VIVA LA RAZA FASCISM WITH XAVIER BECERRA?
Mexico transferred Ernesto Fonseca to
house arrest in 2016 and in 2013 Mexico released Rafael Caro Quintero from
prison on a legal technicality. Clearly, the Mexican government ranks among the
cartels’ chief collaborators.
In 1994, Voz Fronteriza received $6,000 from UC student activity funds and many of its writers are members of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, which refers to the American Southwest as “occupied Mexico.” California attorney general Xavier Becerra, a former congressman once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate, boasts of his involvement with the militant group.
In March of 1995 U.S. Border Patrol
agent Luis Santiago fell to his death while pursuing illegals. Voz
Fronteriza, an officially recognized student publication at the University
of California at San Diego, responded with “Death of a
Migra Pig,” a
page-one editorial that celebrated both the death of Santiago and called for
the killing of federal agents.
A California judge has dismissed a claim that Attorney General Xavier Becerra is ineligible for the office he hold.
On July 18, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Richard K. Sueyoshi, who in a tentative ruling the prior week dismissed the lawsuit prior to a July 13 hearing, stuck with his tentative decision and denied a writ filed by former Attorney General candidate Eric Early. The lawsuit stated that Becerra “does not and cannot meet the minimum eligibility requirements for the position of Attorney General.” Early failed to qualify for the general election after the June 5 primary.
Early’s “Petition for Writ of Mandate” sought to remove Becerra’s name from the ballot in California’s upcoming general election because Becerra was not an admitted, licensed attorney in the State of California for five uninterrupted years prior to being appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown.
California General Election Code 12503 says, “No person shall be eligible to the office of Attorney General unless he shall have been admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the state for a period of at least five years immediately preceding his election or appointment to such office.” As of the November 6, 2018 general election, Becerra will have only been reactivated as a practicing attorney for a period of one year, ten months and five days, according to Early.
Becerra, a sitting member of Congress since 1993, was an “inactive” member of the California Bar for 26 years when Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him as California’s attorney general. Becerra was appointed in January 2017 when then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Judge Sueyoshi appeared read more into the statute by conflating “active status” in the California State Bar Association with “membership in the Bar,” which have two very different meanings — “inactive status” means the law license is suspended, voluntarily or involuntarily.
During the court hearing, Judge Sueyoshi talked of the “intent” of the statute. Plaintiff’s Attorney Brentford Ferreira argued that the statute is clear when it says, “admitted to the Supreme Court, ” and “admitted and licensed to practice law.”
The Judge’s ruling said state law “does not prohibit from serving as Attorney General a person who has voluntarily been placed on ‘inactive’ status with the State Bar at any point during the five-year period immediately preceding his or her election or appointment to the office.” Early and his attorneys said this is what he was trying to “read into” the state statute.
“Inactive with the State Bar Association means ‘suspended,” Ferreira said. Attorney “The words in the statute are unambiguously clear,” Ferreira reiterated: ‘admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the state for a period of at least five years immediately preceding his election or appointment to such office.’”
After the Judge’s dismissal, Attorney Early said that he and his team are preparing to appeal. They want Becerra to be removed from the November ballot.
THE AZTLAN INVASION & THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY FOR MEXICAN SUPREMACY
“The radicals seek nothing less than secession from the United States whether to form their own sovereign state or to reunify with Mexico. Those who desire reunification with Mexico are irredentists who seek to reclaim Mexico's "lost" territories in the American Southwest.”
MULTICULTURALISM, IMMIGRATION AND AZTLAN
By Maria Hsia Chang Professor of Political Science, University of Nevada Reno
One of the standard arguments invoked by those in favor of massive immigration into the United States is that our country is founded on immigrants who have always been successfully assimilated into America's mainstream culture and society. As one commentator put it, "Assimilation evokes the misty past of Ellis Island, through which millions entered, eventually seeing their descendants become as American as George Washington."1 Nothing more vividly testifies against that romantic faith in America's ability to continuously assimilate new members than the events of October 16, 1994 in Los Angeles. On that day, 70,000 people marched beneath "a sea of Mexican flags" protesting Proposition 187, a referendum measure that would deny many state benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. Two weeks later, more protestors marched down the street, this time carrying an American flag upside down. Both protests point to a disturbing and rising phenomenon of Chicano separatism in the United States — the product of a complex of forces, among which are multiculturalism and a generous immigration policy combined with a lax border control. The Problem Chicanos refer to "people of Mexican descent in the United States" or "Mexican Americans in general." Today, there are reasons to believe that Chicanos as a group are unlike previous immigrants in that they are more likely to remain unassimilated and unintegrated, whether by choice or circumstance — resulting in the formation of a separate quasi-nation within the United States. More than that, there are Chicano political activists who intend to marry cultural separateness with territorial and political self-determination. The more moderate among them aspire to the cultural and political autonomy of "home rule". The radicals seek nothing less than secession from the United States whether to form their own sovereign state or to reunify with Mexico. Those who desire reunification with Mexico are irredentists who seek to reclaim Mexico's "lost" territories in the American Southwest.
Whatever their goals, what animates all of them is the dream of Aztlan. According to legend, Aztlan was the ancestral homeland of the Aztecs which they left in journeying southward to found Tenochtitlan, the center of their new civilization, which is today's Mexico City. Today, the "Nation of Aztlan" refers to the American southwestern states of California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, portions of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, which Chicano nationalists claim were stolen by the United States and must be reconquered (Reconquista) and reclaimed for Mexico. The myth of Aztlan was revived by Chicano political activists in the 1960s as a central symbol of Chicano nationalist ideology. In 1969, at the Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference in Denver, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales put forth a political document entitled El Plan de Aztlan (Spiritual Plan of Aztlan). The Plan is a clarion call to Mexican-Americans to form a separate Chicano nation: In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historial heritage, but also of the brutal "gringo" invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the nothern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers ...declare that the call of our blood is...our inevitable destiny.... Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.... Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come .... With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan.
How Chicanos are Unlike Previous Immigrants Brent A. Nelson, writing in 1994, observed that in the 1980s America's Southwest had begun to be transformed into "a de facto nation" with its own culture, history, myth, geography, religion, education, and language. Whatever evidence there is indicates that Chicanos, as a group, are unlike previous waves of immigrants into the United States. In the first place, many Chicanos do not consider themselves immigrants at all because their people "have been here for 450 years" before the English, French, or Dutch. Before California and the Southwest were seized by the United States, they were the lands of Spain and Mexico. As late as 1780 the Spanish crown laid claim to territories from Florida to California, and on the far side of the Mississippi up to the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Mexico held title to much of Spanish possessions in the United States until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American war in 1848. As a consequence, Mexicans "never accepted the borders drawn up by the 1848 treaty."
That history has created among Chicanos a feeling
of resentment for being "a conquered people,"
made part of the United States against their will
and by the force of arms. Their resentment is
amply expressed by Voz Fronteriza, a Chicano
student publication, which referred to Border
Patrol officers killed in the line of duty as "pigs
(migra)" trying to defend "the false frontier."
Chicanos are also distinct from other immigrant groups because of the geographic proximity of their native country. Their physical proximity to Mexico gives Chicanos "the option of life in both Americas, in two places and in two cultures, something earlier immigrants never had." Geographic proximity and ease of transportation are augmented by the media. Radio and television keep the spoken language alive and current so that Spanish, unlike the native languages of previous immigrants into the United States, "shows no sign of fading."
A result of all that is the failure by Chicanos to be fully assimilated into the larger American society and culture. As Earl Shorris, author of Latinos: A Biography of the People, observed: "Latinos have been more resistant to the melting pot than any other group. Their entry en masse into the United States will test the limits of the American experiment...." The continuous influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States serve to continuously renew Chicano culture so that their sense of separateness will probably continue "far into the future...." There are other reasons for the failure of Chicano assimilation. Historically, a powerful force for assimilation was upward social mobility: Immigrants into the United States became assimilated as they rose in educational achievement and income. But today's post-industrial American economy, with its narrower paths to upward mobility, is making it more difficult for certain groups to improve their socioeconomic circumstances. Unionized factory jobs, which once provided a step up for the second generation of past waves of immigrants, have been disappearing for decades. Instead of the diamond-shaped economy of industrial America, the modern American economy is shaped like an hourglass. There is a good number of jobs for unskilled people at the bottom, a fair number of jobs for the highly educated at the top, but comparatively few jobs for those in the middle without a college education or special skills. To illustrate, a RAND Corporation study forecasts that 85 percent of California's new jobs will require post-secondary education. For a variety of reasons, the nationwide high-school dropout rate for Hispanics (the majority of whom are Chicano) is 30 percent — three times the rate for whites and twice the rate for blacks. Paradoxically, the dropout rate for Hispanics born in the United States is even higher than for young immigrants. Among Chicanos, high-school dropout rates actually rise between the second and third generations. Their low educational achievement accounts for why Chicanos as a group are poor despite being hardworking. In 1996, for the first time, Hispanic poverty rate began to exceed that of American blacks. In 1995, household income rose for every ethnic group except Hispanics, for whom it dropped 5 percent. Latinos now make up a quarter of the nation's poor people, and are more than three times as likely to be impoverished than whites. This decline in income has taken place despite high rates of labor-force participation by Latino men, and despite an emerging Latino middle class. In California, where Latinos now approach one-third of the population, their education levels are far lower than those of other immigrants, and they earn about half of what native-born Californians earn. This means that, for the first time in the history of American immigration, hard work is not leading to economic advancement because immigrants in service jobs face unrelenting labor-market pressure from more recently arrived immigrants who are eager to work for less. The narrowing of the pathways of upward mobility has implications for the children of recent Mexican immigrants. Their ascent into the middle-class mainstream will likely be blocked and they will join children of earlier black and Puerto Rican migrants as part of an expanded multiethnic underclass. Whereas first generation immigrants compare their circumstances to the Mexico that they left — and thereby feel immeasurably better off — their children and grandchildren will compare themelves to other U.S. groups. Given their lower educational achievement and income, that comparison will only lead to feelings of relative deprivation and resentment. They are unlikely to be content as maids, gardeners, or fruit pickers. Many young Latinos in the second and third generations see themselves as locked in irremediable conflict with white society, and are quick to deride successful Chicano students as "wannabes." For them, to study hard is to "act white" and exhibit group disloyalty. That attitude is part of the Chicano culture of resistance — a culture that actively resists assimilation into mainstream America. That culture is created, reinforced, and maintained by radical Chicano intellectuals, politicians, and the many Chicano Studies programs in U.S. colleges and universities. As examples, according to its editor, Elizabeth Martinez, the purpose of Five Hundred Years of Chicano History, a book used in over 300 schools throughout the West, is to "celebrate our resistance to being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders." The book calls the INS and the Border Patrol "the Gestapo for Mexicans."
For Rodolfo Acuna, author of Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Toward Liberation, probably the most widely assigned text in U.S. Chicano Studies programs, the Anglo-American invasion of Mexico was "as vicious as that of Hitler's invasion of Poland and other Central European nations...." The book also includes a map showing "the Mexican republic" in 1822 reaching up into Kansas and Oklahoma, and including within it Utah, Nevada, and everything west and south of there
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
KEVIN DeLEON SAYS MEXICANS ARE ABOVE THE LAW IN THE LA RAZA
SUPREMACY STATE of MEXIFORNIA
ILLEGAL IN CA LAW SCHOOL, AND HER ILLEGAL FAMILY SHOVE THEIR
MEX FLAG and the LAWS OF THIS STATE and COUNTRY UP AMERICA’S NOSES!
*
How much welfare, “free” education, “free” healthcare and tax
free mex underground economy have these Mexicans sucked in and yet they wave
their mex flags in our faces.
In a Facebook post in 2016, apparently celebrating her graduation from Santa Clara
University School of Law, Mateo declared, in Spanish: “[E]verything is
dedicated to Oaxaca, Mexico!! to that land that I miss so much.”
LA RAZA FASCIST
XAVIER BECERRA removes from CA Attorney General’s website TEN MOST WANTED
CRIMINALS IN CA…. because they were all MEXICANS!
HALF THE MURDERS IN
MEX-OCCUPIED CA ARE NOW BY MEX GANGS.
93% OF THE MURDERS
IN MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST CITY of LOS ANGELES ARE BY MEXICANS!
Heather Mac Donald of the
Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in
2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for
illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were
illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the
18th Street gang, were illegal aliens.
CALIFORNIA’S LA RAZA
SUPREMACIST FASCIST ATTORNEY GENERAL XAVIER BECERRA…. A LONG HISTORY OF SERVING
THE INVADING MEXICANS!
California’s La Raza
Supremacist Attorney General Xavier Becerra mocks Trump’s wall in a state where
half the murders are by fellow Mexicans and the La Raza Heroin cartels walk
over and under the open border!
BECERRA AGAIN GIVES
THE MIDDLE FINGER TO LEGALS!
The laws don’t apply
to Mexicans in Mexifornia!
LA RAZA FASCIST A.G.
of MEXIFORNIA TELLS MEXICANS “DON’T BE COUNTED IN CENSUS! WE DON’T WANT THE
STUPID GRINGOS TO KNOW HOW GREAT THE OCCUPATION IS!”
California Attorney
General Xavier Becerra and Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa…..
Members of the racist, violent, fascist M.E.Ch.A. separatist movement.
“Many
wonder why Xavier Becerra was chosen by Brown. But all anyone has to do is
peek into the radical California Legislature, and fanatical Gov.
Jerry Brown, to see the trend of militant Marxist, Socialist, Jesuit,
Liberation Theology, Latino activism on the increase.”
"If the racist
"Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no
doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually
labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights
and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to
either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the
existing Democratic Party. The next and final
steps would follow and
that is to elect our own governors of all the
states within
Aztlan."
Professor Predicts 'Hispanic Homeland'
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A University of New Mexico Chicano Studies professor
predicts a new, sovereign Hispanic nation within the century, taking in the
Southwest and several northern states of Mexico. Charles Truxillo suggests the
“Republica del Norte,” the Republic of the North, is “an inevitability.” He
envisions it encompassing all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and
southern Colorado.
JERRY BROWN, KAMALA HARRIS AND LA RAZA M.E.Ch.A. SEPARATIST XAVIER
BECERRA
THE BUILDING OF THE LA
RAZA SUPREMACY WELFARE STATE…. CALIFORNIA SURRENDERS TO MEXICO
JERRY BROWN, KAMALA HARRIS AND LA RAZA M.E.Ch.A. SEPARATIST XAVIER
BECERRA
XAVIER BECERRA IS
A LA RAZA “The Race” SUPREMACIST FASCIST AND MEMBER OF THE MEX SEPARTIST
MOVEMENT OF M.E.Ch.A.
MEChA Supports
"Reconquering" California For Mexico And "Urges All Latinos To
Resist Assimilation With White Americans"
OC Judge Fast-Tracks Huntington Beach Lawsuit Against ‘Sanctuary State’
An Orange County Superior Court Judge decided July 19 to fast-track the City of Huntington Beach’s lawsuit challenging one of California’s “sanctuary state” laws, and set a date for a September 27 trial.
The Huntington Beach City Council voted April 2 to be the first California city to sue the state to overturn Senate Bill 54 (SB 54), titled the “California Values Act.” Mayor Mike Posey and Councilman Erik Peterson that sponsored the closed session agenda item that passed on a 6 to 1 vote in closed session, called SB 54 “constitutional overreach.” The council directed City Attorney Michael Gates to to invite other cities and counties to join the suit, according to the local Los Alamitos Patch.
Mayor Posey issued a press release the next morning that stated that unlike other cities that had passed ordinances and resolutions protesting the SB 54, Huntington Beach had independent authority as a “charter city” to file its own lawsuit to preserve local residents’ right to protections under the California and U.S. Constitutions.
California Deputy Attorney General Jonathan Eisenberg filed an early July motion to halt Huntington Beach’s lawsuit on the grounds it would be more efficient to delay the state court action until judgement was rendered in two similar federal lawsuits filed earlier this year.
A federal judge upheld SB 54 earlier this month, along with one other “sanctuary state” law, while blocking part of AB 450, a law that penalized California businesses for voluntary cooperation with federal immigration law enforcement.
The Los Angeles Times reported that at the July 19 trial setting hearing, Judge Crandall denied the State of California’s request to delay trial, writing that the “two federal actions do not cover the same subject matter” as the Huntington Beach lawsuit.
City Attorney Gatesto said he was pleased with the ruling and believed “the court is interested in taking up the matter.” Gatesto added that SB 54 improperly forbids certain types of general fund spending on law enforcement by municipalities.
The Federation for Immigration Reform argues that SB 54 effectively makes California a “sanctuary state” by legalizing and standardizing statewide non-cooperation policies between California law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities.
IS A
SECOND REVOLUTION BREWING?
THE
AMERCAN PEOPLE vs WALL ST. MEX INVADERS, CONGRESS, THE WHITE HOUSE, AND THE
HISPANIC CAUCUS OF LA RAZA?
TAKING
BACK OUR NATION FROM THE MEXICAN OCCUPIERS
THE
COMING REVOLUTION... get on board or live in a graffiti covered Mexican
dumpster. If you think we’re exaggerating, in today’s Los Angeles Times there’s
an article on dump off of garbage etc., in Mexican occupied district of Los
Angeles. Collected it would equal in volume a twelve story building... THE
MEXICANS ARE HERE.
As
Sirota’s book suggests, there is a new revolution brewing. And it’s brewing all
over the country by small groups and even individual activist determined to
take back our nation from the corporate pillage, corruption, and 38 million
illegals waving their Mexican flags.
The
invasion of 38 million Mexicans since the “amnesty” of ‘86 didn’t happen by
accident. It has been entirely calculated by our elected and their corporate
paymasters. The objective is to depress wages which currently hovers in the
figure of $200 billion per year. Add to that figure what it costs to subsidize
this “cheap” labor, the welfare costs, which over around $300 billion per year.
And then you have the genocide of American culture by the Mexicans who have
utter contempt for the Mexican welfare state Washington, on behalf of big
business, as fronted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and fought for in the
trenches by the ACLU, has created in encourage their invasion. They hate our
laws, ordinances, flag, language, and culture.
A
glance at the American corporate donors to La Raza, the racist Mexican
supremacist front would shock you. Would it shock you even more that your tax
dollars are paid out to La Raza, which takes money from the Government of
Mexico?
The
following is a partial list of politicians that are La Raza members working for
open borders, amnesty (illegal Mexicans are not interested in citizenship) and
no wall. The ultimate goal of Mexico is to continue successfully using the
United States as their welfare system, cut a deal whereby the illegals can hop
the border, give birth, pillage, make their pesos and then return home.
Virulently
racist Mexicans serving Congress are Joe Baca of California, Loretta Sanchez
and sister Linda, also of California. Luis Gutierrez, the rabidly Mexican
racist Congressman from Illinois Chicago. Grace F. Napolitano (D- CA) and
Xavier Becerra.
Here’s
Napolitano’s quote in Congressional Quarterly on Barack Obama and the
representative for illegals in Congress:
“Unless
I see something inherently helpful to our community, I’m going to sit back and
see what happens,” Napolitano said. Napolitano and some of her Hispanic
colleagues are informally boycotting Obama campaign events aimed at reaching
out to Clinton supporters because the candidate himself has not asked for their
help.
Here’s
Becerra’s quote from the same article in Congressional Quarterly:
But the
wound was exacerbated earlier this week when Rep. Becerra, one of Obama’s most
prominent Hispanic supporters, told Politico that he advised the Obama campaign
that he could wrap up Hispanic backing by saying “Just
give him to me for a week, and I will deliver the Latino vote.” (NO
ILLEGAL FRONT HAS FAILED TO SEE OBAMA HISPANDER TO THEM TO DATE)
Get
more info at DAVIDSIROTA.com
In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.
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In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes,
they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While
Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights
advocates launched protests against the administration’s
deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012,
in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days
later, the administration announced that it would defer the
deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in
the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria.
Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing
pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that
because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was
lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race
for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
THE U.S. TAX and WALL STREET
FUNDED MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” NOW CALLING ITSELF UNIDOSus.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/05/mexican-fascist-party-of-la-raza-race_20.html
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generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to
Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica, by Jose Vasconcelos,
Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to
this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal
State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards,
blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack
enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is
replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD
BILLINGSLEY/ FRONTPAGE mag
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