Category: Other Immigration

Anti-amnesty candidate hits a nerve

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Ann mentioned in her story about Obama’s Auntie Zeituni that immigration hasn’t come up as an issue in this election campaign. True for the presidential campaign. But in one congressional race it is THE issue.  Mark Krikorian reports in National Review on the campaign of Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who made national news for his actions to protect his town from an onslaught of illegal immigrants who raised crime rates and made Hazleton an unpleasant place to live.

In 2006, in response to a growing number of illegal residents in his city, he passed an ordinance that would fine those who hire them or rent them apartments; illegal residents started streaming out of the city despite the fact that the measure was struck down by a federal judge in response to an ACLU lawsuit. (The Third Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case yesterday, and since a similar Arizona law has been upheld, Hazleton’s odds are good.)

Now Barletta is running for Congress and is one of the few Republican challengers with a good chance at defeating a Democrat incumbent — he’s up five points in the latest poll. Here’s how important the immigration issue is:

It’s not just that immigration control landed Barletta on national and international news; his stance is wildly popular in his city, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one. In Hazleton’s 2007 elections, not only did he defeat a Republican primary challenger, but so many Democrats wrote his name in that he also won their primary and was reelected with close to 90 percent of the vote.

Those Hazleton voters must be some of the bitter gun-owning religious folks. But wait, the people of Arizona, John “Amnesty” McCain’s own state, are fighting to keep their toughest-in-the-nation immigration law against a coalition of businesses that want to get back to hiring illegal aliens. This coalition is promoting a ballot measure that seeks to roll back the law but is being presented as just the opposite — the usual tactic of those who want to do something the public can’t stand.

No matter who is elected president, the issue of illegal immigration is alive and well.

Agriprocessors manager arrested for role in fake immigration documents

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve posted before about the Iowa slaughterhouse Agriprocessors, which was the target of a big immigration raid in May. Today the Associated Press reported:

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — A former manager of a kosher slaughterhouse that was found to have employed hundreds of illegal immigrants was arrested Thursday by authorities who allege he helped many of the workers get fake documents.

Prosecutors said Sholom Rubashkin, 49-year-old son of Agriprocessors owner Abraham Aaron Rubashkin, is charged with conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for financial gain, aiding and abetting document fraud, and aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.

Immigration agents said in a federal affidavit that one witness said Sholom Rubashkin gave him $4,500 to buy identification documents for illegal-immigrant workers. Another allegedly said Rubashkin saw nothing wrong with hiring a group of workers who had new-looking resident alien cards and might have been fired from the Agriprocessors plant in Postville just two days earlier.

We are our theoretical brothers’ keepers, but not our real ones’

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It was just a coincidence that on the same day I heard a clip of Barack 0bama saying once again “We are our brothers’ keepers” I read about his Auntie Zeituni Onyango living in a Boston slum. You’ve probably heard all about it already, but I can’t resist commenting anyway. It was the British Times (formerly known as The Times of London), not the New York Times or the Boston Globe, that reported:

Barack Obama has lived one version of the American Dream that has taken him to the steps of the White House. But a few miles from where the Democratic presidential candidate studied at Harvard, his Kenyan aunt and uncle, immigrants living in modest circumstances in Boston, have a contrasting American story.

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston. (“Public housing estate” is Brit-talk for “project.”)

Here’s the convoluted description of the relationships:

Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Omar are the children of Mr Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, by his third wife – the woman Mr Obama calls “Granny” because she raised his father. Mr Obama’s father, Barack Sr, was Onyango Obama’s son by his second wife, Akumu. That makes Zeituni and Omar a half-sister and half-brother of Mr Obama’s father, or Mr Obama’s half-aunt and half-uncle.

I know some American families who — through divorce and remarriage — are just as complicated. I myself am a step-grandmother and my daughter is a half-aunt. There are better ways to conduct family life than those that end up with half-whatevers and step-whatevers, believe me, though everybody is loved just as much as if they were whole-whatevers. A system that encourages such arrangements through polygamy doesn’t strike me as healthy. The Times goes on to report:

The Times could not determine their immigration status and an official at Boston City Hall said that Ms Onyango was a resident of Flaherty Way but not registered to vote on the electoral roll. However, that Ms Onyango made a contribution to the Obama campaign would indicate that she is a US citizen.

I guess The Times hasn’t heard that lots and lots of foreigners have donated to the Obama campaign, from all over the world. The Palestinian territories have been a particularly rich source of support. It was generous of Auntie, as she is a poor woman.

An Associated Press story about poor people buying lottery tickets at cheque-cashing shops, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 25, 2003, quotes a Zeituni Onyango whom it describes as out of work and without much money. “It’s like when I feel luck might fall I do that, like manna might come from Heaven. That’s when I buy it,” she told AP.

 What is Obama’s current relationship with his Auntie?

The Obama campaign was repeatedly approached for comment yesterday but had not responded at the time of going to press. It is not clear whether Mr Obama has been in touch with his African relatives living in the US, or even whether he is aware that they are on US soil.

In the preface to the 2004 reissue, he writes: “Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees – a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate.”

Well, if he didn’t know where she was before, he knows now. Just as he knows about his 26-year-old brother George living on less than a dollar a month in Kenya, near Nairobi. That discovery was made by the Italian Vanity Fair and reported on in the Telegraph (UK). Our American reporters are too busy tending to the tingles up their legs to find out about such items as Obama’s family.

It is such a cliche about liberals that you’d think Obama would take pains to disprove it — that they love humanity but hate people. He says we’re our brothers’ keepers, but apparently all he means is that the government is supposed to take our money to care for other people.  When he has the opportunity to show he really believes what he says, by helping his actual brother and his actual aunt who are living in poverty, he takes a pass.

He must be very sympathetic to the refugee agencies we report on, who can pour out many fine words about the wretched of the earth and our duty to help them, and then take our tax money by the millions of dollars to create large agencies that often neglect the people they are paid to help.

Immigrants to Quebec will be required to sign agreement to assimilate

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is interesting.  Canada has been having problems, perhaps greater than the US has had, in getting immigrants to assimilate and respect Canadian values so Quebec has gone one step further.   New immigrants will be required to sign a declaration that they intend to learn French and respect the values of their adopted country. 

Needless to say, the left is furious.  So, you must give supporters of the declaration enormous credit for even pushing the measure.     Can you imagine the uproar if such an effort were attempted here, but maybe things aren’t bad enough here—yet!  From the National Post:

MONTREAL – Future immigrants to Quebec will be required to sign a declaration promising to learn French and respect Quebec’s “shared values,” the government announced yesterday.

In a document with echoes of the controversial code adopted last year by the rural town of Herouxville, immigrants will be informed that Quebec is a democracy where men and women are equal and violence is prohibited.

“Quebecers have said yes to immigration, but they said yes to immigration on the condition that these immigrants integrate into our society,” Immigration Minister Yolande James said as she announced the policy, which takes effect in January.

She added that immigrating to Quebec “is a privilege, not a right.”

There is a lot of information on the web about Herouxville, the town that inspired this initiative.   One story is here.

Al-Qaeda-trained Chinese Muslims are equated to American gun owners

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Andrew McCarthy of National Review provides a devastating commentary on the judge who wants to release the Uighurs into the United States (see previous post). His article is titled “American Gun Owner = Trained Jihadist” and the subtitle scares me to death: “The Uighur saga provides a window on Obama-style counterterrorism.” The whole article is well worth reading, but the first paragraph gives it in a nutshell:

Are you a bitter clinger? One of those American gun owners belittled by Sen. Barack Obama, filled with antipathy for people who aren’t like you? You know, people like foreign Muslims whose idea of a few weeks’ vacation is a course of paramilitary training at an al-Qaeda-affiliated camp?

Yes, we’re bitter clingers, like the people of Grand Island, Greeley, and all those other places that question bringing in people “not like them” — people whose idea of being Americans is to make others conform to their religious preferences. And now our betters are telling us that just because the Uighurs trained at terrorist camps doesn’t mean they won’t make suitable neighbors. Neighbors for us, that is, not for the judge.  When the U.S. government disagreed,

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit told the government in June that it needed to come up with a better rationale for branding the Uighurs enemy combatants. Judge Urbina then dramatically upped the ante, not only concluding the detainees were not combatants but ordering them released into the United States.  The government sought an emergency stay of that order so that the D.C. Circuit could hear its appeal.

That was the occasion for yesterday’s ruling, and for Judge Rogers to share her very interesting views. As the Washington Post reports (italics mine):  

Justice Department lawyers have argued that only the president or Congress has the legal authority to order the Uighurs’ release into the United States. They have also said that immigration laws would preclude them from entering the country because they received weapons training at a camp operated by a designated terror organization.

Rogers rejected those arguments, writing that courts have the power to order the release under habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal doctrine that allows prisoners or detainees to challenge their confinement in federal court. The judge also rejected the argument that immigration laws would bar the Uighurs’ entry, writing that such an interpretation would “rob” the men’s rights of meaning.

Even if the men had received weapons training, she wrote, that “cannot alone show they are dangerous, unless millions of United States resident citizens who have received fire arms training are deemed to be dangerous as well.”

McCarthy points out that the judge is placing the judiciary above the elected branches of government.

Congress has included in the conditions it has set proscriptions against the entry of aliens who have had paramilitary training in terrorist camps or are members of terrorist organizations. The Uighurs are disqualified under both categories.

And he goes on to point out:

The judge is politically unaccountable: We can get rid of a president who endangers us; what do we do about the judge?

And here is his pointed bottom line:

Most unbelievable of all, though, is Judge Rogers’s take on guns. Can you imagine drawing a moral and factual equivalence between United States citizens who own firearms and alien terrorist trainees who have gone to jihadist camps and received instruction in explosives, close-combat, assassination tactics, and jihadist ideology? The mind reels.

Sen. Obama has indicated that, if elected, he will return us to his vision of the “rule of law”: The pre-9/11 days when counterterrorism was the province of the federal courts. How reassuring that, as Colin Powell assures us, Obama is possessed of such “intellectual rigor.” After all, that’s what enables him to shun the simplistic Bush approach of regarding terrorists as wartime enemies . . . and all its attendant false choices.

Sure, the Uighurs may move in next door to you. But not to worry: Obama promises you’ll have the enormous satisfaction of knowing your reputation in the international community — in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan — is now markedly improved. And you can sleep well at night knowing jurists just like Judith Rogers could soon be filling vacancies on federal courts throughout the country.