When Did We Vote to Become Mexico?

5/22/2013 - Ann Coulter Townhall.com

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn't make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya.

Before I had resolved which scandal was distracting from which, we found out the Department of Justice was spying on The Associated Press -- not to protect national security, but to prevent the AP from scooping the White House. Then, this week, it broke that the Department of Justice was also spying on Fox News for reasons that remain unexplained.

Meanwhile, Sens. Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and John McCain are working feverishly to turn the country into Mexico.

So now I think all the scandals are intended to distract from Rubio's amnesty bill.

For decades, Mexicans have been about 30 percent of all legal immigrants to the United States, while only a smidgen more than 1 percent come from Great Britain. Is that fair? Granted, their food is better, but why is it the norm is to have nearly 30 times as many Mexican as British immigrants?

We have been taking in more immigrants from Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Colombia, individually, than from England, our mother country. There are nearly twice as many immigrants from El Salvador as from Canada, and 10 times as many as from Australia.

Why can't the country be more or less the ethnic composition that it always was? The 50-1 Latin American-to-European ratio isn't a natural phenomenon that might result from, say, Europeans losing interest in coming here and poor Latin Americans providing some unique skill desperately needed in our modern, technology-based economy.

To the contrary, it's result of an insane government policy. Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act was designed to artificially inflate the number of immigrants from the Third World, while making it virtually impossible for anyone from the nations that historically provided our immigrants to come here.

Pre-1965 immigrants were what made this country what it was for a reason: They were the pre-welfare state immigrants. From around 1630 to 1966, immigrants sank or swam. About a third of them couldn't make it in America and went home -- and those are the ones who weren't rejected right off the boat for being sick, crippled or idiots.

That's why corny stories of someone's ancestors coming here a half-century ago are completely irrelevant. If their ancestors hadn't succeeded, their great-grandchildren wouldn't be here to tell the story because no one was given food stamps, free medical care and housing to stay. (And vote Democrat.)

Now we're scraping the bottom of the barrel by holding ourselves out as the welfare ward of the world and specifically rejecting skilled immigrants.

As Milton Friedman said, you cannot have open borders and a welfare state. The reason a country's average immigrant matters is that the losers never go home -- they go on welfare. (Maybe if they had to work, immigrants wouldn't have as much time to build bombs.) Airy statements about wanting to end welfare aren't going to change that implacable fact.

It should not come as a surprise that a majority of recent immigrants are following a path that's the exact opposite of earlier immigrants. The immigrant story of lore is that the first generation is poor but works hard, then the second, third and fourth generations soar up the socioeconomic ladder.

But innumerable studies have shown that Mexican first-generation immigrants work like maniacs -- and then the second, third and fourth generations plunge headlong into the underclass.

By now, Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in America, with about 50 million Hispanics living here legally.

Marco Rubio's amnesty bill will soon make it 80 million. First, there are at least 11 million illegal immigrants, a majority from Mexico, who will be instantly legalized. Then we'll get their entire extended families under our chain migration system.

I wouldn't want that many Japanese! I wouldn't want that many Dutch (not that there are that many Dutch)! Why do we have to become a different country? Was there a vote when the country decided to turn itself into Mexico? No other country has ever just decided to turn itself into another country like this.

The nation's plutocrats are lined up with the Democratic Party in a short-term bid to get themselves cheap labor (subsidized by the rest of us), which will give the Democratic Party a permanent majority. If Rubio's amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished. It will be the "Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party" versus the "Chuck Schumer Republican Party."

When that happens, the cover-up of murder in Benghazi, a little IRS abuse or governmental spying on journalists will be a good day for civil liberties.

A majority of Americans still do love this country -- including, one hopes, legal immigrants who thought they were leaving Mexico. But a policy that will change America forever is about to slip through under the cloak of endless scandals from the corrupt Obama administration.

Solving the Immigration Puzzle

6/16/2013 - Bruce Bialosky Townhall.com

Many people are very optimistic regarding the possibility of a comprehensive immigration bill passing through Congress and being signed by the President. The prospects are good, but there are many stumbling blocks ahead. If we heed a couple of simple principles, we will be able to revamp a broken system that does not serve the American people.

There are many challenges that have developed in the 27 years since we last passed a comprehensive law to deal with immigration. We have an almost nonexistent ability to track people who come here on restricted visas and do not comply with the terms of those visas. Too many people of all ethnicities overstay their welcome. How we choose who gets legal immigration needs to be revamped. Too many people coming here become wards of the state. People bellow that these immigrants do not receive government benefits, but they do. When the federal government is awarding states bonuses for handing out food stamps (SNAP -- or as it is gently called in California – Cal Fresh), strict enforcement is not in the cards.

The entire matter hinges on two issues and this has not changed for a decade of more: what are we doing about border enforcement and what are we going to do about the millions of people already here illegally? If we cannot come to a reasonable agreement on these two issues, then there will be no immigration reform.

Let us start by debunking a consistent mantra among the left-wing press. They often say conservatives don’t want immigration reform. Where they come up with this garbage is beyond me, but we suspect that what they mean is conservatives do not want immigration reform as written by the left-wing of the Democratic Party; thus they don’t really want immigration reform. That could not be further from the truth. Just about everyone realizes we have a system that needs significant revamping.

We will have no new law without effective new border security. It is clear that nothing has changed on this major point. The main problem comes from the southern border. We need to do a lot more than we are doing now no matter what rhetoric comes from the Obama Administration and its allies. The decision cannot and will not be in the hands of Homeland Security. Whether it is Janet Napolitano or her successor, they should not have final say. This is a Congressional law and should have Congressional oversight and approval.

I had an argument with my son about this matter when he informed me that the Republicans will be forced to accept the current Senate bill. Now that he has worked in the Presidential campaign headquarters and is a college graduate, he obviously knows more than Dad. But I know that Republicans went down this road in 1986 and had unfulfilled promises, causing our current huge problem with illegal immigrants. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Not only do we have to secure our borders because of our past problems; there are at least two overarching reasons to do so. The first is for security reasons. Everyone in America should be worried about the danger of people coming to America -- whether legally or illegally -- who have bad intentions, and we believe most Americans are rightfully concerned. Second, we have a right to determine who comes into our country and from where. If people sneak into our country because they have proximity, whether they are from Canada or Mexico or Guatemala, harm is done to others around the world seeking legal admission.

The second matter is we must do something about the millions of illegals already here, and just kicking them out or self-deportation is not the answer. There are no easy answers on this matter. Some of what we heard from the Senate group sounded good, but we have also heard there may be too many loopholes. Getting back taxes from these people is borderline silly. They probably do not know how much they have earned nor does anyone else. Also, limiting the process to people who entered before a certain date is silly. Tell us when you came here illegally and prove it. We can come to a reasonable agreement on this issue as long as issue number one is resolved suitably. But we will never resolve dealing with the illegals that are here without stiff and strong border enforcement.

Immigration reform has been an intractable issue for a decade. We can resolve the issue if we solve the border enforcement issue. Everything will cascade from that. No logical argument has been put forth against completing the fence across the southern border – just platitudes and sideshows.

We need to revamp our immigration system not only for all Americans and the sake of our country, but for the benefit of those people around the world dreaming the American dream.

The Immigration “Crisis” Is No Crisis

6/13/2013 - Kurt Schlichter Townhall.com

With the immigration scam well underway in Washington, the only real takeaway for the outside observer is that the Beltway Establishment truly thinks we are idiots. There is no other way to explain the Establishment’s tsunami of faulty premises, bogus clichés, moronic advertisements and bald-faced lies.

There is no immigration “crisis.” It’s not a “crisis” when people who shouldn’t be here anyway don’t have all the privileges of people who do have a right to be here.

That’s how it should be.

There are a lot of people who shouldn’t be here who are here, but this is a “problem,” not a “crisis.” They’ve been here for decades, since the last immigration reform fraud failed. Oddly, the solution offered by the reformers to the problem of people being here who shouldn’t be here in the first place is to let these people here who shouldn’t be here stay here.

That’s like a guy going to the doctor saying he wants to lose weight and the doctor writing him a prescription for a dozen Big Macs.

All the Establishment feeds us is lies. If the reformers are so intent on securing the border, why isn’t it secure right now? Why does that have to wait until we somehow let the last bunch of people who scoffed at our sovereignty get on their pathway to citizenship before we take the most basic step any nation must take to be a nation at all – to protect our borders?

The answer is simple – they don’t want to secure the border, they never have wanted to secure the border, and they never will secure the border, at least until forced to do so, and then only grudgingly and while employing every passive aggressive tool they can to subvert doing so. And they’ll even tell you they have no intention of securing the border – provided you speak Spanish.

To convince us of the vital need to immediately, this minute, right now, no time to think about it, pass their thousand-page wish list of immigration giveaways we get clichés. Facts? Numbers? No, we get told we must do it because illegals need to “come out of the shadows.”

The hell they do. If you shouldn’t be here you should be in the shadows.

We get told that bringing in some untold millions of low-skill immigrants – 30 million or more – will “help our economy.” Let’s assume that’s true. Let’s even assume what we all know is a lie, that none of these people will be able to cash in on the welfare state that already pays too much money to freeloaders who have a right to be here.

So how much money, in dollars, will this bounty bring each of us? I know it will help crony corporatists who want a docile, dirt-cheap labor force. But what’s in it for us regular people?

That’s a legitimate question, and I’ve never heard the straight answer we deserve. After all, this is my country, and adding a zillion new voters will dilute my voting rights, so I’m giving up something. What I am giving up is really, really valuable to me – American citizenship.

I may have been lucky enough to be born into my citizenship, but I earned it in two wars. And my wife and her family – who respected the United States enough to ask for permission to become citizens and then either served in uniform or saw-off family members to war to defend her – earned it too.

So, when we ask why we should just give citizenship away to people who have already disrespected us by coming here uninvited, we deserve an answer, and not some cliché or vague platitude either. If this is going to benefit us, we want to know exactly how, and how much. Then we’ll know if it’s also in our best interest to do it.

But we won’t get an answer. The fact is that this is not meant to benefit us. It’s meant to benefit the Establishment. We just get to pick up the tab. “Trust us,” they say. The IRS, the NSA, reporter subpoenas, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Obamacare: I'm done trusting the Establishment.

So we get those ubiquitous advertisements on conservative shows to try and fool us into signing on. The one from the weirdly-named, liberal front group “Americans for a Conservative Direction” offers the usual lies about securing the border first. They think they can distract us from the prize – citizenship for millions of future Democrat voters.

Why again am I morally obligated to allow a bunch of people who shouldn’t be here in the first place to vote when I know, and you know, and everyone knows, they will vote en masse for my political opponents? I wish the GOP Establishment was as intent on destroying liberalism as it seems to be on destroying conservatism.

Maybe “comprehensive reform” is what Jesus commands in some chapter of the New Testament that none of my ministers have ever mentioned, perhaps the Book of Mario or the Gospel According to Chuck. That’s the message of the most obnoxious ad, the one that assumes Christian conservatives are morons who will fall for anything pushed by a quivering-voiced “evangelical” babbling about prayers. This simpering woman sounds like she’s about to burst into tears as she asserts that Christ commands us to give away the store to the illegals. Maybe in your Bible, lady, but not mine.

I’d be insulted that the people behind these cheesy ploys think we are that dumb, except those coastal enclave Establishment types know nothing about us at all. Well, except for one thing – they know that we are the only obstacle to them pushing through this obnoxious, ruinous disaster.

They are scared of us, because they know that our representatives fear us and our votes more than they fear the Establishment. So they lie to us, try to rush through their scheme, and trick us into just letting it happen.

There is no immigration “crisis.” The only “crisis” is the one faced by an Establishment that needs millions of new voters to cling to power because millions of real Americans are waking up to the nightmare they have created.

Amnesty Nonsense

6/18/2013 - Jack Kerwick Townhall.com

Let’s be blunt: anyone who endorses anything remotely resembling the “comprehensive immigration reform” currently bandied about in Congress is either a fool or a liar.

Amnesty — and make no mistakes about it, “comprehensive immigration reform,” “a pathway to citizenship,” and whatever other euphemisms its apologists invoke do nothing to change the fact that it is amnesty that they favor — is a fool’s errand of epic proportions. This becomes obvious once we consider it in light of an analogy from everyday life.

You’re married. Chief among the obligations inherent in marriage is that of fidelity. Your spouse has chronically failed to fulfill this most basic of duties. Finally, you’ve had enough. Upon threatening your philandering spouse with divorce, she acknowledges that your marriage is “broken” before swearing to not only change, but change radically. Not only will she stop cheating, she promises to transform herself into the epitome of the loyal and loving wife.

While you would doubtless want to believe this, you could not do so.

No one could.

Unfortunately, none of the good sense on display here is present in this debate over amnesty — even though the reasoning for the latter is identical to the reasoning of the unfaithful wife.

It is among the most basic obligations of a government to secure its country’s borders. As fidelity is essential to preserving the integrity of marriage, so too is border security essential to preserving the integrity of a nation. Indeed, a government that fails to secure its borders is unfaithful to its citizens.

Now, according to the Senate Gang of Eight’s plan, the government will be expected, not only to secure the border, but to see to it that a whole lot of other conditions are satisfied by those who are on “the pathway to citizenship.” There are a few things to note here.

First, if the government can’t or won’t fulfill its most basic and simplest of obligations in securing the country’s borders now, there is zero reason to accept its assurances that it will fulfill this duty as well as a bunch of new duties later. As my old martial arts instructor used to say, you’ve got to learn how to walk before you can learn how to run.

With respect to this issue, our government hasn’t yet learned how to walk or even crawl. But the Gang of Eight and their accomplices in the media would have us believe that with the stroke of a pen, the federal government will instantaneously become a marathon runner.

Second, border security is as big of a non-negotiable in governing as fidelity is a non-negotiable in marriage. The citizens of the United States should no more have to negotiate with their government to secure its borders than spouses should have to negotiate with one another to refrain from engaging in adultery. Spouses owe it to each other to be faithful. Similarly, the government owes it to its citizens to secure their borders.

However, when Marco Rubio or Chuck Schumer or any other politician favoring amnesty tells us that, in order to secure the border we must first place millions of illegal immigrants on a “pathway” to citizenship, what they are essentially saying is that we, the people’s elected representatives, will not discharge our constitutional duty unless you go along with what we want.

Translation: border security most definitely is negotiable.

And their accomplices in the media, most tragically the so-called “conservative” media, echo this sentiment.

Finally, when Chuck Schumer, Marco Rubio, and their allies in Washington inform us that our immigration system is “broken,” they admit, albeit unwittingly, that they, Republicans and Democrats alike, broke it. Only now, after decades of breaking the system apart piece by piece, they expect for citizens to trust them to construct a new system that is better than ever, a system that will magically solve all of our immigration related issues once and forever.

To take seriously such a claim is to expose oneself as a fool. To ask others to take it seriously is to expose oneself as a liar.

Everything You Need To Know About the Rubio/McCain Amnesty Catastrophe In 15 Quotes

6/15/2013 - John Hawkins Townhall.com

1) This is President Obama’s number one political agenda item because he knows we will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect. We will perpetually have a progressive, liberal president, probably a Democrat, and we will probably see the House of Representatives go into Democrat hands and the Senate will stay in Democrat hands. -- Michele Bachmann

2) The bill is worse than universal healthcare. Listen to me, it is worse than universal healthcare, and in the coming days as we get closer, we will explain why it's worse than universal healthcare. It is the death knell of the country, there is no recovery from this one. None. No recovery. -- Glenn Beck

3) If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, "simple answers, just no easy answers."

Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegal aliens, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.

So what are the Republicans doing?

Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. -- Pat Buchanan

4) The nation’s plutocrats are lined up with the Democratic Party in a short-term bid to get themselves cheap labor (subsidized by the rest of us), which will give the Democratic Party a permanent majority. If Rubio’s amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished. It will be the “Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party” versus the “Chuck Schumer Republican Party.” -- Ann Coulter

5) Instead of cracking down on the Administration’s abuse of power, S. 744 places unprecedented new restrictions on interior enforcement—making the current situation much worse and much more hazardous. It is as if S. 744 were explicitly written to handcuff law enforcement officials—binding their hands while giving virtually unchecked authority to executive branch officials to prevent future removals, including removals of criminal aliens. -- ICE Council president Chris Crane

6) It doesn’t stop illegal immigration. If anything it makes the problem worse by not securing the border and by incentivizing future illegal immigration. -- Ted Cruz

7) Creating more than 30 million new immigrants, including 11 million former illegal aliens, and supplanting their numbers with another 20-odd million guest workers is from a sociological and demographic point of view quite radical: 30 million is roughly a tenth of the current population of the United States. How we handle immigration is of fundamental importance to questions ranging from national security to economic growth to the character of our nation itself. That we cannot get a couple of small-time performance benchmarks written into the bill suggests that this issue is not being treated with the intelligence and the prudence it deserves. -- The Editors at National Review

8) This is the administration that has refused to enforce the law....they have created new law out of nothing. They’ve violated the law in a number of ways. And our guys are counting on the administration to all of a sudden actually keep their word on something like securing the border when they’ve never done it before and they believe it’s in their political interest to continue not to secure the border even if there’s a deal? I mean that’s crazy to think they’re going to start securing the border and until we secure the border everything else is completely meaningless. -- Louie Gohmert

9) Should this be grounds to primary challenge every Republican who voted for this bill, and I mean every single one? I don’t care if they just got re-elected. Next time they’re up for re-election. Ann Coulter’s right. This is a single issue — this is a single-issue primary challenge. You know why? Because this is it. As Bill Kristol said on this show, as he said on this show, once you give this pathway to citizenship all these benefits, all this discretion to [Janet] Napolitano, it’s over. It’s too late to complain about it. It’s over. -- Laura Ingraham

10) The federal judge in Crane v. Napolitano has ruled that the ICE agents are likely to prevail in their argument that the Obama administration is ordering them to violate federal law. Think about that: This administration is ordering career law enforcement personnel to break the law. Now, the administration is pushing for an amnesty bill that contains almost nothing to improve immigration enforcement. All that the American citizens will get in return for the amnesty is the promise from the Obama administration that they will try harder to enforce the law. The administration has already shattered that promise, doing exactly the opposite. This is a stark warning to Congress. I sincerely hope that they hear it. -- Kris Kobach

11) Almost every requirement in this bill can be waived by Janet Napolitano: for instance, the time limits on when people can be legalized, the requirements on criminal activity or even the enforcement triggers. Those basically don’t mean anything if any of them is held up in court, still. …The litigation over the 1986 bill didn’t end until just a few years ago. The ACLU has been quite clear that it intends to sue to stop mandatory e-verify and probably sue to stop a bunch of other things. If, for instance, mandatory use of electronic verification is still in the courts 10 years after the bill passes, it’s entirely possible the Secretary of Homeland Security can just give everybody Green Cards on her own — and there are hundreds of other examples of that kind of discretion. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that this 1,000 page bill after all of the amendments could be boiled down to, “We trust you, Obama; just do the right thing.” -- Mark Krikorian

12) The 'Gang of Eight' bill is not immigration reform. It is big government dysfunction. It is an immigration Obamacare. All advocates of true immigration reform — on the left and the right — should oppose it. -- Mike Lee

13) Okay. So what does that mean, the republic is at stake? This is the ball game. I remember people saying that about Obamacare. Now they're saying it about immigration reform. And they're both right. In the case of immigration reform, it effectively wipes out the Republican Party. -- Rush Limbaugh

14) Will they listen? Suicidal Republicans have supported illegal alien amnesties dating back to the Reagan era. They have paid a steep, lasting price. As bankrupt, multiculti-wracked California goes, so goes the nation. The progs’ plan has always been to exploit the massive population of illegal aliens to redraw the political map and secure a permanent ruling majority.

Now, in the wake of nonstop D.C. corruption eruptions, SchMcGRubio and Company want us to trust them with a thousand new pages of phony triggers, left-wing slush-fund spending and make-believe assimilation gestures. Trust them? Hell, no. There’s only one course for citizens who believe in upholding the Constitution and protecting the American dream: Stop them. -- Michelle Malkin

15) On every major front, this legislation fails to deliver on its core promises. It delivers only for the special interest groups who helped write it. Should it pass, it would represent the ultimate triumph of the Washington elite over the everyday citizen to whom Congress properly owes its loyalty. -- Jeff Sessions

Gang of Eight Increases Unemployment

5/25/2013 - Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum

The bill created in secret by the Gang of Eight is an outrageous betrayal of American workers, both high-skilled and low-skilled. Claiming it is bipartisan, the drafters were Democrats and globalist Republicans.

Economics 101 teaches that prices of products and wages go up when there is a shortage and go down when there is an ample supply of whatever. But funny thing, a consortium of billionaire oligarchs and high paid lobbyists have defied those axioms by rejecting U.S. STEM college graduates (science, technology, engineering or math) and then crying about shortages.

Half of American STEM graduates are not currently hired for a STEM job. Many students are so discouraged about the lack of job opportunities for STEM graduates that they have switched to more promising course majors, such as accounting.

The lobbyists lied to us by reciting the slogan that the "best and the brightest" are foreigners, rather than Americans, and must be imported so we can benefit from their brains and labor. The notion that the best and the brightest are foreigners is false and contemptible, since most of the world's great inventions and innovations are American.

In pursuit of this foolish notion, tens of thousands of foreigners have been imported to take jobs in the tech industries. The corporations welcome this deceit because they pay them less than Americans, bring in foreigners who are not high-skilled for entry-level jobs, force experienced Americans to train them and then lay off the Americans.

The Gang of Eight is so enamored with this racket that their proposed legislation more than doubles the number of guest worker visas. The Gang of Eight bill raises H-1B visas to 115,000 a year and allows up to 180,000.

The globalists who want to give us a foreign workforce invented a cutesy slogan: "staple a green card" to every master's degree or Ph.D. that a foreign student receives from a U.S. college in STEM subjects. The Gang of Eight bill puts no cap on the number of green cards to be issued, no quality standards for the colleges that grant the degrees, and no effective requirement that tech companies must seek U.S. workers before offering jobs to foreigners.

Colleges can also make this a profitable racket. A master's program usually takes only one year, so foreign students can buy the right to U.S. residency and a tech job by the price of one year's tuition at any U.S. college.

Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who has been the people's friend throughout the negotiations, said, "One of the things that most upsets the American people about Washington is drafting a bill with special interests in secret and jamming it across the finish line in a way that minimizes public involvement and input."

The lobbyists are still objecting to language in the bill that requires employers to ensure that an "equally qualified" American is not available for a job opening before hiring a foreign temporary worker. The Senate Judiciary Committee also defeated a Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) amendment to require that employers assure the government they have made "good faith" efforts to hire American workers.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a usually voluble big-government liberal, claimed this would give the government "too much power" to interpret!

The Gang of Eight beat back several other GOP amendments on border security, such as a Sessions proposal to require 700 miles of double-layer fencing along our southern border. The Gang also defeated Texas' Republican Senator Ted Cruz amendment that would triple border patrol agents.

As bad as the Gang of Eight bill is for high-skilled workers, it is a disaster for low-skilled U.S. workers because the big majority of new immigrants will be low skilled. The bill will swallow up opportunities for our own citizens to join the ranks of the employed and it will depress the wages of both U.S. citizens and immigrants.

Granting amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens will, of course, act as a magnet for future illegals coming across our border, as well as substantially increase the legal immigrants coming in through the family unification process. Estimates are that the Gang's bill will bring in 33 million immigrants over the next 10 years.

The biggest victims demographically will be African Americans because most of the 33 million immigrants will be low skilled. Legal and illegal immigration over the last several decades accounts for 40 percent of the 18-point percentage decline in African-American employment rates, according to evidence produced by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The Gang of Eight bill will punish black Americans to benefit foreigners and tech company profits. Where are the civil rights advocates when we need them?

Amnesty Vote Tuesday, Call Your Senators

Eagle Forum June 10, 2013 Harry Reid filed a Motion to Proceed on S. 744, the Chuck Schumer — Marco Rubio Amnesty bill. This means there will be votes on the bill on Tuesday afternoon. Your Senators need to hear that you expect them to vote NO on every vote related to this bill!  That includes all cloture votes. Cloture votes are the motions to end debate, and they require a 60-vote threshold, so those are the only votes conservatives can win. This bill got worse, not better through the Committee process, and the bill is so bad that no amendments can save it. Tell your Senators you expect them to vote NO on this bill at every turn! Our activists report that they are hearing cop-outs from Senators defending their support for the bill such as, “Our immigration system is broken and something needs to be done.” The system is broken, but this bill does not provide real solutions. This bill does more harm than good and only succeeds in making payoffs to special interests that make the problem worse. We need you to tell your Senators that passing this bill is worse than doing nothing! S. 744 was drafted by eight Senators behind closed doors with little more than one day’s worth of marathon hearings on the many aspects of this sweeping legislation. Only well-funded unions, corporations and special interests were allowed behind the Gang of 8’s closed doors, and the 1,000 + page bill is full of cleverly disguised payoffs to those interests. Direct stakeholders, like immigration enforcement employees, legal immigrants and jobless Americans were excluded from the process. Even if the broken promises on border security are addressed, S. 744 contains too many other fatal flaws to be fixable. Several Senators will introduce amendments they claim will fix the border security but those amendments are wholly inadequate to truly secure the borders, and they do not touch other problems with the bill, like the fact that it guts interior enforcement. Do not allow your Senators to get away with saying that this bill can be improved through amendments, it simply cannot! Several of the bill’s flaws are addressed in the excellent Dear Colleague letter signed by Senators Cruz, Grassley, Lee and Sessions, including the fact that the bill: Provides immediate legalization without securing the border Rewards criminal aliens, absconders and deportees and undermines law enforcement. Contains extremely dangerous national security loopholes. Facilitates fraud in our immigration system. Creates no real penalties for illegal immigrants and rewards them with entitlements. Delays for years the implementation of E-Verify Does not fix our legal immigration system Advanced through a process predicated on a deal struck before mark-up. Rewards those who have broken our laws by offering a special path to citizenship. Additionally, the bill thoroughly guts interior enforcement of immigration laws, and like ObamaCare, S. 744 grants enormous power and discretion to the Secretary of Homeland Security, who has a well-established policy of NOT enforcing immigration laws and of legalizing as many people as possible. Gang of 8 members say we need this bill because we currently have de facto amnesty, but this bill simply codifies amnesty, empowers the Secretary of Homeland Security to continue the policy of inaction, and relaxes the already-enacted laws that are not being enforced. The bill weakens control on asylum seekers, even in the wake of the Boston Marathon terrorist attack, which was perpetuated by foreigners who were granted asylum in the United States. S. 744 also out sources the job of guiding aliens through the amnesty process to ACORN-like, liberal community organizer groups. Finally, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation conservatively estimates that the amnesty portion of the bill alone will cost taxpayers $6.3 Trillion, and reports indicate the bill will flood 33 million people into the country over the next 10 years to compete in an already difficult job market and untold numbers of temporary workers. S. 744 creates extravagant new programs, and because the authors of the bill declared that these programs are “emergency spending,” they are exempted from the “pay as you go” requirement. Even worse, S. 744 combined with ObamaCare will make newly amnestied aliens more attractive to employers than American citizens or legal immigrants, since employers will not have to pay ObamaCare penalties for newly amnestied illegal aliens, because they are not eligible for ObamaCare. This bill is unjust and harmful on so many levels. We need you to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Schumer-Rubio Amnesty bill because it only makes the broken immigration system worse. Take action!  Senator Hatch 888-978-3148                                       Senator Lee 888-978-3094 We need you to tell all your friends, family members and other activists that your Senators’ phones need to be ringing off the hook Monday and Tuesday!  We are hearing that Senators want to vote for this bill to make the issue go away, but they are afraid their constituents will find out what’s in it. Tell your Senators you know how bad this bill is and that they must reject it!

The Boys Who Saved the World for the Rest of Us

6/6/2013 - David Stokes Townhall.com

It made the papers, but was covered far from sufficiently, when Elisha “Ray” Nance died a few years ago at the age of 94. You may never have heard of him, but he was well known around Bedford, Virginia, a picturesque town located at the feet of the Blue Ridge Peaks of Otter. He delivered mail in that neck of the woods for many years. But it was for what he did before becoming a letter carrier that he should be best remembered.

Ray Nance was one of The Bedford Boys.

In fact, he was the last surviving member of his town’s contingent in Company A of the 29^th Infantry Division’s 116^th Infantry – a group that waded ashore on a beach nicknamed Omaha in a far away place called Normandy, 69 years ago. And of the 30 soldiers from Bedford, then with a population of 3,200 (today, about twice that), he was one of only eight from his hometown who lived to tell the story.

Ray lost 22 Bedford buddies that day, 19 of them in the very first moments of the battle. By the time he made it to the beach in the last of his company’s landing crafts to reach that point, he saw “a pall of dust and smoke.” He could barely see “the church steeple we were supposed to guide on.” He couldn’t see anyone in front, or behind him; only that he “was alone in France.” Mr. Nance was a hero “proved through liberating strife.”

In so many ways, it’s a different world today. But interestingly – even ironically – the challenges of our times are not completely unlike those days when bands of citizen-soldier-brethren from the greatest generation saved the world for those of us who would later be born to abundance and liberty.

Next to ingratitude, forgetfulness is the most serious indicator of cultural decline; and in truth, the two are intertwined. Thankfulness and remembrance are flipsides of the same precious cultural coin.

It always bothers me when leaders—those born out of due time—seem to apologize for America and our various endeavors to make this world a better (read: more free) place.

I find myself thinking back to a moment 29 years ago when, on the 40^th anniversary of D-Day, President Ronald Reagan captured the attention of history and honored some of the other “Boys” who did so much for all of us on June 6, 1944. He called them “The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc,” and many of them were in his cliff-top audience in Normandy that day—June 6, 1984.

If you wanted to pick a more foreboding, certainly unlikely, place for an important military attack, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a spot more uninviting than the imposing, rugged cliffs overlooking the English Channel four miles west of Omaha Beach. A few years ago, I had the privilege of visiting the Normandy region for a speaking engagement. I stood on the spot where the Great Communicator spoke and tried to wrap my mind around the quite-evident impossibility of what the United States Army Ranger Assault Group accomplished that fateful day. Mr. Reagan honored those men there:

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of canon....Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe Du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

Now, all these years later, we mark another anniversary of D-Day. But the boys of Bedford are now all gone. And noble ranks of the boys of Pointe Du Hoc have been thinned out by the course of time, as well. So, what happens when those who really remember are no longer around to remind us? What happens when eyewitness memory is no longer vivid and available and we must resort to stories handed down from generations before?

This is where (and why) memorials come in, monuments to important men and moments of a sacred and so-easily-forgotten past.

It has been a dozen years since the national D-Day Memorial opened in June of 2001 in that tiny Virginia town of Bedford, a community that gave so proportionately of its finest young men so many years ago. A while back, my wife and I, along with other family members, visited the D-Day Memorial. I talked to my grandkids about it all. The man who took us around was Mr. James E. Bryant. He had served as a Glider Infantryman with the 82^nd Airborne Division and was part of all of his division’s campaigns from D-Day through to the end of the European war in May of 1945. He wrote a book about it all called, Flying Coffins Over Europe. I purchased a copy in the Memorial’s gift shop and asked him to sign it for me. I was honored and humbled to be in his presence. Really.

So, today I find myself missing the eloquence of Ronald Reagan and remembering how he honored “the Boys.” I also ponder the Great Communicator’s words from that inspirational speech in Normandy:

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Amen!