The Immigration Blog

A lot of blogs picked up on this story last week (see here, here and here) but it is still worth noting for the record (more particularly, the I-told-you-so department therof).

Esteemed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has said what quite a few people have long suspected but not dared say in public: that high degrees of ethnic and racial diversity destroy the conditions of social solidarity in affected communities.

The Financial Times reports:

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

[...] When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.”

The FT has a follow-up article here. It's worth noting that Putnam intentionally delayed publishing his findings before he could find a "solution" to the problems he identified. The solution, you ask?

“What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us.”

Thanks for the science, Bob.

So says out-going Mexican Foreign Minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, in an interview with French center-right daily Le Figaro (translation here). It appears that Mexico is unhappy with Congress' decision, last Wednesday, to authorize construction of a 700 mile long fence along the southern frontier with Mexico.

Alas, it is universally acknowledged that our government has no such intention. So what to make of all the fuss south of the border? Le Figaro reports:

As a protest against the manipulation of this law, Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon is reluctant to visit the United States before his inauguration. Calderon has already visited nine Latin American countries as well as scheduled a forthcoming trip to Canada.

Apparently, the very idea that elected American representatives might for once bow to public opinion on the question of immigration -- symbolically and in complete bad faith, I hasten to add -- is enough to generate a mini-crisis in Mexican-American diplomatic relations.

You shouldn't take it so hard, Felipe. George Bush has let us down, too.

From my latest VDare piece:

When Poland and seven other former Soviet bloc countries joined the European Union in 2004, Tony Blair’s government assured the British public that the country would not be flooded by job-seeking migrants from the East. At most, ministers asserted—at most—Britain could expect around 15,000 additional immigrants per year.

Not for the first time, a government’s math has proven wildly, grotesquely wrong...

Elsewhere in Europe, ministers struggle to come to grips with the growing wave of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the EU on its southern frontiers. Heather first blogged about it here. Since then, French Interior Minister and 2007 presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has urged fellow EU leaders to agree to a ban on future amnesties. Le Figaro reports (my translation here):

At a speech today in Madrid before an inter-ministerial meeting of the European Union's eight Mediterranean member states, Nicolas Sarkozy will endorse a "ban" on massive regularizations. According to a text made public on the eve of the Madrid meeting, M. Sarkozy will prospose a "future ban on all massive regularizations" as part of the "European pact" on immigration that he supports.

Sarkozy is an astute politican who understands that positionning himself as an advocate of tighter borders makes the best electoral sense. But he is also right: Europe will never get control of its immigration mess as long as individual member states continue to use amnesties as a way of making up for temporary labor shortfalls.

The "free hugs" video on YouTube.com showcasing "a real life controversial story of Juan Mann" is sweeping the nation . . . make that the world. But it's not me.

Hey Michelle, help me out here!

I've already posted a disclaimer on the VDARE.com BLOG setting the record straight that IT'S NOT ME! But to no avail.

So far, I've gotten e-mail inquiries from ABC News and 60 Minutes, and as far away as Brazil asking if I'm the "Juan Mann" in the video. But they've got the wrong man. The identity of the guy in the YouTube video remains a mystery. I can assure you though, that it's not this Juan.

I sure wish the media gave a fraction of this landslide of attention instead to things such as VDARE.com, DeportAliens.com and the rigged behind-the-scenes reality of the federal immigration bureaucracy. But then again, bringing up the unpleasant necessity of summary removal of illegal aliens and criminal alien residents is such a downer.

[Original posting in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com]

Here we are five years after September 11, 2001—and the federal government is still as uninterested as ever in receiving reports of illegal aliens and criminal alien residents.

There’s virtually no interest in the executive agencies for getting deportation proceedings rolling against the millions of immigration scofflaws in the country. And there’s even less interest in Congress in setting up a coherent system to (my hobbyhorse) SUMMARILY REMOVE ILLEGAL ALIENS AND CRIMINAL ALIEN RESIDENTS…which just so happens to be perfectly allowable by 100 years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Here’s the proof of the continuing immigration law enforcement disgrace—an e-mail from a VDARE.com reader dated September 7:

“I have made reports 3 months ago of the practice of hiring illegal aliens where I work (there are 45 currently there now) to the following agencies: DHS, LOCAL BORDER PATROL OFFICE, INCLUDING 3 MEETINGS WITH 2 BORDER PATROL AGENTS IN PERSON, DEPT. OF LABOR, DEPT OF JUSTICE, SOCIAL SECURITY, IRS, STATE FRANCHISE TAX BOARD, OSHA . . . and 3 months later nothing has happened!

“Please tell me what I can do.”

Well, it looks like you've done all you can. Welcome to the futility of this situation . . . where the federal government follows its own agenda in direct conflict with the citizens. The end-game here is the three-country merger of North America.

The more the federal propaganda for public consumption changes, the more things remain rigged behind the scenes.

Since 9/11, among other things, I’ve embarked on a one-man crusade to find the most accurate information possible for reporting aliens to the federal government. Here’s the latest word on what to do:

HOW TO REPORT AN ILLEGAL ALIEN OR CRIMINAL ALIEN RESIDENT—If you are not in a border area with a U.S. Border Patrol station nearby, contact the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security by calling (866) DHS-2ICE to "report suspicious activity" (866) 347-2423.

You can also make a report with the DHS/ICE Investigations division in a city near you through the telephone numbers listed on the ICE web site — for Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) Offices, and their subordinate field offices called Resident Agent-in-Charge (RAC) and Resident Agent Offices (RAOs). You can even write them a letter if you want to make a written record.

It’s as if doing something to round up and summarily remove illegal aliens, previously-deported criminals, and the expired visa scofflaw crowd who all have no business being in this country is still a strangely unthinkable concept…even for a country allegedly “at war”.

Since 9/11/01, I’ve been writing about the largely unknown U.S. Immigration Court system of hearings and appeals within the Department of Justice, which is a federal agency called the Executive Office for Immigration Review ( EOIR) that conducts Immigration Court hearings. Ever heard of it?

I’ve been calling for the litigation-based EOIR to be abolished and replaced with a system of summary removal so illegal aliens and criminal alien residents will actually leave the country.

An extraordinary concept, apparently.

Fortunately, Michelle Malkin picked up my thesis and published it in her best-selling book, Invasion (pages 215-16), and also in a September 2002 "backgrounder" by the Center for Immigration Studies report called "The Deportation Abyss: It Ain't Over 'Til the Alien Wins"—[ PDF ].

But the silence since than has been deafening. And the EOIR system of Immigration Court hearings, administrative appeals, and more Federal Circuit Court appeals remains as rigged and alien-friendly as ever.

The Immigration and Nationality Act remains as much of a loophole-filled mess shot full of holes as ever.

The federal immigration bureaucracy still lumbers along is all of its litigation-soaked sloth.

As my VDARE.COM colleague Ed Rubenstein has shown, workplace enforcement has collapsed — even though the costs of immigration law enforcements are a fraction of the Iraq War.

More government employees collecting Department of Homeland Security paychecks are managed by even more superfluous Washington D.C.-based managers.

Five years after 9/11 and the federal immigration bureaucracy is as much of a disgrace as its most-hated predecessor, the abolished Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The proof is the 20-million-plus illegal aliens in the United States who should be immediately reported and deported . . . and the fact that the Bush Administration hasn’t done a damn thing about it since 9/11.

As details concerning the identity of the 21 suspects arrested in Britain's latest anti-terrorist raids begin to emerge -- the Times reports that they are "believed to be British citizens, many of Pakistani origin" -- it is worth recalling that almost every terrorism story has an immigration angle.

Britain's South Asian population largely arrived in the country during the first big wave of post-WWII immigration in the 1950's and 60's. It would be hard to fault the Blair government for bad decisions made well over a generation ago.

But what about the bad decisions being made today?

The Times' Camilla Cavendish writes:

It is hard to think of another issue over which there has been such concerted and effective censorship. For years, this Government has systematically underestimated the numbers of people coming in, selectively picked data to overstate migrants’ net economic contribution, dismissed questions about those figures as scaremongering and ordered the bewildered burgers of the big cities to rejoice at the new rainbow world in which they found themselves. [...]

“If we are not careful”, Frank Field, the Labour MP, said recently, “we will be transformed into a global traffic station. That is not what most people mean by being part of a country.” It is time to make some decisions. Do we want to be the doormat of globalisation, passively accepting that people will flow to where the money is, no matter what strain is put on Britain’s social fabric? Or do we mean something more by a country? And if so, how do we preserve it? In talking of setting an optimum level for immigration, Mr Reid has signalled a potentially significant shift in what was a wilfully passive policy: a woolly mix of kindness, fatalism, a desire to fill skill shortages and a sense of duty to countries such as Poland (a sense I share). There will no doubt be much wrangling over who gets to sit on the committee that will dictate the numbers. But that will be academic unless the Government can also reduce illegal entry. Official figures put the number of illegal immigrants at 900,000, but it is thought to be three or four times as many. So far there has been no real political will to stem the flow. Few companies have been prosecuted for hiring illegal labour.

Sound familiar?

Over a generation after their parents and grandparents first arrived in Britain, many British Muslims continue to entertain a nostalgic and sometimes violent attachment to their ethnic and national origins. Will the millions of immigrants who have arrived in the UK under Blair's watch be any different?

Sadly, the Blair government only now seems to be posing the question.

[Original posting in the Juan Mann Archive on VDARE.com]

The Treason Lobby’s latest pro-alien propaganda effort by its handmaidens in the media and the foundations was released last Monday. It's a report called Immigration Judges—An extensive analysis of how hundreds of thousands of requests for asylum in the United States have been handled has documented a great disparity in the rate at which individual immigration judges declined the applications.

The effort was produced by TRAC Immigration (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse), which calls itself as "a non-partisan research organization associated with Syracuse University." It was dutifully covered promptly in the press.

An e-mail accompanying the TRAC report explained that "[s]upport for this report -- part of a wider project on U.S. immigration matters -- was provided by the JEHT Foundation [that’s "justice, equality, human dignity and tolerance" . . . of course], the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the New York Times Company Foundation as well as Syracuse University."

The report publishes EOIR statistics identifying particular Immigration Court judges from the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), for the apparent unstated purpose of chastising them for not granting enough asylum applications in Immigration Court.

I’ve maintained repeatedly that the EOIR should be abolished outright. But the Treason Lobby calls the shots in the media. So the only criticism of the EOIR allowed in print is the type indicting the EOIR for the scandalous crime of not loving asylum-seeking aliens enough.

Fortunately for EOIR-watchers like myself, the report actually lists the EOIR immigration judges who have been granting asylum to just about any alien with a pulse who shows up and asks for it.

The report specifically identifies the main offender (from VDARE.COM's point of view):

"The judge with the smallest proportion of denials [the most asylum grants] of all the judges for this period was Margaret McManus of New York. She declined 9.8% of her 1,638 asylum requests in represented cases. Judge McManus was appointed in 1991. She began her career in private practice and for one five year period was a staff attorney with Legal Aid Society's Immigration Unit."

With an over 90 percent grant-rate for asylum cases, oh that all EOIR immigration judges could emulate former legal aid lawyer McManus . . . the Treason Lobby hopes!

MSM coverage of the TRAC report features anguished hand-wringing over all the un-McManus-like asylum-denying immigration judges out there. But the report is not exactly explicit about remedies. By implication, the Treason Lobby’s solution to its newly-perceived problem of disparate asylum results in the EOIR is that it could be fixed by providing taxpayer-funded lawyers for the aliens— among other bureaucracy-expanding and burden-of-proof-rigging measures.

But this forgets or conveniently obscures a key fact about the nature of asylum cases heard by EOIR Immigration Court judges: many of the cases have already been rejected…and should be denied again!

The fact is that asylum applications can reach the EOIR in two distinct ways. As the EOIR’s 2005 statistical yearbook explains [PDF, page 27]:

"There are two ways that aliens may request asylum: "affirmatively," by completing an asylum application and filing it with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Asylum Office [of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) division]; or "defensively" by requesting asylum before an Immigration Judge. Aliens who file affirmatively with DHS, but whose requests for asylum are not granted [by USCIS], may be placed in removal proceedings and referred to the appropriate Immigration Court for further review of the case."

What the Treason Lobby’s henchmen at TRAC Immigration don’t mention in their report is that a good percentage of the asylum applications reaching the EOIR Immigration judges have already been rejected by the USCIS asylum offices.

This omission of the distinction between previously-rejected "affirmative" and newly-filed "defensive" applications skews the EOIR’s statistics by making denial rates seem that much higher.

According to the EOIR’s 2005 statistical yearbook [PDF, page 27], approximately 30 percent of the total number of asylum applications heard in Immigration Court were already "refe