Immigration troubles: No end in sight

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views February 2, 2004]

There can be no doubt that immigration, as a critical public policy, will be with us for a long time. More new voices are joining the debate on this issue, and it's getting harder to dismiss the increasing numbers of opponents to the nation's current open borders policy as "racists" or "white supremacists." There's even more open discussion (instead of the usually furtive type) about the downside of what is amounting to the re-population of Western countries.

Since its1996 board elections, factions within the Sierra Club, the country's leading environmental organization, have struggled over the issue of immigration. Although at times it seems improbable, it was the Sierra Club, in 1989, that called for "zero population growth." It was the Sierra Club that vigorously promoted "population stabilization" as a necessary goal for the United States. It was the Sierra Club that urged limits to be put on immigration.

But that was before the attacks from the political left, which described such goals as racist, since the most swiftly growing populations are those of the coloreds. For example, Hispanics in the U.S. are expected to increase in numbers, in just a few decades, from the current 32 million to 190 million. California alone is expected to add 17 million people by 2025.

In that hotly contested 1996 election for seats on the Sierra Club's governing board (there are 15 members), the open borders crowd won, and have done so ever since. But now, with a board election due in the Spring, an anti-immigration faction (sometimes known as "immigration realists") seems to be growing in strength. In recent years, new members have joined the Club with the specific goal of returning the group to its earlier positions on population and immigration.

Several of these new members are running for election to the board. Among them are former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, Cornell University professor David Pimentel, and former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Frank Morris. [Learn more about the Sierra conflict at Support U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS).]

And, of course, would any issue involving race be complete without the interference and vituperation of the obnoxious Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center? Well, he, too, has joined the Sierra Club, to be elected to the board, with the intention of offsetting the anti-immigration "bigots," while urging SPLC members to fight the "greening of hate."

In "Save the Sierra Club From the Treason Lobby," on Vdare, Brenda Walker, a long-time Sierra Club member and editor of the website Limits to Growth, writes that a "war is being waged for the soul of the Sierra Club." She believes that the Club, if returned to "responsible environmentalism," could play a decisive role in the immigration debate.

Columnist Mark Steyn is not optimistic about the recent plan for amnesty-by-some-other-name proposed by President Bush. In "Illegals, the political 'untouchables'"( Chicago Sun-Times, 1/11/04), he muses over the lame excuses offered by both Democrats and Republicans, whose parties countenance the mass influx of illegal aliens. He then asks,

Remember the 1986 immigration amnesty? One of its beneficiaries was Mahmoud abu Halima, who went on to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. His friend Mohammad Salameh wasn't so fortunate. He applied for the '86 amnesty but was rejected. So he just stayed on in America, living illegally, and happily was still around to help Mahmoud and co-attack the Twin Towers. He's the guy who rented the truck, which suggests he had enough ID to get past the rental agent at Ryder.

But I don't want to tar illegal immigrants with the terrorist brush. After all, in their second and much more successful assault on the World Trade Center, most of the killers were approved by the State Department, ushered in through Foggy Bottom's ''visa express'' program for Saudis, even though their answers on the application form were almost comically inadequate (''Address while in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA'') and they're exactly the category -- young single men with no job and no motive to return -- that's supposed to be a red flag for immigration fraud. . . .

The world's most powerful nation has an illegal immigration problem because it has a legal immigration problem. Transferring millions of people from the unofficial shadow network to the arthritic bureaucracy that allowed the problem to get this big is unlikely to solve it.

Copyright © 2010 Issues & Views