One of the few positive surprises in the Kennedy-Bush immigration bill is the slow phasing in of a Canadian-style points system intended to bring in more skilled legal immigrants by cutting back on nepotistic chain migration. Reunification bonus points for Of course, that's exactly the part of the bill that Democrats such as Barack Obama have zeroed in on to criticize. As Your Lying Eyes pointed out, Obama proclaimed:
But the most disturbing aspect of this bill is the point system for future immigrants. As currently drafted, it does not reflect how much Americans value the family ties that bind people to their brothers and sisters or to their parents.”
“As I understand it, a similar point system is used in Australia and Canada and is intended to attract immigrants who can help produce more goods. But we need to consider more than economics; we also need to consider our nation's unique history and values and what family-based preferences are designed to accomplish. As currently structured, the points system gives no preference to an immigrant with a brother or sister or even a parent who is a United States citizen unless the immigrant meets some minimum and arbitrary threshold on education and skills.”
“That’s wrong and fails to recognize the fundamental morality of uniting Americans with their family members. It also places a person’s job skills over his character and work ethic. How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”
“I have cosponsored an amendment with Senator Menendez to remove that arbitrary minimum threshold of points before family starts to count and to bump up the points for family ties.”
“And at the appropriate time, I will be offering another amendment with Senator Menendez, to sunset the points system in the bill. The proposed point system constitutes, at a minimum, a radical experiment in social engineering and a departure from our tradition of having family and employers invite immigrants to come.
Let's not try to make the current immigration system more rational because that would constitute "a radical experiment in social engineering"!!! Whereas the effects of the current free-for-all are downright Burkean.
The thing that makes Obama so dangerous is his mastery of conservative rhetoric -- "a radical experiement in social engineering" -- that he deploys shamelessly to advance his own leftist and/or idiosyncratically personal obsessions, combined with how his charisma interacts with white American fantasies about racial transcendence to inspire the He Understands Us! response that De Gaulle mastered to get enormous power put in his hands. Well, yeah, sure, Obama understands us. Foxes understand hens, too.
One obvious distinction that is lost in this kind of demagoguery is that the proposed changes would retain "nuclear family reunification" (spouses and minor children) while cutting back on "extended family reunification" (siblings, parents, and adult children). Although Hillary and Barack have been rattling on about how America is built on family values, the reality is that traditional American culture values nuclear families (e.g., Ozzie and Harriet) and is suspicious of extended families (e.g., the Corleones).
Extended family reunification has been bad for low-skilled Americans, especially African-Americans, who have very little chance to get hired by by nepotistic immigrant entrepreneurs, who would rather import their low-skilled relatives. As you travel about the country, notice how few American blacks work in immigrant-owned businesses versus how many African-Americans work in big national chains (e..g, Hertz, Marriot, Ruby Tuesday, etc.)
Of course, driving African Americans out of New York City and replacing them with more docile immigrants has been long one of the covert reasons for the media enthusiasm for the current immigration arrangement.
However, with Obama, everything is personal. His biggest motivator is his enormous personal ambition. He chose ethnic politics as his career, so helping African-Americans get ahead in the market place isn't all that interesting to him because he is a politician and is rewarded for delivering tax money and favors.
Second, his unknown African extended family has always played a much more idealized role in his emotional life than his white semi-nuclear family that actually raised him.
The son of a bigamous marriage between an 18-year-old Kansas girl and a Kenyan who quickly abandoned her, grew up, as he details at vast length in his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, fantasizing about the love of his African extended family and resenting his white mother. He has approximately a half dozen half-siblings by his father. Some of them, such as his beloved alcoholic half-brother Roy (who now calls himself Abongo after converting to Islam and Afrocentrism) might have trouble qualifying for immigration under a rational system designed to benefit American citizens. In contrast, Obama's half-brother Mark, a physicist whom Obama cut off all contact with because he rejects Obama's Afrocentrism, is exactly the kind of skilled individual who would be chosen under the rational Canadian-style immigration system that Obama opposes.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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15 comments:
I think you need to edit this article some more. That last sentence just leads nowhere and I have noticed other problems.
If you have any doubt about the bias of the media, do two different Googles: make the first "Obama + bigamy." Make the second "Romney + polygamy." With the Obama search you get a few hundred hits. With the Romney search, you get over 200,000.
Romney's family hasn't had any polygamists since, at least, his great-grandfather. In Obama's case, it was his father who was the biganist.
And ain't it just fascinating that, if Obama wins, we'll have two back-to-back presidents who are the smooth-talking sons of serial bigamists?
it's probably time to retire this topic for, oh, two months at least. no more obama posts until august.
If Mr Obama could flood this country with 100 million foreigners he would do it in a heartbeat. Unless, of course, they were white. But, hey, the world is a tribal place...
...Steve, are we gonna see some excoriations of National Review staff? Here or at Vdare? Naming of names? A review of who said what and when on the National Question? A review of who fired whom? Who banished and exiled whom?
Maybe it's not the time for dissention. But those neocon snakes have been behind this immigration mischief the whole way. And now that it's dreadfully late in the game, all of the sudden NR is sounding the alarm. Does this not make you physically ill? After all that has gone on. After all of the unforgivable backstabbing and treason that has gone on.
Today NR is asking "Who Lost Texas?" What a sickening joke that is. When California was lost to the Left, the neocons didn't do anything but suppress the truthtellers. And they knew exactly what was happening. They nurtured the process.
These despicable neocons must not be allowed to paint themselves as giving a damn about the border. They are only jumping on the train now because of the upheaval and because they feel victory has been secured.
George HW Bush was a bigamist? Please explain.
Also wtf is wrong woth SS's last sentence - makes sense to me.
A comment usually adds something to the discourse. Keep up the good work on Obama SS. Dan
And ain't it just fascinating that, if Obama wins, we'll have two back-to-back presidents who are the smooth-talking sons of serial bigamists?
I meant, of course, to say "two back-to-back Democratic presidents."
Anon 10 pm -- your effort to root out neocons i.e. "jews" is wrong and foolish. It was the traditional Republicans in the WSJ, the Bush Cabinet, and Republican Establishment that since 1986 supported illegal immigration (by not enforcing the borders) and repeated Amnesties.
As for who lost California, it was lost when the Republican Establishment demonized Pete Wilson for supporting Prop 187, while at the same time supporting the Clinton "peace dividend" that essentially destroyed the Southern California Aerospace and Defense industry. No Jews or Neocons in sight.
NR and Redstate oppose this Amnesty Bill and have been quite active. Do you want Cindy Sheehan-like political purity tests or any type of opposition to this awful bill? Take your choice.
Steve --
I think you are wrong on at least two counts on Obama. First, he has limited appeal to Whites. Certainly the media, but they are wildly unrepresentative of ordinary white voters, who by and large see the gargantuan hypocrisy of racial politics and feel zilch guilt themselves.
Obama's overt racial politics are a turn off to folks who see protected class minorities in the workplace occupying special positions. This applies to the cubicle farms as well as blue collar work. He's also glib, rich and the plaything of the media elite which is poison.
Don't confuse the Media Elite's fascination with him as being indicative of the larger population. Shrillary still leads with Dem voters, despite Nixonian levels of charisma and a horrible image of her by most men. So what does that say about Obama the Messiah?
And, with all due respect you are missing the big issue, the dog that didn't bark.
WHY since it is so bad for African-Americans are so many of them just rolling over for Amnesty? They must know they'll be economically cleansed out of many places, as they are in NYC, South Central LA, New Orleans, and elsewhere?
What this says to me is that the Black Community is so broken that it can't self-organize. It's essentially dead. In contrast, there is considerable effort among Conservatives to kill the Amnesty bill, including "Divorce" letters to the Republican Party, such stuff as 40% downturn in donations, burning/tearing up Registrations cards, etc. Not to mention the Minutemen, various other anti-illegal immigration groups.
Yet despite Blacks being hurt the most by illegal immigration, there is no action. Mayor Tony has his repeat of the May Day fiasco and the Black Community won't organize against him?
The total destruction of political and social life in the Black Community is the only answer I get.
I don't think it's fair to lambaste all the NR folks as "neocons." They have genuine editorial diversity, and clearly most of their writers are not "neocons."
Mark Steyn, Andrew Stuttaford, John O'Sullivan, David Frum, Mark Levin, Rich Lowry, The Derb - those are the names I can think of off the top of my head who are anti-open borders, to one degree or another.
I've been off the Bush bandwagon for quite some time, especially on immigration. I've always felt that conservatives were damaging conservatism by continuing to embrace Bush. But never, until now, have they actually done so. It's truly amazing how widespread the disgust is: Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Urinal; Laura Ingraham on her radio show; Mark Levin, David Frum, and Kathryn Lopez (a big Bush cheerleader) over at NRO.
The disdain - for Bush and for other Republican sellouts, like Lindsey Graham - is large and spreading. At this point, given Graham's ugly, hateful speech to the folks at The Race (the last 20 seconds are the kicker), I have to doubt the man would survive a GOP challenge - which he will have.
These are the kinds of things that make for political realignment. Americans who favor border control are tired, angry, and fed up with being called "racist, nativist, xenpohobes, and bigots." PC and mulitculuralism are at death's doorstep.
And we all thought 9/11 was amazing...
As for who lost California, it was lost when the Republican Establishment demonized Pete Wilson for supporting Prop 187
That myth has been disproved so many times it's almost pointless responding to it again.
California, by 1994, was already a liberal state. In 1992 - 2 years before Prop 187 - it voted overwhlemingly for Clinton, Boxer, and Feinstein, and it's congressional delegation was already overwhelmingly Democrat.
George HW Bush only barely own it in 1988, and then only thanks to Reagan.
Do the math: of the 23 members of Congress who are Hispanic, 20 are Democrats - a disparity that has existed for a very long time - long before the current debates about immigration.
WHY since it is so bad for African-Americans are so many of them just rolling over for Amnesty?
I don't think most blacks are for amnesty, though most black leaders are. And even if it were true, it would only go to show how difficult a time so many people have with connecting cause and effect.
Anon 10 pm -- your effort to root out neocons i.e. "jews" is wrong and foolish.
Agreed. When I look at websites which could be classified as "neocon" - i.e. pro-free market, pro-Israel, Republican-leaning - I note that they tend to be pretty strongly against illegal immigration and amnesty. This is in stark contrast to liberal and libertarian sites, which are alarmingly pro-open borders.
One thing struck me watching the Nicky Barnes harlem heroin episode of American Gangster (season 1's best episode): how a young Barrack must have viewed Malcolm X as a role model. Barrack's dabbling in drugs before finding a "clean path" and becoming an activist might have been a self-conscious effort to construct a pseudo out-of-the-ghetto background and, hopefully, be just like his idol, (the great unifier) X. Of course, Malcolm was the real timber, where Barrack would be merely the post-1980 self-constructed image of the timber.
What's wrong with that last sentence?
Well, here is the last sentence on this site. (It is not the last one on the main site anymore, but it still makes no sense.)
In contrast, Obama's half-brother Mark, whom Obama cut off all contact with because he rejects Afrocentrism, with his physics degree from Stanford.
Remove the parenthetical sentence, and we get:
In contrast, Obama's half-brother Mark with his physics degree from Stanford.
If you are fine with that sentence, then I have to agree that the quality of education in the US has gone down considerably.
Dismissing criticism of neoconservatives as anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish is nothing less than shameless.
And pulling out the Prop 187 myth is so very clever at a place like isteve.com.
Hard to tell if the posters above are fellow travelers or just useful idiots. But we can see the new history beginning to gel. Purges? What purges?
For neocons and their useful idiots history always begins anew! Especially if it means your magazine might come back through the office window tightly wrapped around a rock.
Here's a radical notion: it matters greatly what people have said and done in the past, especially when they have said and done it consistently and repeatedly.
Neoconservatism is an invasion of the Pod People!
Larry Auster discusses the neocon ideology behind Powerline blog.
Auster discusses the neocon "quasi-Marxist" mindset.
Pod means Podhoretz and, yes, the Pod People are of various religious and ethnic backgrounds. Now, as to who is providing the "intellectual firepower", and who are the useful idiots? The reader can decide.
Pod means Podhoretz and, yes, the Pod People are of various religious and ethnic backgrounds. Now, as to who is providing the "intellectual firepower"
Intellectual firepower my @$$. I'm a pretty regular reader of The Corner, and I can't tell you the last time I recall JPodidiot ever contributing anything to the discussion. Here's there for one and only one reason - his last name. The man just sits there and bloviates.
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