Scratch a man, and get punched in the mouth.

better to call names than try to understand what is driving people to desperate choices. your contempt for these people diminishes you, not them.

I'm afraid that when it comes to immigration, Orrin throws the word "racist" around as much as any loony leftist. I don't think that objecting to a rapid change in one's neighborhood culture due to immigration is necessarily "racist." Human psychology is complicated, and yes, people do often see race instead of other traits that are more crucial. I'll bet their neighborhoods have also had an increase in crime, for example.

Orrin would probably call me racist for objecting to the illegal Mexicans that hang around some streetcorners in my neighborhood, but I'd object just as much if they were illegal Swedes, or legal Midwesterners. I just don't like groups of men hanging around streetcorners. I also don't want to have to punch a button on an ATM to tell it to use English, either. None of that means I believe in racial superiority, ending all immigration, segregation, or anything like that.

I would say that this supports my claim that the problem is how immigrants are treated by the government, not so much the immigrants themselves.

When a government outlaws self defense and then excuses blatant criminal behavior by immigrants, what other result can be expected? One might note that much crime is by natives as well, but better to "solve" half the problem than none.

Here's a moderate statement on illegal immigration. Who do you think it is?

"Unless we're able to secure and protect the borders, it's hard to talk about a path to citizenship, because essentially all you do is incentivize ... people coming into the country, sneaking into the country, breaking the law, and hiding from the law for a few years or at least long enough to be granted amnesty under the President's plan if he has it his way. So I think you have to secure the borders first, and once you do that you can have a reasonable and serious conversation about what to do with 11 million illegal immigrants in this country now, and you can have a serious conversation about providing, or laying out, a path"

Tancredo?, Buchanan? David Duke? No, OJ's favorite Harold Ford, who voted for the Sensenbrenner immigration bill.

self-defense is in fact illegal in the u.k.

oj's excusing of all things immigrant disqualifies his opinion on the subject, to me.

I don't see why serious concern over the assimilation of immigrants is either nativist or racist.

People flock to countries with appealing ways of life. However, the newcomers do not carry with them the traditions that preserve the very thing they have come for. Too many newcomers at one time can extinguish whatever is great about a country.

Concern about that is rational and proper. In England, where is someone concerned with these things supposed to turn? Labour? The Tories? Please.

Why not look at it as a positive, all the new BNP "immigrants" may destroy the old BNP and create a new one better suited to the needs of the country.

OJ certainly feels that way about HAMAS. Why not the BNP?

When the illegals come overwhelmingly from one country, it's easy to make the accusation that anyone who objects does so for less than honorable reasons. What we need is affirmative action. Outreach attempts to other countries to do what they can to send more of their people here to get a more even balance of illegals.

And coming from the whitest part of the country farthest from the front-lines, it does start to border on sactimonioius hypocrisy, doesn't it? Then again, New Englanders have always thought they had a God-given right to lecture the rest of the country how it should run itself, when spends no effort on getting its own states in cleaned up. (can you say Kennedy? Of course you can.)

Who said this?

"...the civilized world can not tolerate geographical regions where no central political authority exercises sovereign legal power and can be held accountable for the cross border behavior of inhabitants. It would be best if [they] dealt with the tribal areas themselves, but if not we'll have to eventually."

That's oj. On Pakistan, anyway.

If this BNP is a racist party, then that's not the answer. But neither is what Labour has been foisting on to the nation, which has been a kind of anti-white racism. They are trying to dissolve the people and elect a new one. Not to mention the Leftist assault on traditional morality--by which I mean 'morality'.

Scratch a pro-immigration nut, get a nut.

the truly funny thing, the pants pissingly funny thing, is that the bnp would choose new hampshire over every other state.

Although I agree that we need to control immigration more, I ran across the following in my reading which does put the current situation in a different perspective:

"Until about 1840 America received no more than about 20,000 immigrants a year ... Total immigration between 1607 and 1840 was no more than one million.Then suddenly, thanks to a famine in Ireland in 1845 and immense political upheaval elsewhere, America's immigration became a flood. In the second half of the nineteenth century, thirty million people poured into the country, and the pace quickened further in the early years of the twentieth contury. In just four years at its peak, between 1901 and 1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a million Austro-Hungarians, and half a million Russians, plus tens of thousands of other people from scores of other places.

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only." -- The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, Bill Bryson.

In the time periods mentioned the total U.S. population was:
1850 - 23,191,876
1900 - 76,094,000
1901 - 77,585,000
1905 - 83,820,000
1917 - 103,266,000
Thus, more than half of the population increase during this period was from immigration.

Posted by: jd watson at April 16, 2006 8:24 PM

i don't believe those numbers are accurate, for 1607 - 1840. in fact, i think they are crap. and not to prove or disprove a point.

i don't believe those numbers are accurate, for 1607 - 1840. in fact, i think they are crap. and not to prove or disprove a point.

Sorry about the suffering of those people, but I'm glad they came here and built this great country, so my grandchildren can live in peace and prosperity. Thanks guys for a job well done... and now if the moonbats will leave the president alone, he can finish the job he started, so we can be safe and secure.

He needs to be supported, not have pot shots aimed at him by jerks like George Will. Sorry, I usually rail against name calling, but sometimes a spade needs to be called a spade and please, no racial jokes.

Concern about assimilation isn't--it requires the natives to change. Concern about immigration is.

Yup, support for the BNP tells us who y'all are.

toe:

When reality contradicts your emotions it's always best to deny it.

toe:

No they wouldn't. In NH you know your neighbors and such racist scum are unwelcome. They'd go to ID with the rest of the white separatists.

sharon:

no, get a descendant of immigrants.

Noel:

Obviously you're right--we ought to bring them here where they'd have jobs.

Raoul:

We get Haitians, Cubans, Chinese, etc., too, but you're right we should be trying to get more.

cjm:

Note that your own point is that British culture is misshapen.

h:

Black politicians are natural allies of nativists because rising Latino political power will marginalize them even further. The natural alliance is the far Right, seculars, blacks and Labor.

Papaya:

No, you wouldn't.

toe:

One can understand why Hitler became a Nazi without feeling any less contempt for him.

Allen:

You don't find men joining the BNP or KKK.

Immigrants may cost Americans a few jobs, and they clearly depress wages for unskilled workers.
They may or may not cost America a few billion dollars a year in net benefits paid over taxes received, or perhaps they actually pay more than they get.

That's all quibbling.

America is a super-rich nation. We can easily afford to pay an extra ten or twenty billion a year to attract these immigrants. We don't even miss it.

Beyond the fact that it's the charitable thing to do, to give these folks a shot at a better life at next to no cost to us, (a sentiment supported by Buddhist, New Age spiritualist, and secular humanist philosophy, and commanded by Christianity), it's also a very shrewd business move.

The one resource that is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to any successful economy (or military) is human capital; labor, sure, but beyond strong backs, strong and fertile minds, bubbling with ideas.
By taking in tens of millions of immigrants now, we capture the energy and dynamicism of them and their descendants, for future America.

The cold Atlantic and wide Pacific have ceased to be our "moat", and now our edge is ingenuity and a willingness to take risks.
We sharpen that blade by drawing on as many minds as we can, and the current immigration situation gives us those minds at fire sale prices.

Whether it's just dumb good luck, or whether God is once again blessing the US of A, the situation is that it's raining soup, but some people are complaining that it's staining the patio furniture.
Good golly, just grab a bowl !

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at April 17, 2006 12:03 AM

Here here Michael.

And given JD's post, it's pretty clear, given our immense relative wealth compared to 1900, that we ought to be taking far more of Emma Lazarus' "tired, poor,
huddled masses yearning to breathe free", then we have been.

The Irish, Italians, Germans, Slavs, and Jews who came here at the turn of the century greatly enriched this nation. As will the Mexicans, Central Americans, and any others who come here.

Michael/jd

Well done. And before anyone weighs in to argue that today's immigrant is a different breed, I think even a cursory look at immigration history shows that many, many of those millions from the past started in highly visible poverty, leaned heavily on public charity, never mastered English, were attracted to crime and provided the backbone of socialist, communist and radical labour movements. Where are they, or rather their descendents, now?

It is strange how in a country with such deep political divisions, some expect all immigrants will be Limbaugh-loving, super-patriotic self-reliant baseball fanatics from the day they arrive. It is also telling that the main fear of nativists from both the left and the right seems to be that today's immigrants are likely to gravitate to the wrong side of the political/cultural divide. Obviously, they are going to do both, just like the native-born.

OJ

Harold Ford might prefer that his views be judged on their own merits, rather than reference to his race. (just as Peter, immediately above would resent, my flippantly ignoring his otherwise perfectly valid argument by making reference to his ethnic background)

The problem with the current situation is the too many of the illegals come up here and want to bring their old culture with them. The failed culture that caused all of the problems they are moving away from.

h:

Of course he wants to pretend it's not about race.

Fred:

Yes, significant portions of the culture they bring--family structure, faith, work ethic--are superior and we need to re-adopt them ourselves.

h-man

True, both sides should take care not to be casual about allegations of racism, but isn't it a little inconsistent to be chewing Orrin out on this given all that is being said or implied about the Mexicans?

fred:

The failed culture that caused all of the problems they are moving away from.

Doesn't that argument belong in the plus rather than the minus column?

And different ethnic groups of nativists opposed those immigrants too.

these people you call racist scum, are the ones who laid down their lives by the hundreds of thousands, to defend their country. you aren't fit to carry their water.

toe:

If they died fighting for their country they aren't members of the BNP today. But Germans died by the hundreds of thousands fighting to defend Nazism too. People fight for lots of crappy causes.

OJ, I am the daughter of an immigrant. First generation American. And I don't support illegal immigration. They can wait in line like everybody else.