Common sense on Somalis and immigration from John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire, curmudgeon extraordinaire and writer for National Review, ended a blog post on Somalia’s chaos and Somalis with “And for crying out loud, keep them out of our country.”  

Naturally he was taken to task by a reader. Here is his very sensible reply:

An outraged reader:

Mr. Derbyshire — You say “And for crying out loud, keep them out of our country.”

Keep who out? Somalis? But most Somalis are not terrorists. On what grounds can we keep them out?

On the grounds that we can grant, or deny, permission for a foreigner to enter our country, according to what we perceive to be our interests. Otherwise, in what sense is this our country? And in fact we do have procedures for deciding who may, or may not, enter the U.S.A. If a foreigner wants to settle in the U.S.A., the procedures are even longer and more burdensome. I know they are; I’ve been through them. This is at is should be.

If the objection is, that we ought not base this decision on some factor as broad as national origin, I can only say I disagree. We should not let people enter if we have no way of verifying what they tell us about their background and intentions. Somalia has been in a state of utter chaos for decades. We have no effective consular presence there. There is no way we can verify what any aspiring Somali immigrant tells us about himself. Since there are a great many jihadists there — the place is on the point of being taken over by them! — the wisest thing, for our own security, would be to admit no Somalis. What is wrong with this reasoning?

Of course I know that most Somalis are not terrorists. Some Somalis are terrorists, though, and we have utterly no way of distinguishing them from the others. So let’s play safe and keep ’em all out. Again, I don’t see what’s wrong with this. In fact, I think our public discourse has come to a sorry pass when I even have to say the things I just said.

As Ann pointed out last week, our admissions of refugees have increased this year despite the recession, including 2,232 Somalis.

Obama: the Alinsky president

We’ve written about and referred to Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals frequently here, since so much that happens with refugees and community disruption seems to hark back to what Alinsky wrote. Today Jim Geraghty has an article called The Alinsky Administration on National Review Online. He begins:

Barack Obama never met Saul Alinsky, but the radical organizer’s thought helps explain a great deal about how the president operates.Relationships Built on Self Interest, an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.”

Alinsky died in 1972, when Obama was 11 years old. But three of Obama’s mentors from his Chicago days studied at a school Alinsky founded, and they taught their students the philosophy and methods of one of the first “community organizers.” Ryan Lizza wrote a 6,500-word piece on Alinsky’s influence on Obama for The New Republic, noting, “On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written

The conclusion Geraghty draws is that the goal for Obama, following Alinsky, is power above all and everything is subordinated to that.

Obama is a pragmatist, but a pragmatist as understood by Alinsky: One who applies pragmatism to achieving and keeping power.

….Moderates thought they were electing a moderate; liberals thought they were electing a liberal. Both camps were wrong. Ideology does not have the final say in Obama’s decision-making; an Alinskyite’s core principle is to take any action that expands his power and to avoid any action that risks his power.

….As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it — including invite Rick Warren to give the benediction at his inauguration, dine with conservative columnists, and dismiss an appointee at the White House Military Office to ensure the perception of accountability.

What is amazing to me is that while many people, mainly conservatives, saw Obama’s lack of principle and lust for power very early,  most people, including some “conservative” pundits, still don’t see it. But it’s the same kind of people who see what the idealism of liberals does when it plunks down refugees in the middle of an unsuspecting community who also see Obama for what he is. God bless them; they will be the saving of this nation, if we are to be saved.

Would-be White House visitors found to have deportation orders against them

Here is an amusing little story on Drudge tonight.  Two immigrants in the country illegally were hoping to be part of an adult education tour of the White House, but oops! a security check revealed they were in violation of immigration law and had been ordered deported.

And, no, it was not Aunt Zeituni and the long-ago missing Uncle George (or at least we don’t think so).   Surely not Omar Jamal either!

From AP:

WASHINGTON – Two people facing deportation from the United States have been taken into custody at the White House gate. They had arrived for a tour of the executive mansion.

The pair was part of an adult education program, and a routine background check showed they had an outstanding immigration order against them.

If anyone learns more about who they were, I would love to know.

ACORN revelations and creating crisis

Following up on Ann’s post earlier today, Bring us your poor and angry!, I’m posting  this article from World Net Daily, ACORN born in leftist revolution, by Jerome Corsi. It’s a good short summary of the Cloward-Piven strategy which seeks, to quote David Horowitz’s website Discover the Networks, “to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.”

It has four good links in it, and I’ll give them to you here in case you want to go directly to them for more information. 

The first is to the original article by Cloward and Piven in the Nation in 1966 (though registration is required).

Second, the Discover the Networks page is here, and in addition to a very good article on the strategy it has more links to related articles.

Third, Sol Stern had a long and detailed article on ACORN in the City Journal of Spring 2003 titled ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.

And fourth, here’s Jim Simpson’s American Thinker piece from September 28, 2008, titled Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Ann discussed this article when it first came out.

One reason I’m writing this post is that we’re sure to write more on the subject and I like to have the links handy.  Over the 1-3/4 years we’ve been doing Refugee Resettlement Watch, we’ve discovered that there is much more to refugee matters than it first appeared. As with many social phenomena, the left finds refugees and refugee resettlement useful for various purposes. Now that we’re seeing revelations about how far-reaching and well-funded ACORN is, we want to know more about where our particular topic fits in and how it is possibly being used to help create chaos and revolution.

Addendum: Jim Simpson just sent me the links to the other two articles in his series on the Cloward-Piven strategy: Part I,  Manufactured Crisis and Part III, Conspiracy of the Lemmings. Part II is the link from the American Thinker, above. All very worthwhile reading for understanding what is going on.

Rumor: Refugees are getting larger SSI payments than American citizens

We’re launching a new category this morning, obviously titled “Rumors.”   One of the most important reforms the Refugee Resettlement industry must make is to promote transparency (where have I heard that word before?) in how the program operates.    The result of the present obvious strategy of keeping the public in the dark about the program is that “rumors” get a life of their own.   We want to find the facts!

The “rumor” of the day is that the Obama Stimulus plan gives refugees larger Supplemental Security Income (SSI) increases than American citizens are receiving.

True or false?    Would a reader who knows the answer please give us the facts.