>(i) In general Any alien who seeks to enter the U.S. for the purpose of performing skilled or unskilled labor is inadmissible, unless the Secretary of Labor has determined and certified to the Secretary of State and the Attorney General that —</i></p>
<p><i>(I) there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the U.S. and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor, and</i></p>
<p><i>(II) the employment of such alien will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of workers in the U.S. similarly employed.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Eliminating these provisions of our immigration laws would accomplish precisely what Greenspan called for when he said that American workers should no longer be shielded from foreign competition so that the “wage premiums” being paid to American workers could be eliminated.  This is not about decreasing the wage disparity between America&#8217;s super wealthy and other Americans but about greatly reducing the wage disparity between America&#8217;s middle class and Americans living below the poverty level.</p>
<p>Senator Ted Cruz, however, is truly leading the charge against American high-tech workers.  He provided an amendment to Comprehensive Immigration Reform (S.744) referred to as “Cruz 5.” The goal of his amendment was made crystal clear in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHlGlNwsQb0"><span style="color: #011480;">the video of statements by Cruz</span></a><span style="color: #011480;"><b> </b></span>at a Senate hearing on this issue.  His amendment provides for a 500% increase in the cap for H-1B visas, increasing the current annual cap of 65,000 such visas to an outrageous 325,000 Science, Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) professionals.</p>
<p>When the Labor Department reports on the unemployment rate &#8212; currently estimated to be 6.1% &#8212; the fact that nearly 100 million Americans of working age are not working is utterly ignored, both in the statistics and in the way that roughly one-third of American citizens are left out of the equation.  This is a bit like a surgeon conferring with the family of a patient who has died on the operating table telling the family that the news is not all bad, at least the deceased in not suffering from a fever.</p>
<p>Politicians &#8212; Democrats and Republicans alike &#8212; seek every opportunity to call for educating more foreign students because, they claim, that we need to bring the world&#8217;s best and brightest students and workers to the United States so that America can be successful, often stating that we should be “stapling green cards onto the diplomas and degrees earned by those foreign students so that they will not go back to their home countries half-way around the world upon graduating.”</p>
<p>What they fail to note is that we have a term for the world&#8217;s “Best and Brightest” &#8212; they are called <em>Americans</em>!</p>
<p>The assertions about the need to import the world&#8217;s best and brightest to fill a supposed lack of qualified workers are utterly false.</p>
<p>On January 2, 2014 the <em>Global Post</em> published a report written by James Tapper.</p>
<p style="color: #011480;"><span style="color: #000000;">The title and subtitle of his report summed up his findings succinctly:<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/131210/the-indian-tech-worker-h-1b-visa-scam">&#8220;The Indian tech worker H-1B visa scam: </a></span> <i><a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/131210/the-indian-tech-worker-h-1b-visa-scam">More than 1 in 3 US tech jobs go to foreigners. Americans, and many foreigners, get cheated in the process. Obama and Zuckerberg want to let in more.&#8221;</a></i></p>
<p>Here is an excerpt from Tapper&#8217;s article:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Unemployment </i><a href="http://cew.georgetown.edu/unemployment2013/"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>rates are high</i></span></a><i> for information systems graduates, with 14.7 percent out of work.</i></p>
<p><i>The competition from foreign workers also depresses wages for Americans. The </i><a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-microsoft-report-distorts/"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>average hourly wage</i></span></a><i> for computer and mathematics graduates was $37.27 in 2000, and $39.24 in 2011 — an average rise of less than 0.5 percent per year.</i></p>
<p><i>And </i><a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>research</i></span></a><i> from the Economic Policy Institute contends that only half of American students who graduate with a degree in science, technology, engineering or maths ends up with a job in that field.</i></p>
<p><i>“It has nothing to do with any lack of American workers,” Professor Hira said. “It is simply that the foreign workers will work for less.”</i></p></blockquote>
<p>When aliens marry American spouses solely to acquire lawful immigrant status, such an arrangement is referred to as a “Marriage of Convenience.”  Such a “marriage” constitutes a federal crime, one involving fraud, wherein the alien gains lawful immigrant status by deception and defrauding the government and the citizen “spouse” is paid for involvement in the scam.</p>
<p>Today there is a new sort of  “marriage of convenience” impacting immigration &#8212; this one involves corporate executives who are normally at each other&#8217;s corporate throats, but who have joined forces for a common goal- flooding America with as many foreign workers as possible to drive down wages and other labor-related costs.  These CEOs consistently lie about the supposed need for foreign high-tech workers because of a purported shortage of qualified Americans.  They have also pumped huge sums of money into this effort to influence politicians about this alleged “shortage.”</p>
<p>Politico reported on this “marriage of convenience” in its September 2013 article, <span style="color: #011480;"><a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ixzz2gNNiaQva">&#8220;Tech rivals joining forces on NSA, immigration.&#8221;</a></span></p>
<p>Here is how this report began:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>They trash each other in the marketplace and sue each other in courts.</i></p>
<p><i>But lately, tech companies and their leaders have been holding hands to fight for things they care about in Washington, from immigration reform to National Security Agency damage control.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The report went on to note:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>The primary example is immigration reform. Tech company lobbyists and industry trade groups have linked arms to work for passage of legislation, holding Monday strategy calls, deploying teams to focus on lawmakers by party and by chamber and acting as a coordinator among the disparate groups pushing Congress to act.</i></p>
<p><i>Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tapped Silicon Valley’s leading executives and investors to join his reform advocacy group, FWD.us. His group and others in the tech sector are pushing for comprehensive immigration reform, an evolution from the industry’s past strategy of focusing narrowly on its desire for more high-skilled visas.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Although my focus is the immigration issue, it is important to note that the Politico article reported that the CEOs of these competing companies are also uniting to push globalist positions to enable them to move data across international borders.</p>
<p>For these CEOs, profits trump America&#8217;s national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.</p>
<p>They have even convinced others to get into their “marital bed.”</p>
<p style="color: #011480;"><span style="color: #000000;">Consider the February 4, 2014 Breitbart report written by Matthew Boyle, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/02/04/Democratic-Party-operative-helped-prepare-Zuckerberg-s-House-GOP-pro-amnesty-packet">&#8220;Former Democrat Operative Helped Prepare Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s Amnesty Pitch to GOP.&#8221;</a></span></p>
<p>Here is how this report begins:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>FWD.us, the pro-amnesty brainchild of Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, made a big splash at the House GOP retreat last week in Cambridge, Maryland, with a packet distributed to every lawmaker touting the benefits of a big, comprehensive reform bill.</i></p>
<p><i>However, the Republicans who received the document might be interested to learn that one of its co-authors (Jennifer Martin) is a hardened Democratic party operative.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The Daily Caller&#8217;s article, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/19/zuckerbergs-lobby-group-announces-hackathon-with-illegal-immigrants/"><span style="color: #011480;">&#8220;Zuckerberg’s lobby group announces hackathon with illegal immigrants,&#8221;</span></a>  focused on a unique program created by Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley cohorts to provide opportunities expressly for illegal aliens.</p>
<p>The article began with this statement:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Tech-savvy illegal immigrants are being given a chance to prove their mettle alongside renown American technology entrepreneurs in an upcoming contest in Silicon Valley, where they will code and create projects to promote comprehensive immigration reform.</i></p>
<p><i>Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg’s political action committee, FWD.us, is hoping to showcase the programming talents of members of the technology community who would most directly benefit from comprehensive immigration reform: illegal immigrants.</i></p>
<p><i>The contest, called a hackathon, will be </i><a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/_blank"><span style="color: #011480;"><i>held</i></span></a><i> at LinkedIn’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. from Nov. 20 to 21.</i></p>
<p><i>Zuckerberg, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Groupon founder and former CEO Andrew Mason, and Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston are expected to work alongside the hackathon’s participants as mentors throughout the event.</i></p>
<p><i>“Each team will create a project or application that could help supporters share stories, contact members of Congress or show family and friends why they want meaningful immigration reform,” FWD.us states on its website.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Ironically, Zuckerberg referred to this stunt as a “Hackathon.”  A computer hacker is one who accesses computers by breaking in.  Here he provided encouragement for illegal aliens to break into the United States and acquire educational and career opportunities he would joyfully provide to them, but not to desperate fellow Americans or lawful immigrants.</p>
<p>Why could not this incredible opportunity have been provided to<i> American</i> children &#8212; perhaps especially those living in poverty?  It is reported that some 25% of all American children now live below the poverty line.  Many of these children are members of America&#8217;s minority communities.</p>
<p>Why not provide such opportunities to returning battle-weary and/or wounded members of the U.S. military?</p>
<p>Zuckerberg and his cohorts know that the administration won&#8217;t ask them those questions nor seek to take punitive actions against them for providing such opportunities to illegal aliens.  The DHS, an agency I have come to refer to as the Department of Homeland Surrender, is no more likely to act against Zuckerberg than it is to act against sanctuary cities that shield illegal aliens from detection by the federal government.</p>
<p>Some of these “illegal immigrants” may not be who they claim that they are.  Some may have entered the United States with nefarious intentions and may not have actually entered the United States as children as they claim.  This is the same vulnerability with the “DREAMERS” who have until age 31 to file an application in which they claim to have entered the United States before the age of 15.  There is no record of their entry and their true identities cannot be verified.  Providing high-tech training to such foreign nationals engenders unacceptable national security risks.</p>
<p>On March 26, 2013 CNBC posted an insightful report that was, itself, predicated on a Sunlight Foundation report.  The title of the CNBC article paints a clear picture, <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100593528"><span style="color: #0d4399;">&#8220;Our Massively One-Sided Immigration Debate.&#8221;</span></a></p>
<p>Here is an important excerpt from the CNBC report:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>As it turns out, while Americans remain divided on immigration, the lobbyists are not.</i></p>
<p><i>The Sunlight Foundation, a do-gooder government transparency and accountability outfit formed in 2006, on Monday released &#8220;</i><a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/03/25/immigration/"><span style="color: #0d4399;"><i>Untangling the Webs of immigration Lobbying</i></span></a><i>,&#8221; a report examining the organizations that have led the charge for changing the rules on immigration to the United States.</i></p>
<p><i>Sunlight dug through 8,000 lobbying reports filed since the last big push for immigration reform in 2007. Six-thousand seven-hundred and twelve of those involved immigration lobbying. More than $1.5 billion was spent on this immense lobbying push.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Members of the leadership in the House of Representatives, perhaps bowing the pressures of that gargantuan lobbying effort, have expressed a willingness to provide illegal aliens with lawful status.</p>
<p>On December 4, 2013 <em>The Fiscal Times</em> published an important report: <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/12/04/Obamas-Immigration-Sop-Silicon-Valley">&#8220;Obama’s Immigration Sop to Silicon Valley&#8221;</a></p>
<p>Here is how this report begins:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>“Is President Obama’s push for more STEM grads and increased H-1B visas payback to the tech companies that got him re-elected? It seems possible. While the likes of Google and Microsoft have been sounding alarms over a shortage of technical workers, other research indicates that in fact we may have too many college graduates with degrees in science and math. Critics charge that Silicon Valley has promoted the shortage myth to gain support for policies — like those promoted by the president — that ultimately aim to keep a lid on tech pay.”</i></p></blockquote>
<p>With all of the frustration so many Americans now justifiably feel about their representation (or lack thereof) by the administration and by Congress, it is essential to note that one of the implacable stalwart champions and defenders of American workers and their families is Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.</p>
<p style="color: #386eff;"><span style="color: #000000;">In fact, on May 16, 2014 Breitbart posted an article with a crystal clear title, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/16/Scholars-Debunk-Claims-of-High-Tech-Workers-Shortage-Question-Industry-s-Free-Pass">&#8220;Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry&#8217;s &#8216;Free Pass.&#8217; &#8220;</a></span></p>
<p>The article noted that:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>On a Friday conference call that was organized by the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has been relentless in standing up for American workers and their interests during the amnesty debate, Hal Salzman, a Rutgers University public policy professor, said current wages in the high-tech and information technology (IT) industries do not reflect a labor shortage.Matloff said the high-tech industry has gotten a &#8220;free ride&#8221; from the media and enjoys a very &#8220;positive image&#8221; in this debate, which he said has &#8220;really been a non-debate.”</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Here are several additional significant quotes from this article.</p>
<blockquote><p><span style="color: #386eff;"><a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CCgQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2FBig-Government%2F2013%2F11%2F27%2FReport-Claims-of-Shortage-of-High-Tech-Workers-a-Myth&amp;ei=5YB2U7n5C9GRqgbB1YHICQ&amp;usg=AFQjCNEtaCYlXbMaSJRRtuErYbYDH1S2eA&amp;bvm=bv.66917471,d.b2k"><i>The myth</i></a><i> </i></span><i>that there are such widespread labor shortages in the high-tech industry </i><a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/21/Atlantic-No-Empirical-Evidence-to-Support-Claims-of-Shortage-of-American-High-Tech-Workers"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>has been debunked</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>in numerous studies, but </i><a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/15/After-Backing-Amnesty-Tea-Party-Express-Chair-Claims-He-Stands-with-Sen-Sessions-American-Workers"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>Republicans</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>and </i><a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/02/Schumer-Blasts-Hateful-Steve-King-on-Amnesty-Falsely-Claims-High-Tech-Worker-Shortage"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>Democrats</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>have continued to, as the scholars noted, perpetuate it without being challenged on their specious claims. High-tech lobbies like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s </i><a href="http://fwd.us/"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>FWD.us</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>have poured in millions of dollars in high-profile campaigns to secure more high-tech visas.</i></p>
<p><i>And they have partly been succeeding. The Senate&#8217;s amnesty bill that passed last year would double and possibly </i><b><i>triple </i></b><i>the number of high-tech visas and, as Breitbart News has reported, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte&#8217;s (R-VA) &#8220;</i><a href="http://mashable.com/2013/05/23/stem-immigration-visas/"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>SKILLS&#8221;</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>Act that that passed out of his committee would </i><b><i>double </i></b><i>the number of H-1B visas.</i></p>
<p><i>Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has worked on these issues for more than a decade, said on the conference call that the H-1B visas that are filling the supposed &#8220;gaps&#8221; are &#8220;doing more harm than good&#8221; to the U.S. science and engineering workforce.</i></p>
<p><i>He noted that the majority of the H-1B visas are being used for &#8220;cheaper workers&#8221; from abroad and mentioned that offshoring firms used 50% of the cap last year to further their business model of bringing in &#8220;lower-cost H-1B workers to replace American workers.&#8221; Salzman said that even after American software engineers train their replacements, they cannot speak out about their experiences for fear of being blackballed or having to forfeit their severance payments.</i></p>
<p><i>Hira said that the H-1B program has run amok because &#8220;Congress sets the wage floors way too low&#8221; and &#8220;far below the market wages for American workers&#8221; while not placing any &#8220;requirement to look for or recruit American workers first, so there is no displacement of American workers.&#8221;</i></p>
<p><i>&#8220;As a result, you are basically inducing companies to game the system to bring foreign workers to undercut American workers,&#8221; Hira noted. &#8220;Instead of complimenting the U.S. workers as it should, it&#8217;s substituting for the U.S. workforce and taking away future opportunities by shifting the work overseas.&#8221;</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Here is an additional quote from the article:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>IT guest workers are on pace to make up 30-40% of the entire IT workforce even when there are </i><a href="http://issues.org/29-4/what-shortages-the-real-evidence-about-the-stem-workforce/"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>50% more</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>graduates than job openings in the STEM fields.</i></p>
<p><i>Further, Matloff emphasized that H1-B visa holders earn 5-10% less on average than American workers and there is a high churn rate that gives companies a &#8220;never-ending supply of new hires,&#8221; allowing them to replace workers over the age of 35 while weakening the &#8220;bargaining position of current workers.&#8221;The Senate bill, Matloff said, exacerbates this problem by providing 150% of the visas that the IT industry has said they needed at the beginning of the debate.</i></p>
<p><i>&#8220;You are replacing more innovative people with less innovative people, which also will amount to a net loss for the U.S. economy,&#8221; Matloff said, saying, for instance, that there are </i><a href="http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html"><span style="color: #386eff;"><i>fewer patents per capita</i></span></a><span style="color: #386eff;"><i> </i></span><i>produced by those from abroad than those in America.&#8221;</i></p>
<p><i>As a result, fewer Americans are able to move up the economic ladder through the high-tech fields. And the problem has gotten worse since the H-1B spigots were opened in the 1990s.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>They are ignoring the obvious: That the best way to make certain that students who acquire vital education in the United States don&#8217;t leave the United States is to educate American students.  Upon graduation, rather than go half-way across the planet, they will simply go half-way across town and take jobs inside the United States.  This will help Americans and also the American economy.  Foreign workers, both legally and illegally working in the United States, last year sent at least 125 billion dollars in remittances back to their home countries.  Economists estimate that because of the multiplier effect this alone increases America&#8217;s burgeoning national debt by roughly a half trillion dollars per year.  Now consider the impact this further has on the displacement of American workers who go from being tax-paying middle class consumers to joining the growing ranks of Americans living below the poverty line who lose their homes to foreclosure and lose their disposable income, creating a further drag on our nation&#8217;s economy.</p>
<p>I would argue that all of America&#8217;s national debt could be eliminated by effective immigration law enforcement coupled with “going back to the future” by making certain that <i>American Citizens</i> be provided with a world class education and preference in the workforce.  This is how the “Greatest Generation” built America&#8217;s Middle Class and with it, the American Dream.</p>
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		<title>Video: Raymond Ibrahim Discusses &#8216;Islam&#8217;s Protestant Reformation&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/video-raymond-ibrahim-discusses-islams-protestant-reformation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=video-raymond-ibrahim-discusses-islams-protestant-reformation</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2014 04:20:05 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Those hoping for an “Islamic reformation” need to look elsewhere…]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Center, recently appeared on Sun News’ Byline with Brian Lilley discussing his recent article, &#8220;<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/islams-protestant-reformation/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Islam&#8217;s &#8216;Protestant Reformation</span></a>.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Islam’s ‘Protestant Reformation’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/islams-protestant-reformation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islams-protestant-reformation</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:22:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why radical Islam is the “reformed” version of Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235188" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hg.jpg" alt="hg" width="262" height="222" /></a>Originally published by PJ Media in </i><a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/islams-protestant-reformation/?singlepage=true"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>two</i></span></a><i> </i><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i><a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/islams-protestant-reformation-part-2/?singlepage=true">parts</a>.</i></span></p>
<p>In order to prevent a clash of civilizations, or worse, Islam must reform.  This is the contention of many Western peoples.  And, pointing to Christianity’s Protestant Reformation as proof that Islam can also reform, many are optimistic.</p>
<p>Overlooked by most, however, is that Islam <i>has been</i> reforming. What is today called “radical Islam” <i>is</i> the reformation of Islam.  And it follows the same pattern of Christianity’s Protestant Reformation.</p>
<p>The problem is our understanding of the word “reform.”  Despite its positive connotations, “reform” simply <a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/reform"><span style="color: #0433ff;">means</span></a> to “make changes (in something, typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it.”</p>
<p>Synonyms of “reform” include “make better,” “ameliorate,” and “improve”—splendid words all, yet words all subjective and loaded with Western references.</p>
<p>Muslim notions of “improving” society may include purging it of “infidels” and their corrupt ways; or segregating men and women, keeping the latter under wraps or quarantined at home; or executing apostates, who are seen as traitorous agitators.</p>
<p>Banning many forms of freedoms taken for granted in the West—from alcohol consumption to religious and gender equality—can be deemed an “improvement” and a “betterment” of society.</p>
<p>In short, an Islamic reformation need not lead to what we think of as an “improvement” and “betterment” of society—simply because “we” are not Muslims and do not share their reference points and first premises.  “Reform” only sounds good to most Western peoples because they, secular and religious alike, are to a great extent products of Christianity’s Protestant Reformation; and so, a priori, they naturally attribute positive connotations to the word.</p>
<p>&#8212;-</p>
<p>At its core, the Protestant Reformation was a revolt against tradition in the name of scripture—in this case, the Bible.  With the coming of the printing press, increasing numbers of Christians became better acquainted with the Bible’s contents, parts of which they felt contradicted what the Church was teaching.  So they broke away, protesting that the only Christian authority was “scripture alone,” <i>sola scriptura</i>.</p>
<p>Islam’s reformation follows the same logic of the Protestant Reformation—specifically by prioritizing scripture over centuries of tradition and legal debate—but with antithetical results that reflect the contradictory teachings of the core texts of Christianity and Islam.</p>
<p>As with Christianity, throughout most of its history, Islam’s scriptures, specifically its “twin pillars,” the Koran (literal words of Allah) and the Hadith (words and deeds of Allah’s prophet, Muhammad), were inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Only a few scholars, or <i>ulema</i>—literally, “they who know”—were literate in Arabic and/or had possession of Islam’s scriptures.  The average Muslim knew only the basics of Islam, or its “Five Pillars.”</p>
<p>In this context, a “medieval synthesis” flourished throughout the Islamic world.  Guided by an evolving general consensus (or <i>ijma‘</i>), Muslims sought to accommodate reality by, in medieval historian Daniel Pipes’ <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/13033/can-islam-be-reformed"><span style="color: #0433ff;">words</span></a>,</p>
<blockquote><p>translat[ing] Islam from a body of abstract, infeasible demands [as stipulated in the Koran and Hadith] into a workable system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia and made the code of law operational. Sharia could now be sufficiently applied without Muslims being subjected to its more stringent demands…  [However,] While the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, <i>it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists</i> (emphasis added).</p></blockquote>
<p>This vulnerability has now reached breaking point: millions of more Korans published in Arabic and other languages are in circulation today compared to just a century ago; millions of more Muslims are now literate enough to read and understand the Koran compared to their medieval forbears.  The Hadith, which contains some of the most intolerant teachings and violent deeds attributed to Islam’s prophet, is now collated and accessible, in part thanks to the efforts of Western scholars, the Orientalists.  Most recently, there is the Internet—where all these scriptures are now available in dozens of languages and to anyone with a laptop or iphone.</p>
<p>In this backdrop, what has been called at different times, places, and contexts “Islamic fundamentalism,” “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” and “Salafism” flourished.  Many of today’s Muslim believers, much better acquainted than their ancestors with the often black and white words of their scriptures, are <i>protesting</i> against earlier traditions, are <i>protesting</i> against the “medieval synthesis,” in favor of scriptural literalism—just like their Christian Protestant counterparts once did.</p>
<p>Thus, if Martin Luther (d. 1546) rejected the extra-scriptural accretions of the Church and “reformed” Christianity by aligning it more closely with scripture, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (d. 1787), one of Islam’s first modern reformers, “called for a return to the pure, authentic Islam of the Prophet, and the rejection of the accretions that had corrupted it and distorted it,” in the words of Bernard Lewis (<i>The Middle East</i>, p. 333).</p>
<p>The unadulterated words of God—or Allah—are all that matter for the reformists.</p>
<p>Note: Because they are better acquainted with Islam’s scriptures, other Muslims, of course, are apostatizing—whether by converting to other religions, most notably Christianity, or whether by abandoning religion altogether, even if only in their hearts (for fear of the apostasy penalty).  This is an important point to be revisited later.  Muslims who do not become disaffected after better acquainting themselves with the literal teachings of Islam’s scriptures and who instead become more faithful to and observant of them are the topic of this essay.</p>
<p>&#8212;&#8211;</p>
<p>How Christianity and Islam can follow similar patterns of reform but with antithetical results rests in the fact that their scriptures are often antithetical to one another.   This is the key point, and one admittedly unintelligible to postmodern, secular sensibilities, which tend to lump all religious scripture together in a melting pot of relativism without bothering to evaluate the significance of their respective words and teachings.</p>
<p>Obviously a point by point comparison of the scriptures of Islam and Christianity is inappropriate for an article of this length (see my “<a href="http://www.meforum.org/2159/are-judaism-and-christianity-as-violent-as-islam"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam</span></a>” for a more comprehensive treatment).</p>
<p>Suffice it to note some contradictions (which will be rejected as a matter of course by the relativistic mindset):</p>
<p>•The New Testament preaches peace, brotherly love, tolerance, and forgiveness—for all humans, believers and non-believers alike.  Instead of combatting and converting “infidels,” Christians are called to pray for those who persecute them and turn the other cheek (which is not the same thing as passivity, for Christians are also called to be bold and unapologetic).  Conversely, the <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Koran and Hadith</span></a> call for war, or jihad, against all non-believers, until they either convert, accept subjugation and discrimination, or die.</p>
<p>•The New Testament has no punishment for the apostate from Christianity.  Conversely, Islam’s prophet himself <a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/084-sbt.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">decreed</span></a> that “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”</p>
<p>•The New Testament teaches monogamy, one husband and one wife, thereby dignifying the woman.  The <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Quran/017-polygamy.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Koran</span></a> allows polygamy—up to four wives—and the possession of concubines, or sex-slaves.  More literalist readings <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islamic-fatwa-husbands-should-abandon-wives-to-rapists-in-self-interest/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">treat women as possessions</span></a>.</p>
<p>•The New Testament discourages lying (e.g., Col. 3:9).  The Koran <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/taqiyya-about-taqiyya/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">permits it</span></a>; the prophet himself often deceived others, and permitted lying to one’s wife, to reconcile quarreling parties, and to the “infidel” during war.</p>
<p>It is precisely because Christian scriptural literalism lends itself to religious freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of women, that Western civilization developed the way it did—despite the nonstop propaganda campaign emanating from academia, Hollywood, and other major media that says otherwise.</p>
<p>And it is precisely because Islamic scriptural literalism is at odds with religious freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of women, that Islamic civilization is the way it is—despite the nonstop propaganda campaign emanating from academia, Hollywood, and other major media that says otherwise.</p>
<p>&#8212;-</p>
<p>Those in the West waiting for an Islamic “reformation” along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation, on the assumption that it will lead to similar results, must embrace two facts: 1) Islam’s reformation is well on its way, and yes, along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation—with a focus on scripture and a disregard for tradition—and for similar historic reasons (literacy, scriptural dissemination, etc.); 2) But because the core teachings of the scriptures of Christianity and Islam markedly differ from one another, Islam’s reformation has naturally produced a civilization markedly different from the West.</p>
<p>Put differently, those in the West uncritically calling for an “Islamic reformation” need to acknowledge what it is they are <i>really</i> calling for: the secularization of Islam in the name of modernity; the trivialization and sidelining of Islamic law from Muslim society.</p>
<p>That would not be a “reformation”—certainly nothing analogous to the Protestant Reformation.</p>
<p>Overlooked is that Western secularism was, and is, possible only because Christian scripture lends itself to the division between church and state, the spiritual and the temporal.</p>
<p>Upholding the literal teachings of Christianity is possible within a secular—or any—state.  Christ called on believers to “render unto Caesar the things of Caesar (temporal) and unto God the things of God (spiritual)” (Matt. 22:21).  For the “kingdom of God” is “not of this world” (John 18:36).  Indeed, a good chunk of the New Testament deals with how “man is not justified by the works of the law… for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified” (Gal. 2:16).</p>
<p>On the other hand, mainstream Islam is devoted to upholding the law; and Islamic scripture calls for a fusion between Islamic law—Sharia—and the state.   Allah decrees in the Koran that “It is not fitting for true believers—men or women—to take their choice in affairs if Allah and His Messenger have decreed otherwise. He that disobeys Allah and His Messenger strays far indeed!” (33:36).   Allah tells the prophet of Islam, “We put you on an ordained way [literarily in Arabic, <i>sharia</i>] of command; so follow it and do not follow the inclinations of those who are ignorant” (45:18).</p>
<p>Mainstream Islamic exegesis has always interpreted such verses to mean that Muslims must follow the commandments of Allah as laid out in the Koran and Hadith—in a word, Sharia.</p>
<p>And Sharia is so concerned with the details of this world, with the everyday doings of Muslims, that every conceivable human action falls under five rulings, or <i>ahkam</i>: the forbidden (<i>haram</i>), the discouraged (<i>makruh</i>), the neutral (<i>mubah</i>), the recommended (<i>mustahib</i>), and the obligatory (<i>wajib</i>).</p>
<p>Conversely, Islam offers little concerning the spiritual (sidelined Sufism the exception).</p>
<p>Unlike Christianity, then, Islam without the law—without Sharia—becomes meaningless.   After all, the Arabic word <i>Islam</i> literally means “submit.”  Submit to what?  Allah’s laws as codified in Sharia and derived from the Koran and Hadith.</p>
<p>The “Islamic reformation” some in the West are hoping for is really nothing less than an <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/why-moderate-islam-is-an-oxymoron/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Islam without Islam</span></a>—secularization not reformation; Muslims prioritizing secular, civic, and humanitarian laws over Allah’s law; a “reformation” that would slowly see the religion of Muhammad go into the dustbin of history.</p>
<p>Such a scenario is certainly more plausible than believing that Islam can be true to its scriptures in any meaningful way and still peacefully coexist with, much less complement, modernity the way Christianity does.</p>
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		<title>Pro-Amnesty Elites Treat People as &#8216;Commodities&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jeff-sessions/pro-amnesty-elites-treat-people-as-commodities/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pro-amnesty-elites-treat-people-as-commodities</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2014 04:55:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sen. Jeff Sessions]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sheldon Adelson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[working americans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234668</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who will stand up for the interests of everyday working Americans?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/">Breitbart.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/F2bl6FnmXaE" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Perhaps no issue better illustrates the current divide between everyday citizens and our political and business elites than the issue of immigration. The latter group draws the financial gains from a generous labor supply without considering the perspective of those on the other side of the ledger: the working people who have to worry about being laid off and replaced with lower-wage workers, about the strain placed on their local hospitals and neighborhood resources, or about cartel violence spilling across the border into their own communities.</p>
<p>For instance, Sheldon Adelson recently wrote that: “The immigrants here illegally need jobs, want to work and are willing to take on jobs that are not appealing to many Americans.” What about Americans who need jobs? Human beings are not commodities. We need to get our own workers off of unemployment and into good-paying jobs that can support their families. That means if a job is hard or strenuous, employers should raise wages and improve working conditions – why shouldn’t Americans who do tough work get paid more for their efforts?</p>
<p>Rupert Murdoch also recently argued for a dramatic expansion of the controversial H1B guest worker program. Murdoch writes that “there is a shortage of qualified American candidates,” to fill jobs in STEM fields like computer services and engineering. But the evidence shows the opposite: the US graduates approximately twice as many STEM-trained students each year as there are STEM jobs to fill. There is a large surplus of unemployed Americans with STEM degrees and yet, per the Economic Policy Institute, “the annual inflow of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half of all new IT jobs holders.” As Rutgers Professor Hal Salzman poignantly asked, “Average wages in IT today are the same as they were when Bill Clinton was president well over a decade ago…if there is in fact a shortage, why doesn&#8217;t that reflect in the market? Why don&#8217;t wages go up?&#8221;</p>
<p>The United States has the most generous immigration policy in the world. Each year, the US grants permanent legal admission to an additional 1 million immigrants who will be able to apply for citizenship, along with roughly 700,000 guest workers, 200,000 relatives of guest workers, and 500,000 students. These are overwhelmingly <em>not</em> farm workers as activists falsely suggest, but are instead workers brought in to fill jobs in every sector, occupation and industry throughout the US economy.</p>
<p>Overall, the number of people living in the US who were born in another country has quadrupled since 1970. And yet the Senate immigration bill doubles the rate of future immigration and guest worker admissions.</p>
<p>For too long, the immigration debate has been driven by the needs of politicians, business interests, and immigration activists who fail to appreciate that a nation owes certain obligations to its own citizens.</p>
<p>Consider immigration policy from the viewpoint of a middle-aged unemployed American who has to borrow gas money to drive to a job interview 100 miles away. Imagine how his or her life is affected when the company gives that open job to a temporary guest worker hired from 10,000 miles away. Imagine what any of the 58 million working-age Americans who don’t have jobs might have to say to the lawmakers and activists who claim there is a “labor shortage”.</p>
<p>The phrase “immigration reform” has been thoughtlessly applied to any legislation that combines amnesty with dramatic future increases to our record supply of labor. This is the singular vision championed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. It therefore falls on the shoulders of Republicans to stand alone as the one party representing the interests of everyday working Americans.</p>
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		<title>The Tech Industry&#8217;s Immigration Lies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-tech-industrys-immigration-lies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-tech-industrys-immigration-lies</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 04:25:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[degree]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is there really a shortage of high-skill American workers? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/immigration_generic_NSH304.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-222563" alt="immigration_generic_NSH*304" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/immigration_generic_NSH304.jpg" width="304" height="202" /></a>One of the primary narratives associated with comprehensive immigration reform has nothing to do with the millions of low-skill workers that would be granted an opportunity to compete against Americans for jobs. As a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/130388692/Tech-CEO-letter">letter</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sent to the president and Congressional leaders signed by more than 100 chief executives of major tech companies and trade associations indicates, there is a shortage of highly-skilled American labor that drives reform as well. Yet as the Atlantic&#8217;s Michael S. Teitelbaum </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, that narrative is a lie.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;A compelling body of research is now available, from many </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/chapter-3/c3h.htm">leading</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674052420">academic</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674049710">researchers</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and from respected research organizations such as the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w11457">National Bureau</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w11623">of Economic Research</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF194.html">RAND Corporation</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, and the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=411562">Urban Institute</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">,&#8221; Teitelbaum explains. </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher&#8230;All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&amp;E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He then introduces the 800-pound gorilla of Economics 101, as in the reality that a genuine shortage of high-skill workers would pressure those seeking an ostensible scarcity of talent to offer higher levels of compensation to potential workers. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is occurring. &#8220;Most studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How does this reconcile with the claims of people like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer? &#8220;Because labor markets in science and engineering differ greatly across fields, industries, and time periods, it is easy to cherry-pick specific specialties that really are in short supply, at least in specific years and locations,&#8221; Teitelbaum explains. And while he concedes that high-skill occupations have unemployment rates lower than those of the workforce in general, &#8220;surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious &#8216;shortages&#8217; such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent).&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Economic Policy Institute (ECI) also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.epi.org/publication/current-proposed-high-skilled-guestworker/">hammers</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> home reality about the so-called shortage of foreign workers, revealing that in 2011, the number of college-educated &#8220;guest workers&#8221; under the age of 30 comprised 66 percent of the 166,000 new college-educated Information Technology (IT) job-holders under the age of 30. They further note that this reality is discouraging many Americans students in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields from entering IT. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With good reason. Americans colleges already graduate 50 percent more computer science majors than are finding jobs in IT. The ECI further notes that if comprehensive immigration reform and/or the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://issa.house.gov/skills/">Skill Visa Act</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> promoted by Republicans Darryl Issa (R-CA) and Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) become reality, the conservative estimate of 180,000, &#8220;new IT guestworkers and STEM green card beneficiaries will be greater than the number of new hires of young IT college graduates in 2011.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">At the heart of this sellout is the H-1B visa program. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/320/314501.pdf">does its best</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to obscure reality, stating that most of those visas are used to fill &#8220;entry level&#8221; positions. Yet EPI confirms Teitelman&#8217;s assessment of flat or slow-growing wages, revealing that such workers are not only competing with recent U.S. graduates, but providing a supply of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-brightest-immigration-policy/">lower-wage</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> guest workers that can take jobs from older workers as well.</span></p>
<p><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Computerworld</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, which on April 1 received the latest data regarding H-1B visas from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247241/Offshore_firms_took_50_of_H_1B_visas_in_2013?taxonomyId=70&amp;pageNumber=1">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> there is such heavy demand anticipated, all of them will be claimed by the end of this week. They further note that the majority of claimants will be firms &#8220;that use visa holders to displace U.S. workers.&#8221; &#8220;The offshore outsourcing firms are once again getting the majority of the visas,&#8221; said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. &#8220;The program continues to promote the offshoring of high-wage American jobs.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The top three companies on the list of visa approval in 2013 were Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Cognizant. Other players include IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Google and Oracle. Many of these firms hire IT workers for offshore outsourcing contracts. Domestic workers who are replaced as a result often have to train their replacements as a condition of their severance package. Companies such as Cognizant insist they maintain a robust effort to hire American workers, but they do not disclose data to support that contention. Moreover, in 2013, Infosys agreed to pay $34 million to resolve a claim by the federal government: they had accused the firm of running an unlawful visa scheme. Infosys also refused to release data on its U.S. workforce. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Food and agricultural producer Cargill is another company outsourcing its IT jobs, sending them to TCS. Cargill&#8217;s home base is in Minnesota, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), along with Marco Rubio (R-FL), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) were </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236208/Senators_seek_H_1B_cap_that_starts_at_115_000_and_rises">developing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Immigration Innovation Act of 2013. The bill aims to initially raise the current H-1B cap of 85,000 visas, comprised of 65,000 H-1Bs, plus an additional 20,000 set aside for advanced degree gradates of American universities, to 115,000. It also includes an increase in the cap based on demand, until it reached 300,000 visas every year thereafter, even as it exempts advance degree STEM students from the total. In addition, the bill won&#8217;t apply employment-based green card quotas to foreign students earning a master&#8217;s or doctorate in STEM fields at a U.S. university, or their spouses and minor children.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The bill </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr3309">passed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the Republican-controlled House on Dec. 5, 2013. It has yet to be taken up by the Democratically-controlled Senate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as this amounts to dream legislation for high-tech companies, they are keeping up the pressure on lawmakers. In March, Goodlatte, who is the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/19/House-Judiciary-Chairman-Holding-Big-Money-Fundraiser-in-Silicon-Valley-with-Amnesty-Advocates">held</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a high-dollar fundraiser in Silicon Valley with pro-amnesty forces who ponied between $10,000 and $40,000 apiece for the privilege. Ron Conway, a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/02/10/ron-conway-sv-angel/">prolific</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> angel investor and venture capitalist, expressed the kind of arrogance one expects from those who seemingly believe government should be particularly responsive to high rollers. &#8220;In this case, because there’s been mixed messages from the Republicans, before I write my check, I wanted some assurances that Bob Goodlatte would be prepared to discuss immigration reform and what the timetable is for immigration reform, because we’re coming down the wire here with the [2014] elections and we need accountability,” he declared. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If genuine accountability is wanted&#8211;as opposed to the fulfillment of an agenda&#8211;getting the facts right would be a good place to start.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Both Teitelbaum and Michael Anft, senior writer for Johns Hopkins magazine, reveal that stores about a shortage of STEM workers are nothing new. Teitelbaum refers to five &#8220;alarm/boom/bust&#8221; cycles, each lasting about 10 to 15 years. From just after WWII through 2003, each cycle was initiated by alarms about a worker shortage, followed by policies to increase the supply of STEM workers, followed by the inevitable busts characterized by &#8220;mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts that inflicted severe damage to careers of both mature professionals and the booming numbers of emerging graduates, while also discouraging new entrants to these fields.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Anft </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.rit.edu/news/pdfs/CHE_Hira.pdf">speaks</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the same phenomenon, noting that prior to Americans worrying about the current emergence of China and India as the primary challengers to our status as the world&#8217;s preeminent innovator, &#8220;there were ruckuses caused by an increase in foreign auto and electronics imports (Japan) in the 1970s and 80s, a fear that someone else (the U.S.S.R.) would win the space race in the 50s and 60s, and the wartime emergency (Nazi Germany) that led to the Manhattan Project in the 40s.&#8221;   </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hira, who has testified before Congress regarding the issue, notes the hypocrisy of high-tech firms like Microsoft, who advocate for more IT visas, even as they lay off thousands of Americans with comparable skills. Norman S. Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of </span>California at Davis, is far more direct. &#8220;This is all about industry wanting to lower wages,&#8221; he contends.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Toward that end, high-tech companies are making contingency plans, in case their current push for comprehensive immigration reform proves unsuccessful. As Silicon Valley attorney John Bautista </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101502379">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, some companies with solely domestic operations are exploring the idea of opening offices overseas so they can hire people and bring them back to America on visas that allow for internal transfers of existing employees. &#8220;Before [corporate boards said], &#8216;We&#8217;ve got someone we want to hire, what&#8217;s the best way to bring him over?&#8217;&#8221; he explained. &#8220;Now it&#8217;s, &#8216;We have a hiring problem, let&#8217;s use the immigration laws to come up with an overall strategy to bring teams of people on board.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Part of that overall strategy includes the oldest strategies of all: pumping loads of cash into political campaigns and lobbying efforts. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the computer and Internet industries </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/visas-for-high-skilled-workers-could-double-under-bipartisan-senate-plan/2013/03/20/8b74c08a-9194-11e2-bdea-e32ad90da239_story.html">showered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Democrat and Republican candidates for federal office, as well as political committees, with $62 million during the 2012 election cycle. That same year tech companies spent a record-setting $132.5 million on Washington lobbying efforts, running their ten-year total in that regard to over $1 billion. </span></p>
<p>In 2013, the tech sector <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/315077-tech-and-agriculture-industries-team-up-to-lobby-for-immigration-reform">combined</a> forces with the agricultural sector. They were joined by the Chamber of Commerce, which <a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/195997-chamber-spent-50m-amid-immigration-push">added</a> another $52.7 million to reform lobbyists&#8217; coffers. &#8220;We&#8217;re determined to make 2014 the year that immigration reform is finally enacted,&#8221; said Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue in January.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">By any means necessary, it seems. Whether they get across the finish line remains to be seen. Likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul (R-KY) is the latest Republican to drink the comprehensive Kool-aid, insisting that his party has to get &#8220;beyond deportation to the rest of the issues,&#8221; if they want to compete for Hispanic votes. Those would be the same Hispanic votes that have </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">never</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/mortensen/hispanics-were-democrats-long-illegal-immigration-became-issue">accrued</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Republicans in more than three decades of elections. Furthermore, alienating both low-skill and high-skill </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">American </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">workers as a tradeoff is a fool&#8217;s errand.  </span></p>
<p>Unfortunately, for un- or under-employed Americans, the outright lie that there&#8217;s a shortage of high-tech workers apparently takes precedence over their well-being. For Democrats, virtually anything the expands the dependency of Americans has become, rather than a badge of shame, an integral part of their party platform. For Republicans, the sop of accommodating their business allies, and siren song of possibly newfound Hispanic fealty that drives their ambitions. In a better world, the efforts by both parties would be seen as the contempt for the rule of law and the utter lack of concern for Americans they truly represent. In this one, the narrative, no matter how duplicitous and despicable, rules the roost.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Millionaires Need Your Help</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/millionaires-need-your-help/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=millionaires-need-your-help</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/millionaires-need-your-help/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 04:15:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wages]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222573</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The truth about pro-Amnesty "struggling farmers."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="start">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FARMERS-2-articleLarge.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222578" alt="FARMERS-2-articleLarge" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FARMERS-2-articleLarge-429x350.jpg" width="300" height="245" /></a>Last Sunday, The New York Times published a front-page article about the heartfelt need of California farmers for more illegal aliens.</p>
<p>The first tip-off that heinous public policy ideas were coming was that the Times introduced farmer Chuck Herrin, owner of a farm-labor contracting company, as a &#8220;lifelong Republican.&#8221; That&#8217;s Times-speak for &#8220;liberal.&#8221;</p>
<p>Herrin admitted that he employs a lot of illegal aliens and bitterly complained that they lived in fear of &#8220;Border Patrol and deportations.&#8221; (But, apparently, he doesn&#8217;t live in fear of admitting he&#8217;s violating our immigration laws.)</p>
<p>Sorry that running a country inconveniences you, Chuck.</p>
<p>He said his illegal alien employees deserved amnesty because if &#8220;we keep them here and not do anything for them once they get old, that&#8217;s really extortion.&#8221;</p>
<p>As the punch line goes, &#8220;What&#8217;s this &#8216;we,&#8217; paleface?&#8221;</p>
<p>Taxpayers have been subsidizing Chuck Herrin&#8217;s underpayment of his illegal labor force for decades, with skyrocketing taxes to pay for schools, roads, bridges, food stamps, health care and so on. Now Herrin thinks &#8220;we&#8221; are supposed to support his illegal employees in their old age, too.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s another idea: How about a federal law mandating that employers of illegal aliens take responsibility for the people they hire? Why is the taxpayer on the hook for illegal aliens&#8217; food, housing and medical care, when Chuck Herrin got 100 percent of the profit from their cheap labor?</p>
<p>We don&#8217;t allow chemical companies to dump pollutants in rivers, walk away and then say, &#8220;If we dump chemicals in rivers and we don&#8217;t clean them once the plant is gone, that&#8217;s really criminal.&#8221;</p>
<p>No, you dumped the chemicals &#8212; not &#8220;we.&#8221; And you, Chuck Herrin, got the cheap labor &#8212; not &#8220;we.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;We&#8221; got hospital emergency rooms jammed with illegal aliens when we came in with heart attacks. &#8220;We&#8221; got the crime, drunk-driving and drug trafficking associated with illegal aliens. &#8220;We&#8221; got the overcrowded schools filled with kids whose illegal alien parents don&#8217;t pay property taxes. &#8220;We&#8221; got to press &#8220;one&#8221; for English.</p>
<p>This is even worse than the Wall Street bailouts &#8212; another example of fat cats pocketing 100 percent of the profits when business is good, but demanding a taxpayer handout when their investments go south. At least the Wall Street bailouts didn&#8217;t alter the country forever by giving the Democrats 30 million new voters.</p>
<p>According to the California Hospital Association, health care for illegal aliens is costing state taxpayers well <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/illegal-aliens-cost-california-hospitals-more-than-1-billion-annually">over $1 billion a year.</a>. Eighty-four hospitals across California have already been forced to close because of unpaid bills by illegal aliens.</p>
<p>Last year alone, California taxpayers paid <a href="http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/01/05/3699529/fresno-co-aims-to-cut-health-care.html">$32 million for indigents&#8217; health care</a> at hospitals located in Fresno County&#8211; which happens to be where Chuck Herrin&#8217;s company is based. How about submitting a portion of that cost to Herrin?</p>
<p><i>Here&#8217;s your bill for $13 million.</i></p>
<p>What&#8217;s this for?</p>
<p><i>The county hospital. You&#8217;ve been paying your employees $20 an hour, and that&#8217;s just not enough to pay for their measles and tuberculosis treatments, not to mention delivery of their premature babies. No one&#8217;s saying it&#8217;s your fault, but it&#8217;s not the county hospital&#8217;s fault either.</i></p>
<p>Luckily, you&#8217;ve got deep pockets, Chuck &#8211; <a href="http://www.manta.com/c/mm7pxmy/sunrise-farm-labor">several hundred million dollars a year, we understand</a> &#8211; thanks in part to how little you pay your workers, who are burdening our local services.</p>
<p>Not only should employers of illegal aliens be responsible for their employees&#8217; becoming public charges, but they ought to be legally responsible for any crimes their illegal workers commit, just as parents can be for the crimes of their minor children, and bars can be for the behavior of their over-served customers.</p>
<p>Why should employers of illegal aliens be allowed to externalize their costs, while keeping 100 percent of the profits?</p>
<p>The very fact that the American taxpayer is required to subsidize illegal alien farm labor &#8212; to say nothing of anti-competitive marketing orders, tariffs and subsidies given to farmers &#8212; proves that we&#8217;re propping up an industry the country doesn&#8217;t need.</p>
<p>If Mexican farm labor is so much cheaper, maybe we should be growing our fruits and vegetables in Mexico. There&#8217;s absolutely no reason to import Mexicans to do something they could do at home and then sell to us. I believe this is what economists call &#8220;competitive advantage.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Times quotes a report by two pro-amnesty farmers groups, Partnership for a New American Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, complaining that American consumption of foreign-grown produce has increased by 80 percent since the late 1990s.</p>
<p>I see why rich farmers are alarmed by that, but why should Americans care? If food can be grown cheaper in other countries, isn&#8217;t it the very essence of libertarian free trade principles to buy it from them?</p>
<p>No. Apparently, we&#8217;re required to wreck the country by bringing in millions upon millions more poor people so we can save the buggy whip industry.</p>
<p>We didn&#8217;t do that with oil. We didn&#8217;t do it with steel. We must be &#8220;Fortress America&#8221; only when it comes to asparagus!</p>
<p>Hey! Where&#8217;s the Cato Institute on this? Busy drafting another philippic against our drug laws?</p>
<p>I care more about my fellow Americans who can&#8217;t get well-paying jobs than I do about multimillionaire farmers, demanding that the rest of us pay to support an industry that claims it can&#8217;t compete without taxpayer-subsidized illegal alien labor.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Choosing American Workers over Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/choosing-american-workers-over-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=choosing-american-workers-over-amnesty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/choosing-american-workers-over-amnesty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 04:44:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jeff sessions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221138</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Senator Sessions issues a call to action.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/worker-construction-grinder-machiine.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221139 alignleft" alt="worker-construction-grinder-machiine" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/worker-construction-grinder-machiine.jpg" width="324" height="258" /></a>JFK won Macomb County, Michigan in 1960 by 75 percent. In 1980, Reagan won it by 66 percent. This heart of ‘Reagan Democrat’ country was closely split by Gore and Bush and Bush and Kerry… until Obama won it 53 to 45 in 2008 and by 51 to 47 in 2012.  </span></p>
<p>The Republican Party doesn’t need to worry about the Latino vote nearly as much as it should be worrying about its inability to connect with white working class Americans. The pro-amnesty GOP establishment’s electoral vision of a party of corporations and minority voters already exists.</p>
<p>It’s called the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>The Republican Party’s fate in 2016 will be decided in places like Macomb County. It will be decided by white men and women earning $20,000 to $50,000 a year. It will be decided by working families struggling to get by and searching for answers from a government that keeps betraying them.</p>
<p>That is the point that Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator who has stood tallest against amnesty, makes in his National Review article “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373230/becoming-party-work-senator-jeff-sessions">Becoming the Party of Work</a>.”</p>
<p>Sessions argues that slowing down immigration in a time of tremendous economic turmoil would actually be the populist thing to do. Three to one of those earning under $30,000 want to see reductions in immigration. Instead the Republican Party is alienating them further by championing illegal aliens.</p>
<p>&#8220;To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos,&#8221; Sessions warns.</p>
<p>Too many Senate Republicans act like members of a globalist party who legislate while detached from the concerns of ordinary working Americans. McCain, the GOP candidate in 2008, and the most aggressive GOP proponent for amnesty in the Senate, whose daughter has made a career of “outreach” to her own class of hip young wealthy people, represents the opposite of what the GOP should be doing.</p>
<p>McCain’s infamous claim, “There are jobs Americans won’t do” was seen as embodying the detachment of the pro-amnesty elite from working Americans struggling to get by.</p>
<p>“Mitt Romney,” Sessions points out, “lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.”</p>
<p>In 2008, McCain won only 25 percent of voters whose incomes fell below $15,000, 37 percent of voters whose incomes were between $15,000 and $30,000 and 43 percent of voters in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. That is not what a party that aspires to represent the silent majority of Americans looks like.</p>
<p>Inflation has changed income and demographics have changed as well, but still the only income group that Reagan lost in 1984 were in the under $12,500 range and even then it was close. Even in 1980, Reagan did not lose any income group by more than 10 percent.</p>
<p>George W. Bush was able to win back some Reagan Democrats, but the party never again equaled Reagan’s performance.</p>
<p>Senator Sessions however has some proposals for changing that from merging 80 means-tested poverty-assistance and welfare programs into one to be administered by a welfare office that doubles as a job training program to cracking down on corporate outsourcing and repealing ObamaCare.</p>
<p>The Republican Party has been able to put forward a credible pro-business agenda, but it needs a credible pro-worker agenda without assuming that talking about Staples is the same thing as connecting with Staples employees. If it fails to do that, it will be hammered by minimum wage and overtime measures until its voting base is limited to a shrinking upper middle class.</p>
<p>“Wherever the policies of the Left have been faithfully implemented, as in Detroit, human tragedy has followed. The future offered by the Left — a shrinking work force struggling to fund a growing welfare state — is not only unsustainable but uncompassionate. Compassion demands that we spare no effort in helping millions now jobless to realize the dream of financial independence. This is the urgent economic task of the 21st century,” Sessions writes.</p>
<p>The Republican Party has to stop merely running against welfare and start running on opportunity. The left’s response to the GOP’s anti-welfare rhetoric has been to swell the welfare rolls making more and more Americans complicit in the welfare state.</p>
<p>Instead of turning to 47% rhetoric, the critique of a political movement that has given up, it has to reclaim welfare voters and transform them into working voters.</p>
<p>Session’s agenda challenges the GOP to stop trying to plug a work culture hole with immigrants. Instead he urges the Republican Party to “help the millions struggling here today — immigrant and native-born alike — transition from dependency to self-sufficiency.”</p>
<p>Reagan understood that welfare was morally crippling. In his 1985 State of the Union address, he said, “Let us resolve that we will stop spreading dependency and start spreading opportunity; that we will stop spreading bondage and start spreading freedom.”</p>
<p>In a ringing critique of the welfare state, he stated that, “Policies that increase dependency, break up families, and destroy self-respect are not progressive; they’re reactionary. Despite our strides in civil rights, blacks, Hispanics, and all minorities will not have full and equal power until they have full economic power.”</p>
<p>This is the critique that Sessions and David Horowitz return to.</p>
<p>Last year, <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/david_horowitz_fight_fire_with_fire">David Horowitz said that</a> the “historic assault on Detroit’s African American population was absent from all the speeches and all the political ads of all the actors supporting free market solutions in the 2012 elections. The word &#8216;Detroit&#8217; wasn’t mentioned.”</p>
<p>Amnesty for illegal aliens may be an even bigger assault on both lower income whites and blacks than anything before. Instead of countering it, too many Republicans are providing cover for it. Instead of offering American solutions to American problems, they take refuge in abstract free market ideology.</p>
<p>Sessions confronts the intersection between immigration and unemployment, between the welfare state and the open border and urges the Republican Party to stand up for American workers.</p>
<p>Amnesty is an assault on the economic freedom and opportunity of the voters that the Republican Party needs to win in 2016. The Republican Party has critiqued the Democratic Party’s debt slavery, borrowing trillions to be repaid in the future, but with amnesty the GOP is selling off its base of today in the hopes of buying a new demographic of voters from a new nation.</p>
<p>The United States cannot survive as a welfare nation, but the Republican Party cannot win it back until it relearns how to speak to the national interest instead of the global interest, to the American worker and the American businessman.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield </strong>on <strong>The</strong> <strong>Glazov Gang</strong>. He discusses <em>Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Belief that Abbas is a Peace Angel</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Helplessness Over the Ukraine</em>, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
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		<title>Amnesty: A Disaster for the American Worker</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-a-disaster-for-the-american-worker/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-a-disaster-for-the-american-worker</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:45:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wages]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217509</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The threat of the immigration reform push underway in Congress. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/open-borders.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217510" alt="open-borders" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/open-borders-450x345.jpg" width="315" height="241" /></a>Ninety two million Americans have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537585/More-Americans-not-working-92-million-people-workforce.html">left</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the workforce. Another 50 million live </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/7/obamas-rhetoric-on-fighting-poverty-doesnt-match-h/?page=all">below</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the poverty line. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">One-in-five</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> American households are on food stamps. Household income is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/politics/us-median-income-rises-but-is-still-6-below-its-2007-peak.html?_r=0">down</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 4.4 percent since the so-called recovery began in 2009. Only 74,000 jobs were </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2014/0110/Just-74-000-jobs-created-in-December-far-below-forecasts.-What-happened">created</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last month, and America remains mired in the weakest economic recovery </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2014/0110/Just-74-000-jobs-created-in-December-far-below-forecasts.-What-happened">since</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Great Depression. The bipartisan &#8220;solution&#8221; for these problems steadily gaining steam in Washington? Comprehensive immigration reform that will heighten the competition for jobs between newly legalized immigrants and Americans workers struggling to find employment.</span></p>
<p>Make no mistake: Americans are struggling to find employment. Even Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, <a href="http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/05/gene-sperling-on-state-of-the-union-white-house-extends-unemployment-insurance/">admitted</a> as much, conceding that there are &#8220;three people looking for every job.&#8221; Despite that reality, one of the proposals contained in the Senate immigration bill <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/immigration-bill-2013-senate-passes-93530.html">passed</a> last June would <a href="http://cis.org/gang-of-eight-bill-doubles-temporary-worker-flow">double</a> the number of guest workers admitted to the United States on an annual basis. That increase is four times larger than the one contained in the 2007 Bush-Kennedy proposal.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">America currently </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/jun/20/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-us-admits-1-million-immigrants-ye/">admits</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> one million legal immigrants per year, far more than any other nation in the world. Yet when one combines the aforementioned guest workers with illegal aliens who would be granted work permits and permanent residency, the bill supported by the Senate Democrats and Obama would </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2014/01/09/is-2014-year-for-immigration-reform-republicans-chamber-commerce-spar/">triple</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that number to 3 million immigrants per year, and 30 million mostly lower-skill immigrants coming to America over the next decade. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sixteen conservative House members sent a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/367945/house-conservatives-make-populist-case-against-immigration-reform-andrew-stiles">letter</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the president illuminating the consequences. “The White House has entertained a parade of high-powered business executives to discuss immigration policy, all while shutting out the concerns of everyday wage-earners who overwhelmingly oppose these measures,” it states. &#8220;So-called comprehensive immigration reform may be a good deal for big businesses who want to reduce labor costs, and it may be a good deal for progressive labor unions seeking new workers from abroad, but it&#8217;s an awful deal for U.S. workers &#8211; including African-American and Hispanic communities enduring chronically high unemployment.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The letter is spot on. The current official </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://voxxi.com/2014/01/10/latino-unemployment-rate-8-3-percent/">unemployment rate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for Hispanics is 8.3 percent, well above the national average of 6.7 percent. And just like the average unemployment rate is completely misleading because it doesn&#8217;t include the millions who have left the labor force, so it goes for Hispanics whose workforce participation rate shrank by 261,000 in December. For black Americans, the stats are even worse. Their official </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm">unemployment</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> rate is 11.9 percent, and their labor force participation rate of 65.6 percent is the lowest ever recorded.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unemployment is only half the equation. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), wages would also be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44346-Immigration.pdf">negatively</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> affected &#8212; for an entire decade. &#8220;Average wages would be slightly lower than under current law through 2024, primarily because the amount of capital available to workers would not increase as rapidly as the number of workers and because the new workers would be less skilled and have lower wages, on average, than the labor force under current law,&#8221; the CBO writes. The CBO further notes the Senate proposal would &#8220;slightly raise the unemployment rate through 2020.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet it is the other part of the letter that is likely to resonate with ordinary Americans. Average Americans </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">were</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> shut out of the process of immigration reform while organizations like Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, United Technologies, American Express, Procter &amp; Gamble, T-Mobile, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Cigna and Texas Instruments all </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2013/10/07/business-pushes-immigration-reform-even-as-it-lays-off-american-workers-n1719123/page/full">petitioned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Congress to increase the number of immigrant workers. Mirian Graddick-Weir, Merck Executive Vice President for Human Resources, sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), insisting more foreign workers were necessary to &#8220;address the reality that there is a global war for talent&#8221; and to &#8220;align our nation&#8217;s immigration policies with its workforce needs at all skill levels to ensure U.S. global competitiveness.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2013, Merck laid off 16,000 workers. The other companies mentioned above have also laid off thousands of workers over the last few years. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Chamber or Commerce (COC) is an equally hypocritical organization. Despite their purported alliance with Republicans, they also support comprehensive immigration reform. &#8220;We&#8217;re determined to make 2014 the year that immigration reform is finally enacted,&#8221; said COC president Tom Donohue. Toward that end, the COC has targeted the one stumbling block to that reform, namely conservative House members. As conservative columnist Michelle Malkin </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2014/01/24/the-us-chamber-of-commerce-versus-america-n1783823">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the COC will spend &#8220;$50 million subsidizing the Republican incumbency protection racket and attacking anti-establishment conservatives.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Donahue laid out the COC&#8217;s agenda for the 2014 election campaign. “In 2014, the chamber will work to protect and expand a pro-business majority in the House and advance our position and our influence in the Senate,” he said in his annual State of American Business speech in Washington. “The business community understands what’s at stake.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So does Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who is leading the charge against comprehensive immigration reform. &#8220;Senate Democrats, the Gang of Eight and the White House have all apparently decided that large corporations should be able to tailor the nation&#8217;s immigration policy to suit their own financial interests,&#8221; he said in a statement released last October. &#8220;Now it falls on the shoulders of House Republicans to do the right thing and to defend the legitimate interests of American workers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cis.org/immigrant-gains-native-losses-in-the-job-market-2000-to-2013">illuminates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the immigration trends, both legal and illegal, that have</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> already</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> adversely affected those interests. Their analysis of government data shows that over the last 13 years, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of the net gain in employment has gone to legal and illegal immigrants. During that timeframe, which was also a period of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration-statistics-2012-legal-permanent-residents">record immigration</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the net number of jobs held by U.S.-born Americans declined by 1.3 million, while the number of jobs held by both legal and illegal immigrants increased by 5.3 million. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The report undermines several other shibboleths promoted by the pro-reform advocates, especially the notion that immigration reform is necessary to fill the jobs &#8220;Americans refuse to do.&#8221; CIS reveals that out of the 472 civilian occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, only six occupations are majority immigrant, both legal and illegal. Those six occupations account for only one percent of the total American workforce. &#8220;Given the employment situation in the country, the dramatic increases in legal immigration contemplated by the Gang of Eight immigration bill seem out of touch with the realities of the U.S. labor market,&#8221; the report concludes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately those with vested interests, including Democrats, who envision a plethora of new voters giving them a permanent majority, labor unions who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/why-labor-has-learned-to-love-immigration-reform-20130131">envision</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> millions of new dues-paying members, and establishment Republicans, more than willing to kowtow to their big business campaign donors eager for cheap labor, couldn&#8217;t care less. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of the three entities, the GOP establishment truly stands out. It is not often that a political party mired in minority status since 2006 is given a gift as large as ObamaCare to run against in 2014. It is truly remarkable that they would even consider alienating their core constituency in return for….what? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Certainly not the allegiance of Hispanics. In every presidential election since 1980, Hispanics have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/mortensen/hispanics-were-democrats-long-illegal-immigration-became-issue">favored</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Democrats over Republicans by an average margin of 64-31 percent. That included the 1988 election, which followed the granting of unambiguous amnesty to 2.7 million illegals, courtesy of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Despite a blowout win for George G.W. Bush, he received only 30 percent of the Hispanic vote, even as loser Michael Dukakis garnered 69 percent. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus one is left to conclude the establishment wing of the GOP is doing nothing more than serving interests of their big business campaign donors. Townhall&#8217;s John Hawkins </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/01/28/why-proamnesty-republicans-are-so-desperate-to-pass-immigration-reform-this-year-n1785691/page/2">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the dynamic:</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;There are a lot of businesses out there that want an endless supply of cheap labor, which would be fine, except that they want everyone else to pay for it. An illegal alien with no car insurance, no health insurance, who claims he has 14 kids so he can get an earned income tax credit can work cheaper than a law abiding American. So, when the illegal crashes his car, you pay for it. When he gets sick, you pay for it. Your taxes put his kids through school. Your taxes pay the bills if he goes to jail. Your tax dollars go into his pocket when he cheats on his taxes &#8212; meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce crowd makes so much money off of these illegals that they can afford to donate some of it to politicians like John Boehner, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham and John McCain in order to get them to keep the gravy train going.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That gravy train is utterly antithetical to the interests of the average American worker, and the conservative members of the GOP know it. “Job number one for Congress should be to reduce the unemployment rolls, get families and communities out of poverty and government dependency, rebuild our deteriorating communities and collapsing middle class, and increase wages for American citizens,” the above letter concludes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, the signs remain ominous. GOP leaders will soon release their so-called &#8220;statement of principals&#8221; regarding comprehensive immigration reform. As Sen. Sessions </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/26/sessions-immigration-reform-obama-gop-column/4917095/">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, they mirror many of the central elements of President Obama&#8217;s plan, allowing millions of illegals to gain work permits and permanently increasing the flow of foreign workers into America. And while pro-immigration advocates ramble on about the supposed economic benefits that will accrue as a result, a fundamental economic law is being calculatingly ignored in the process: more of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">anything</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, including millions of additional workers, makes the individual value of that thing (worker) worth less. Combine that economic fundamental with the current, largely jobless, recovery that already has three people competing for every one job, and it&#8217;s a formula for disaster for the American worker.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;The choice is clear,&#8221; writes Sessions. &#8220;Either the GOP can help the White House deliver a crushing hammer blow to the middle class&#8211;or it can stand alone as the one party defending the legitimate interests of American workers.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It could be clearer than that. A day after the president has made populist </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">rhetoric</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the central part of his agenda, the GOP has an opportunity to seize the high ground on populist </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">reality</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. It may be the last chance they get for a long time.</span></p>
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		<title>George Soros&#8217;s Illegal Alien Guerrilla Activists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/george-soross-illegal-alien-guerrilla-activists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=george-soross-illegal-alien-guerrilla-activists</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:40:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Breaking the law, harassing their political enemies -- and demanding citizenship. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/522254626.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208014" alt="522254626" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/522254626-450x296.jpg" width="270" height="178" /></a>Radical community organizers and illegal aliens are stepping up their in-your-face campaign against the nation&#8217;s immigration laws by illegally using physical force to prevent federal officials from carrying out lawful deportations.</span></b></p>
<p>Given that illegal immigrants got here by breaking the law, their continued lawbreaking activity shouldn&#8217;t be all that surprising. It certainly doesn&#8217;t bother President Obama, who won&#8217;t do anything about these abusive protests because he agrees with the activists.</p>
<p>In recent weeks activists across America complaining about high deportation rates <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2013/10/16/many-immigration-activists-switching-from-vigils-and-rallies-to-more-aggressive/">have used</a> chains and pipes to bind themselves to the tires of buses that transport illegals slated for deportation to court. They have also snarled traffic on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and blocked the entrance to a federal detention center.</p>
<p>In Tucson, Ariz., they surrounded local police who stopped two illegals. A hundred police officers were dispatched to deal with protests at two sites in the city.</p>
<p>More unlawful activity is coming, they say.</p>
<p>A defiant Marisa Franco, campaign organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), is helping to lead the Left&#8217;s assault on the rule of law. &#8220;The people will take power back into their own hands and set a true example of leadership that the Beltway will have to follow.&#8221;</p>
<p>Activists are taking the law into their own hands &#8220;out of frustration and impatience,&#8221; said Franco. &#8220;Immigrant communities who are losing 1,100 loved ones every day to deportation cannot wait for Congress to end its political games or for the president to rediscover his moral compass,&#8221; she whined.</p>
<p>NDLON is one of the worst of the illegal alien groups. NDLON <a href="http://capitalresearch.org/2010/09/national-day-laborers-organizing-network-how-it-supports-illegal-immigration/">relentlessly hounds</a> cities to establish &#8220;day laborer centers&#8221; to help illegals find work and fights loitering laws that make finding work more difficult. It works with labor organizations such as AFL-CIO to unionize day laborers and pushes lawmakers to apply worker protections in U.S. labor law to illegal immigrants. By fighting for the so-called rights of illegal immigrants, NDLON and its ilk make it easier for illegals to stay stateside, which in turn encourages others to enter the U.S. illegally.</p>
<p>Nowadays NDLON has reason to be optimistic. One of its spiritual leaders, left-wing extremist <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/tom-perez-obamas-radical-labor-secretary-nominee/">Thomas Perez</a>, is now U.S. secretary of labor. Perez was previously president of Casa de Maryland, a notorious advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by America-hating philanthropist George Soros and the dead communist leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.</p>
<p>Soros, incidentally, is eager to leverage the immigration issue to hurt the GOP.</p>
<p>Starry-eyed Republicans think that backing amnesty will somehow win their party Latino votes but they never seem to factor in the exodus of conservative Republican voters their support of the legislation will all but guarantee. An added benefit, from the Left’s perspective, is the proposed mass amnesty would destroy once and for all the Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, are gunning for the legislation because it assures them a permanent leftist majority.</p>
<p>One of the more active progressive groups pushing amnesty, National Immigration Forum, has <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/amnesty-and-the-attack-on-american-workers/">taken in</a> more than $5.4 million from the billionaire Marxist&#8217;s philanthropies.</p>
<p>NIF is <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/18/George-Soros-group-plans-fly-in-to-push-House-Republicans-for-amnesty-deal">planning</a> an Oct. 28 &#8220;fly-in&#8221; of hundreds of alleged conservatives to Capitol Hill to strong-arm House Republicans into caving in on the amnesty issue. NIF is reportedly working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s group FWD.us, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New American Economy.</p>
<p>Leftists like Soros are openly contemptuous of the rule of law. They’re not shy about admitting that the Left uses America’s confusing immigration system to promote so-called social justice. Eliseo Medina, secretary treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, says that boosting immigration levels will help push America further leftward. Immigration “will solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future,” said Medina who is an honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America.</p>
<p>The newly aggressive approach by NDLON activists contrasts with the usual tack taken by illegal alien supporters. Vigils, marches, and rallies are no longer in vogue as advocacy groups use phone-banking, email campaigns, and direct targeting of federal lawmakers and their staffers.</p>
<p>“These organizations stopped having faith in any progress for immigration reform,” according to Michael Young, a sociology professor at the University of Texas. “They’re distancing themselves from the national, more moderate organizations that said you have to worry about this will come off or how it will play to the national, broader audience.”</p>
<p>In June an angry mob of more than 100 activists led by a group called Sunflower Community Action <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/kris-kobach-protesters_n_3459237.html">surrounded</a> the suburban Kansas City home of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), an outspoken illegal immigration opponent. Sunflower Community Action is part of a larger Saul Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA). You might remember the joint actions conducted by NPA and SEIU. The two organizations use angry mobs to invade banks and <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2010/05/21/NPA-SEIU-Terrorizes-Child--Breaks-Laws---What-Did-President-Obama-Know-And-When-Did-He-Know-It">terrorize bank executives</a> in their homes.</p>
<p>The radical left-wing community organizers were attempting to intimidate Kobach and remind him that they knew where his family lived. They left a mountain of shoes on his front door to symbolize lawbreakers who had been deported. Incidentally, your federal tax dollars subsidize Sunflower Community Action&#8217;s mischief. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) <a href="http://usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_term%22%3A%22sunflower+community+action%22%7D">has given</a> the group $44,800 to promote &#8220;environmental justice,&#8221; whatever that is.</p>
<p>Such jackboot activism is not legitimate political advocacy protected by the First Amendment. Its most prominent practitioner in recent years has been the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010 and is now splintered into more than two dozen groups across the nation</p>
<p>One of the shoe-throwing storm troopers, identified as Veronica Miranda, is now <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/18/crazy-to-pay-woman-protester-to-be-obamacare-navigator-kansas-official-says/">receiving</a> taxpayer money to work as an Obamacare “navigator.” Kobach said people like Miranda should not be given public funds and access to Obamacare enrollees&#8217; sensitive personal information.</p>
<p>“She was more than trespassing,” Kobach said last week of the incident four months ago. “She was attempting to intimidate a public official.” Protesting at his office is fair game, he said, but “it crosses the line when you go to someone’s home and attempt to intimidate them.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Now someone engaged in that kind of tactic is getting taxpayer money to implement Obamacare,&#8221; Kobach said. &#8220;It’s crazy.”</p>
<p>Right now immigration legislation is stalled in Congress.</p>
<p>In June the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/sen-jeff-sessions-heroic-stand-against-amnesty/">rammed through</a> an immigration reform package on a 68 to 32 vote, falling short of the 70 votes backers said they were aiming for.</p>
<p>The immigration amnesty legislation that supporters refuse to acknowledge grants amnesty to illegal aliens provides for a bogus “border surge” that would beef up enforcement efforts — but which everyone in Washington knows will never actually be carried out. The bill perversely rewards employers for hiring illegal aliens over those legally allowed to work, and stays deportation efforts against criminal illegal aliens for two-and-a-half years to allow them to seek legal status. The legislation is also larded down with stimulus programs and political pork that has nothing to do with immigration. One provision would set aside $1.5 billion to provide low-income young people with taxpayer-funded vehicles such as cars, motorcycles, or scooters.</p>
<p>According to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), who voted against the measure, the bill provides that an additional 4.5 million illegals will be legalized over the following decade. At that point the nation’s intake of immigrants will grow by at least 50 percent per year over 10 years for a total of 1.5 million immigrants a year being placed on a path to citizenship, or 15 million more for 10 years.</p>
<p>In addition to these 30 million immigrants placed on a path to citizenship, the measure would also double the quantity of temporary workers who could come and stay in the U.S. for three years, Sessions said. The workers would have the option to “re-up” for another three years with their families.</p>
<p>It is unclear if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will act. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said House members plan to write their own version of the legislation and won’t consider the Senate bill.</p>
<p>Conservative amnesty opponents in the House GOP have repeatedly fired warning shots across the bow of House leadership. They say they’re willing to take away Boehner’s gavel if he doesn’t play ball on immigration. Boehner garnered only 220 votes in the election for Speaker in January this year, barely mustering the 218 votes he needed to claim the post.</p>
<p>In the painful, protracted soul-searching that has followed Mitt Romney’s defeat last November, some leading Republicans claim that to stave off political oblivion the GOP must wholeheartedly embrace comprehensive immigration reform including amnesty for those illegal aliens already in the country.</p>
<p>This is wishful thinking, of course. According to various studies including a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report, pandering to Latino voters will not gain the GOP Hispanic-American votes. Latinos are particularly hard to win over to the Republican side because they tend to be ideologically sympathetic to big-government solutions traditionally associated with Democrats.</p>
<p>Maddeningly, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives seems oblivious to the fact that new ethnic groups in the U.S. almost without exception vote for left-of-center political candidates.</p>
<p>Some psephologists say it takes four generations for these groups to move rightward and start voting Republican.</p>
<p>Can conservatives who want a restoration of limited government, the rule of law, and respect for the Constitution afford to wait that long?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Amnesty&#8217;s Second Wind</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/amnestys-second-wind/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnestys-second-wind</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:36:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208016</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why conservatives may be more vulnerable than ever to persuasion. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/images.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-208017" alt="images" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/images.jpg" width="268" height="188" /></a>America remains mired in the weakest recovery since WWII. The unemployment rate of 7.4 percent obscures the reality that we have the lowest workforce participation rate <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/labor-force-participation/">since</a> 1978, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/part-time-job-creation_n_3788365.html">75 percent</a> of the jobs created in 2013 are part-time with <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-57504243/during-recovery-most-new-jobs-offer-low-wages/">lower wage</a> levels, and American incomes have <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-21/business/41431709_1_sentier-research-4-percent-households">declined</a> 4.4 percent since the recovery began in 2009. In short, Americans need jobs. Despite that reality, President Obama is aiming to <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/20/hopes-dim-for-immigration-reform/3062199/">pursue</a> comprehensive immigration reform, even though it is utterly anathema to the interests of American job-seekers.</p>
<p>A report issued last summer by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) reveals that American job-seekers would get hit with a double whammy of lower wages and higher unemployment levels. “Taking into account all of those flows of new immigrants, CBO and JCT expect that a greater number of immigrants with lower skills than with higher skills would be added to the workforce, slightly pushing down the average wage for the labor force as a whole, other things being equal,” the report states. “Although the average wage would be lower than under current law over the first dozen years, the minimum wage would keep the wages of some less skilled workers from falling, dampening businesses’ demand for those workers,” the analysis added.</p>
<p>Comprehensive immigration reform supporters cling to the one nugget of good news in the report, noting that the CBO estimates a reduction in the federal budget deficit of $175 billion over the first ten years folowing reform, along with a decrease in the federal deficit by another $700 billion the decade after that. In other words, the federal deficit would be reduced by an average of $43.75 billion per year over 20 years. In March, the Senate <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/us/politics/senate-passes-3-7-trillion-budget-its-first-in-4-years.html?_r=0">adopted</a> its first formal budget in four years. They want to spend $3.7 trillion for 2014. Thus, assuming the CBO numbers are accurate, America would be shaving a grand total of just under 1.2 percent off 2014&#8242;s budget total. Since the federal budget has nearly doubled since 2000, the ongoing savings over the course of two decades would amount to little more than a rounding error.</p>
<p>Furthermore, assuming the CBO&#8217;s calculations are accurate is a big &#8220;if.&#8221; According to a devastating <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/05/the-fiscal-cost-of-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty%20to-the-us-taxpayer">report</a> by the Heritage Foundation, comprehensive immigration would <i>cost</i> taxpayers $6.3 trillion in new spending on entitlements and social programs over a 50 year period. Heritage contends that $9.4 trillion in government benefits included in the Gang of Eight bill, namely Social Security, Medicare, social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and coverage under Obamacare, would be offset by only $3.1 trillion in taxes paid by those who receive de facto amnesty.</p>
<p>The business community isn&#8217;t buying Heritage&#8217;s contentions. As a result, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, along with the nation&#8217;s leading trade associations, will be <a href="http://www.dailylocal.com/general-news/20131018/business-groups-keep-backing-boehner-plan-to-target-tea-party">backing</a> Republicans who favor immigration reform when they run against Republican candidates who don&#8217;t in upcoming primaries. In Michigan, Reps. Justin Amash and Kerry Bentivolio will be targeted. In Alabama, business groups hope to undermine the candidacy of Dean Young, whose grassroots campaign <a href="http://blog.al.com/live/2013/09/dean_young_rides_grassroots_co.html">propelled</a> him into a Republican Party runoff with former state Senator Bradley Byrne. Business groups may also support Republican incumbent  Rep. Mike Simpson, who faces a tea party challenger who pushed Simpson to embrace defunding ObamaCare.</p>
<p>The business community&#8217;s agenda is largely hypocritical. In September, the chief human resources officers of more than 100 large corporations <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/companies-lay-off-thousands-then-demand-immigration-reform-for-new-labor/article/2535595">sent</a> Reps. John Boehner (R-OH) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) a <a href="http://www.hrpolicy.org/downloads/2013/CHRO_Immigration_Reform_Letter.pdf">letter</a>, asking them to &#8220;enact legislation to fix the broken immigration system and work with the Senate to ensure that a bill is signed by the President this year.&#8221; Among the signees were Tracy Keogh, Executive VP for Human Resources at Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard laid off 29,000 employees in 2012. Cisco Systems&#8217; Senior VP of Chief Human Resources Officer Kathleen Weslock also signed the letter, even as her company has laid off 8,000 workers over the last two years, and has announced a cut of an additional 4,000 this year. American Express&#8217;s Chief HR Officer, L. Kevin Cox also signed the letter,  even as his company laid of 5,400 workers in 2013. So did Proctor &amp; Gamble&#8217;s Chief HR Officer, Mark F. Biegger, despite a 2012 announcement that P&amp;G would eliminate 5,700 jobs.</p>
<p>Several other companies, including T-Mobile, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Texas Instruments, Cigna, Verizon and General Mills also participated in this undermining of the American labor force, despite the signees insisting that &#8220;many of our companies continue to have difficulty finding sufficient American workers to fill certain lesser-skilled positions.&#8221; They further contended that comprehensive immigration reform &#8220;would be a long overdue step toward aligning our nation’s immigration policies with its workforce needs at all skill levels to ensure U.S. global competitiveness.&#8221;</p>
<p>Ensuring &#8220;global competitiveness&#8221; could severely damage the American middle class, due in large part to the reality that the legalization of 11 million illegals would also legalize an additional 17 million immigrants over the next decade as part of the <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/how_amnesty_serves_the_left.html">family reunification</a> process. Yet business leaders remain adamant. &#8220;We urge Congress not to miss this opportunity to level the playing field for U.S. employers&#8221; the letter states. &#8220;We can’t afford to wait.&#8221;</p>
<p>Equally impatient are immigration activists <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/15/immigration-activists-chaining-themselves-to-protest-deportation/">ratcheting up</a> the pressure on both political parties. On October 11, protesters in Tucson, AZ chained themselves to three buses, demanding a halt to Operation Streamline, a program that either prosecutes or seeks to deport illegal aliens caught at the border. The following Monday, 250 protesters showed up at ICE headquarters in Phoenix. Last Thursday in San Francisco, protesters shouting, “Undocumented, unafraid!” <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2013/10/19/immigrant-activists-in-california-have-standoff-with-homeland-security/">surrounded</a> another bus containing illegal aliens in the custody of immigration officials. Ironically, in both Arizona and California, activists have vented their wrath against President Obama, whom they labeled the Deporter-In-Chief.</p>
<p>Frank Sharry, who heads America’s Voice, a Washington D.C.-based organization that favors more flexible immigration laws, made the agenda of the activists clear. “Of course, advocates and activists want Congress to act, but if they don’t, we won’t go away,&#8221; he promised. &#8220;We’ll get louder, stronger and more confrontational. That’s what movements have always done.  And that’s what our movement is already doing.”</p>
<p>The National Immigration Forum (NIF), an organization funded by leftist heavyweight George Soros, is also lending its weight to the reform push, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/14/immigration-house-republicans/2961571/">organizing</a> a &#8220;fly in&#8221; of ostensible conservatives to lobby House Republicans. This will be the second fly-in organized by the NIF, following one earlier in the year targeting the Senate, which has already passed their version of reform. This one is aimed at House Republicans who believe that securing the border must occur prior to any kind of legalization efforts.</p>
<p>Perhaps fittingly, those efforts could be hampered by what just happened with regard to the government shutdown. Yesterday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of comprehensive immigration reform&#8217;s biggest supporters, noted that the exceedingly acrimonious stance taken by Obama and his fellow Democrats during the shutdown may have <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/14/immigration-house-republicans/2961571/">poisoned</a> the well with regard to a reform bill. “Immigration reform is going to be a lot harder to accomplish than it was three weeks ago,” he contended, further noting that he agreed with Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) who said Republican leadership would be &#8220;crazy&#8221; to negotiate with  a president who could be as recalcitrant regarding immigration reform as he was during shutdown negotiations. Labrador also reminded his colleagues that Obama is “trying to destroy” the GOP. Despite this reality, Rubio remains committed to reform. “There’s no argument the immigration system has to be fixed,” he told Fox News.</p>
<p>At what price? As American Thinker&#8217;s Tara Sevatius <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/how_amnesty_serves_the_left.html">explains</a>, comprehensive immigration reform serves the left&#8217;s interests far more than those of conservative Americans. If 11 million illegals are granted amnesty, &#8220;the shift to an America one-party state will accelerate at warp speed,&#8221; she writes. She further notes that Republicans are kidding themselves if they think Hispanics will eventually embrace conservative values, citing a 2012 <a href="http://www.nmtelegram.com/2012/04/05/poll-of-hispanics-shows-gop-challenges-go-beyond-immigration/">survey</a> taken by the Pew Hispanic Center. It revealed that a staggering 75 percent of Hispanics prefer &#8220;bigger government and more services.&#8221; That compared to only 41 percent of the American population as whole that wants the same thing.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the Hispanic community&#8217;s affinity for Democrats is hardly news. They have consistently supported Democrats by <a href="http://www.cis.org/mortensen/hispanics-were-democrats-long-illegal-immigration-became-issue">wide margins</a>, going all the way back to 1980.</p>
<p>Regardless, it would appear that immigration reform is moving to the front burner once again. Thus, in the next few months the American public will be bombarded with volumes of  information attempting to convince them that the the legalization of 11 million illegal aliens currently in the country, along with the 17 million immigrants added to that total over the years, is a net plus for the nation.</p>
<p>Yet American workers who will be forced to compete with millions of mostly low-skill workers for jobs&#8211;even as job creation remains stagnant&#8211;would be wise to remember basic economics. Basic economics explains that more of anything makes each individual unit of that thing worth less. More American workers competing with newly legalized immigrants for scarcer and scarcer well-paying jobs is no exception to that rule.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Rubio: No Friend to Immigrants and the Working Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:20:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Grabar]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Rubio]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203434</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The path to ending the conservative movement -- and prosperity for the poor -- begins with amnesty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sen.-Marco-Rubio_immigration-cropped-proto-custom_28.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203435" alt="John McCain, Charles Schumer, Marco Rubio, Robert Menendez" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sen.-Marco-Rubio_immigration-cropped-proto-custom_28-431x350.jpg" width="259" height="210" /></a>When it comes to immigration, our terms have been redefined in an Orwellian sleight of hand.  Today, the one who comes over the border illegally is called the same thing as the one who waits to come over legally, as those of my parents’ generation did.</p>
<p>Back in the late 1950s when my parents and aunts and uncles escaped from communist Yugoslavia being an immigrant meant staying off the government dole and having “sponsors” guaranteeing that you would.  My relatives spent years as refugees in Austria, where they worked on farms, often living in barracks.  Once here, they were greeted by sponsors who guaranteed housing, food, and medical care until the new immigrants could find jobs.  It was a mark of shame to receive public assistance.  Immigrants skimped and saved.  They struggled to learn English and what they could not learn they demanded their children learn.  When I and my cousins went to public school, we were inculcated with American values and strove to become Americanized.</p>
<p>This is not true today where government-paid workers search out immigrants, offering them government assistance.  In schools, immigrant and illegal alien children get anti-American lessons, and often in their own language.</p>
<p>Now Republicans are embracing the same ideas.  They even use the language of the Marxists who have been behind the push to legalize millions of illegal aliens in order to gain Democratic voters.</p>
<p>As New Zealand blogger and researcher Trevor Loudon documents in his <a href="http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/08/trevor-loudon-presents-his-new-book-the-enemies-within-tues-aug-27th-in-columbia-sc/">new book</a>, <i>The Enemies Within</i>, the push for amnesty for new Democratic voters began in 1995 when the unions, that had previously fought amnesty to protect jobs, were taken over by Marxists who then infiltrated the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>A key player is SEIU leader, and Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Elisco Medina.  In 1999, he convinced the AFL-CIO convention that U.S. immigration policy was “broken and needs to be fixed.”  In 2000, the AFL-CIO called for a new amnesty and the repeal of the 1986 law that criminalized hiring illegal aliens.</p>
<p>In 2009, Medina spoke about the need for “’comprehensive immigration reform’” at America’s Future Now! conference in Washington, D.C.   Noting that two out of three Latino voters voted for Barack Obama, he presented a two-part strategy:</p>
<p>In order to expand their power, he said progressives need to be “solidly on the side of immigrants,” who would remember “who was there with you.”</p>
<p>Second, with “reform of immigration laws,” 12 million people would be put on “the path to citizenship, and eventually voters.”  Medina asked attendees to imagine the gain in voters even if only two out of three voted Democrat.</p>
<p>But if one does not believe Loudon that Democrats/Marxists are using the case of “immigration” for vote harvesting, one should listen to esteemed political science professor Alan Abramowitz, author of <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Polarized_Public.html?id=JhLSygAACAAJ"><i>The Polarized Public</i></a><i>: Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional</i>.  A year ago, at our annual Labor Day book festival in Decatur, Georgia, he told an Obama-pumped audience that the demographics were on their side.  Abramowitz is known for his accuracy in predicting election outcomes.  But it’s not rocket science.  Abramowitz<i> </i>simply looked at the demographics and correctly predicted a Democratic victory.  (Political polarization was attributed to conservative “extremism” on the part of conservatives, which would disappear once they were outnumbered.)</p>
<p>As Abramowitz showed the charts and graphs, as well as photos of multihued Obama rallies, I thought of how sad it was that he would brag that the gains in Democratic voters was not due to the appeal of ideas but to racial and ethnic pandering. It was a celebration of vote-buying.</p>
<p>This Labor Day weekend, at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation conference, I heard hecklers interrupt Senator Marco Rubio’s speech with chants of “no amnesty.” Rubio has used rhetoric about the “broken system” to sell the “Gang of Eight’s” senate bill 744.  Many in the audience were annoyed by the hecklers, still seeing Rubio as a shining star, an old-fashioned immigrant success story.  “He’s right on most of the issues,” a woman told me.</p>
<p>Yes, Rubio did hit all the talking points about economic freedom.  But these were the same canned lines that I had heard in the summer of 2008 at the first Red State conference in Atlanta.</p>
<p>In 2013, in front of nearly 2,000 activists he became flustered as he tried to ignore calls of “traitor.”</p>
<p>As I left the room, I saw three individuals in bright pink t-shirts emblazoned with “Pink Slip Rubio.com” standing in the hall.  One was Jack Oliver, legislative director for Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, a decade-old group.  Oliver feels betrayed by Rubio, who had shaken his hand and promised that he would never support comprehensive reform, legalization, or the Dream Act.  According to his group’s <a href="http://www.flimen.org/">website</a>, Senate Bill 744 gives work permits and legalization to over 11 million illegal aliens, doubles authorized immigration to 22 million over the next decade, and adds millions to welfare and entitlement rolls.  Oliver calls it “amnesty first and a promise for enforcement lager,” and contends that the bill never would have gotten through the Senate without Rubio acting as the immigrant “poster child” of the sponsoring “Gang of Eight.”</p>
<p>Oliver began his career in construction as a plasterer laborer in 1968, a time when such a trade could support a family.  He got involved in the immigration fight when he heard George W. Bush claim that illegal aliens were needed to do the jobs Americans wouldn’t do.  He saw his wages drop 30 percent under Bush’s lax policies.  He had left Florida in 1986 and returned in 2002.  As a field superintendant he saw that construction workers were making less in actual dollars than what they had been making in 1986.</p>
<p>“I saw how devastating illegal labor is to the domestic labor market,” he says, citing the millions of young people who aren’t going to college.  “If they’re not going to make a living in the trades we’re going to have to subsidize those families.  It’s an expansion of the welfare state.”  Especially hard hit is the black community.  He estimates that 75 percent of the construction laborers with whom he worked in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., were black.</p>
<p>The immigration bill will change demographics forever, he contends, with Democrats fast-tracking the newly legalized immigrants to citizenship and voting rolls.   It will end the conservative movement.</p>
<p>Post-election quarterbacks attributed Mitt Romney’s loss to a “conscious decision to blow off Hispanic voters.” Republicans sounded like a party that “hates brown people,” said <a href="http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/07/status-quo-ante/">Erick Erickson</a>. Others made similar analyses until the real numbers came in, showing that the deciding factor in the Republican loss was the abandonment by white working class voters—like Oliver.  Furthermore, as <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/11/07/gop-outreach-to-hispanics-wont-work/">J. Christian Adams</a> pointed out, going back to the George W. Bush administration, the policies of the left don’t work with conservative Hispanics, the only ones the GOP can realistically count on.</p>
<p>I am reminded by Jack’s story about my immigrant family, about an uncle who was a bricklayer, about my father who was a welder.  Other legal immigrants I knew worked in manufacturing or such skilled labor jobs.  Today they would not have a chance.</p>
<p>So Rubio, despite the rhetoric from the powerful large business interests in the Republican Party, is no friend of the middle class or of legal immigrants.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>GOP Ready to Cave on Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/gop-ready-to-cave-on-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gop-ready-to-cave-on-amnesty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/gop-ready-to-cave-on-amnesty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:26:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199938</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left is so optimistic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/GOP-620x412.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200016" alt="GOP-620x412" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/GOP-620x412-398x350.jpg" width="279" height="245" /></a>The Republican Party is seemingly on the verge of embracing so-called comprehensive immigration reform. Using a tactic best described as &#8220;calculated incrementalism,&#8221; House Republicans plan to <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/07/Schumer-House-s-piece-meal-immigration-end-game-OK-by-us">pass</a> a series of individual bills addressing various aspects of immigration reform, which will then be combined in conference with the Senate bill. Former House Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/the-secret-republican-strategy-to-secure-amnesty-for-millions-of-illegal-immigrants/#">cut</a> right to the heart of the subterfuge, saying that the Republicans’ promise “to act tough on border security while looking to secure amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants has become infuriatingly all-too-familiar.”</p>
<p>Indications that House Republicans plan to acquiesce to amnesty were <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/04/Cantor-Doesn-t-Deny-House-GOP-Leadership-Will-Support-Overall-Path-to-Legalization">revealed</a> by House Majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) last Sunday. Cantor was repeatedly asked if the House would put 11 million illegal aliens on the so-called &#8220;pathway to citizenship.&#8221; Cantor responded that, while his chamber would not be taking up the Senate version of the bill, they would be taking the position that the system is “broken&#8221; and &#8220;we want to fix it.&#8221; He also expressed support for the House version of the DREAM Act, because children should not he held &#8220;liable for illegal acts of their parents.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) appears equally on board. In an <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/paul-ryan-immigrants-bring-labor-to-our-economy-so-jobs-can-get-done-20130725">interview</a> with the National Journal, he made the economic case for immigration reform, arguing that even low-skill immigrants &#8220;bring labor to our economy so jobs can get done.&#8221; He insisted that Wisconsin dairy farmers are having a hard time finding workers, and that if they can&#8217;t &#8212; or if they raise wages as an alternative to attract those workers &#8212; both scenarios will lead to the importation of those products.</p>
<p>Ryan&#8217;s reasoning sparked the ire of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Next Monday, they&#8217;ll <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/05/200000-ad-campaign-hits-ryans-immigration-plan/">begin</a> running an ad campaign ridiculing Ryan&#8217;s contention that Wisconsin suffers from a labor shortage. “Tell that to the 12 percent unemployed in Racine, the 10 percent unemployment in Milwaukee, the 9 percent unemployment in Janesville,” the ad states. “Thousands are looking for work, yet Ryan supports a plan that could double immigration, grant amnesty to illegal aliens, and bring in millions more foreign workers to take jobs.”</p>
<p>House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) has his <a href="http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/08/08/Two-House-Republicans-announce-support-for-pathway-to-citizenship/UPI-19081375943400/#ixzz2bOBJ3ip">own take</a> regarding the pathway to citizenship. He envisions granting illegals the provisional status that was passed by the Senate. After that, Goodlatte believes illegals with provisional status will take advantage of existing U.S. law, allowing foreigners to pursue green cards or permanent legal residency. After <i>that,</i> Goodlatte claims, they will pursue citizenship by already available methods, including marriage to a U.S. citizen, or having an American employer sponsor them. &#8220;All of those are ways they could then eventually find themselves permanent residents and, ultimately, citizens, but none of those would be special ways that have been made available only to people who have come here illegally,&#8221; he told C-SPAN&#8217;s &#8220;Newsmakers&#8221; program last month.</p>
<p>Two other House Republicans, Daniel Webster (R-FL) and Aaron Schock (R-IL), also <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/republicans-may-be-changing-minds-on-immigration-reform/">support</a> a path to full citizenship, succumbing to what ABC News described as &#8220;an intense campaign by pro-immigration advocates targeting key House members at town-hall events.&#8221; It is part of a &#8220;larger five-week plan for hundreds of rallies, petition drives and other events across the country timed for the Congressional recess.&#8221;</p>
<p>That campaign will be part of an effort led by the progressive group Americans United for Change, which will coordinate with liberal activists to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/30/progressives-august-recess_n_3678743.html">confront</a> Republicans at every opportunity, demanding that they embrace comprehensive reform. &#8220;This is a new approach. The theory in the past has been to be stealth about the effort to confront members at town halls&#8211;but sometimes it&#8217;s been too stealth, and we haven’t generated enough activity,&#8221; said Brad Woodhouse, president of the organization.</p>
<p>Other pro-immigration groups will be <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/08/05/expect-more-than-just-town-hall-protests-this-august/">doing</a> their part as well. Organizing for Action (OFA) the progressive spinoff from Obama&#8217;s reelection campaign apparatus, will hold a national day of action next Monday, aimed at getting Americans to support comprehensive reform. Mi Familia Vota, coordinating with <a href="http://americasvoiceonline.org/blog/alliance-for-citizenship-launches-new-campaign-to-win-citizenship-for-11-million-immigrants/">Alliance for Citizenship</a>, will initiate community campaigns aiming to achieve the same goal. Clarissa Martinez of the National Council of La Raza, an organization that has long demanded an end to the deportation of all illegal aliens, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/07/31/immigration-republican-house-recess/2606309/">promised</a> that a collation of groups will host 360 different events in 52 congressional districts, while Congress remains in recess. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) will also bring pressure to bear. &#8220;This is the beginning of a long, hot summer for the House of Representatives,&#8221; said SEIU member Eliseo Medina.</p>
<p>The above organizations will be countered by organizations such as the aforementioned FAIR, as well as NumbersUSA, which advocates lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, and Tea Party affiliates.</p>
<p>As a result of the latter groups&#8217; efforts, Republicans have been careful to frame their support for reform as one that enhances border security, and promotes the ability of state and local law enforcement officials to enforce immigration laws. Yet as Gang of Eight Senator Chuck Schumer has <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/07/Schumer-House-s-piece-meal-immigration-end-game-OK-by-us">indicated,</a> it may be nothing more than talk. &#8220;We would much prefer a big comprehensive bill, but any way that the House can get there is OK by us,&#8221; he told CNN. &#8220;I actually am optimistic that we will get this done.&#8221; Getting there, according to Schumer includes &#8220;certain bottom lines for us: We do need some kind of path to citizenship.&#8221;</p>
<p>Why is Schumer optimistic? Hayworth explains that Republicans are embracing a classic &#8220;bait and switch&#8221; technique that is likely to succeed this time because, as opposed to the 2006-2007 effort, &#8220;the GOP leadership has become smarter, and more devious with their messaging.&#8221; He contends that a tough law enforcement bill sponsored by Rep. Mike McCaul, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, will receive a vote of approval, but will be subsequently abandoned during the House-Senate reconciliation process. McCaul has reportedly been apprised of this reality &#8212; behind closed doors &#8212; by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).</p>
<p>Instead, a bill <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/eric-cantor-bob-goodlatte-kids-act_n_3581635.html">sponsored</a> by Cantor and Goodlatte, tentatively named the KIDS Act, legalizing illegal aliens who came to the country as children, will also be approved, and then become the actual bill that is sent to conference. Once it gets to conference, House Republicans will no longer be able to stop it: only a <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/08/how-immigration-reform-could-still-pass-congress.php">simple majority</a> of conferees from each chamber will be needed to get the reconciled &#8220;Conference Report&#8221; floor votes in both the House and the Senate. This will allow House GOP members to claim they are tough on enforcement, even as Boehner will appoint conferees who can be counted on to embrace the Senate&#8217;s position on amnesty.</p>
<p>As Hayworth explains, when the resulting Conference Report is brought to the House floor, only a handful of Republican votes, coupled with overwhelming Democrat support, will be required to make amnesty a reality.</p>
<p>Hayworth is correct when he says that only a handful of Republicans would have to vote for reform. As it stands currently, the House is <a href="http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/cong.aspx">comprised</a> of 234 Republicans and 200 Democrats, with one vacancy. Assuming Democrats vote as a monolith, as is often the case when ideological principles are involved, (and would undoubtedly be the case here, since amnesty could conceivably make them a permanent majority for the foreseeable future), only 18 Republicans would have to be swayed to support the bill. As it stands now, 21 House Republicans support immigration reform.</p>
<p>Such a reality underscores the true nature of Republican deviousness. Comprehensive immigration reform went down in flames in 2006-2007, because the millions of Americans who opposed it had a quantifiable bill to oppose. By breaking immigration reform into separate pieces, Republicans are hoping opposition to the bill will be similarly splintered&#8211;and muted. Even worse, House members will spend their August recess canvassing their constituents&#8217; sentiment before a bill is even written. Thus, their thinking may be influenced by nothing more than who shows up at a town hall meeting and shouts the loudest.</p>
<p>Given the aforementioned promises of the above activist groups, a quiet recess is unlikely. Yet one gets the uncomfortable feeling that the best Americans opposed to the massive legalization of millions of lawbreakers can hope for is that the pro-immigration activists, as has often been the case, overplay their hands. Loud and noisy demonstrations by progressive activists <i>demanding</i> a pathway to citizenship might sway Republicans to abandon this effort or prompt a backlash.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, House Speaker Boehner <a href="http://thehill.com/video/administration/312879-white-house-boehner-comments-on-immigration-are-laughable">offers</a> little comfort in that regard. “Nobody has spent more time trying to fix a broken immigration system than I have,” he said last month. “I talked about it the day after the election. I’ve talked about it a hundred times since. And while some may disagree about how we’re going about fixing a broken immigration system, it’s been a big goal of mine.”</p>
<p>Like other Republicans, Boehner needs to be reminded that the system is &#8220;broken,&#8221; primarily because the refusal to enforce the crackdown on businesses who hire illegal aliens, and the steadfast refusal to secure the border (mandated by the <i>1986</i> immigration reform bill) has brought us to where we are now. Moreover, there is absolutely nothing stopping those provisions from being enforced <i>right now </i>&#8211; other than the ongoing refusal by the Obama administration, supported by compliant Republicans, to enforce that law. Is there any end in sight to this racket?</p>
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