The Blog of Record

Something only the blind in Britain didn’t see has now been confirmed: Tony Blair’s Labour Party attempted to create a permanent Labour-voting majority by shipping in millions of immigrants:

Huge increases in immigration over the past decade were a deliberate attempt to engineer a more multicultural Britain, a former Government adviser said yesterday.

Andrew Neather, a speechwriter who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a plan to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’.

As well as bringing in hundreds of thousands to plug labour market gaps, there was also a ‘driving political purpose’ behind immigration policy, he claimed.

Ministers hoped to change the country radically and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. But Mr Neather said senior Labour figures were reluctant to discuss the policy, fearing it would alienate its ‘core working-class vote’.

For the Left in any country, the ends always justify the means. And for their ends to be achieved, the country always needs to be changed radically – the more radically, the better. Just look at what’s happening in America now.

Much fewer Mexican illegals are coming into the U.S., but fewer are returning, too, because the recession - like everything else - is worse in Mexico.

How a push against Islamization, if and when it materializes, may result in non-Muslim immigrant minorities in Western countries becoming de facto pro-Islamization fifth columns.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

Rejecting skilled foreign workers at a time when America needs the best and the brightest to help it get out of the crisis:

Thanks to the Employ American Workers Act (EAWA), which was folded into the stimulus bill, it’s become harder for companies getting government support to hire skilled immigrants with H-1B visas — they’ll have to show they haven’t laid off or plan to lay off an American from a similar occupation.

Supporters say the law will help U.S.-born workers and stimulate our economy, but this is just wrong. The economy is not of fixed size, in which more foreign-born workers necessarily mean fewer U.S. workers. Productive foreign-born workers can help create more jobs here. Keeping them out damages us.

Start with the damage to companies that have received money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Over 400 firms now face a sharply curtailed talent pool, precisely when they need visionary talent to rebuild amidst the world’s most severe economic crisis in decades. Without the best talent, ultimately they’ll create fewer jobs.

This policy is already beginning to cause unforeseen damage to higher education, write the authors.

Hundreds of thousands of stimulus jobs going to illegal Mexican immigrants, though? Congress doesn’t seem to mind this in the least.

(Via Greg Mankiw.)

The Mexico Stimulus, kindly paid for by you:

Tens of thousands of jobs created by the economic stimulus law could end up filled by illegal immigrants, particularly in big states such as California where undocumented workers are heavily represented in construction, experts on both sides of the issue say.

Studies by two conservative think tanks estimate immigrants in the United States illegally could take 300,000 construction jobs, or 15% of the 2 million jobs that new taxpayer-financed projects are predicted to create.

They fault Congress for failing to require that employers certify legal immigration status of workers before hiring by using a Department of Homeland Security program called E-Verify. The program allows employers to check the validity of Social Security numbers provided by new hires. It is available to employers on a voluntary basis.

“They could have deterred this, but they chose not to,” said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies.

He said a federal requirement that employers use E-Verify would have reduced, if not eliminated, the hiring of immigrants in this country illegally.

An advocacy group for immigrants, illegal and legal, did not disagree with the 300,000 estimate.

So how did the 300,000 become “tens of thousands” in the first paragraph?

In a country like Canada this question is, of course, purely hypothetical. But it’s really just a particular case of a wider question: Is immigration policy still a means of ensuring a country’s continued development – and then the country is entitled to pick and choose whom it wants as new citizens based on their acceptance of its values, - or is it… well, I can’t imagine what else it can be.

Actually, I can – there’s Britain, where the Labour government has been importing Muslims by the million, while making sure to do nothing to integrate them, as the surest way to expand Labour’s voter base.

 USA Today reports:

Criminal gangs in the USA have swelled to an estimated 1 million members responsible for up to 80% of crimes in communities across the nation, according to a gang threat assessment compiled by federal officials.

The major findings in a report by the Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center, which has not been publicly released, conclude gangs are the “primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs” and several are “capable” of competing with major U.S.-based Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

And this is hardly surprising:

Assistant FBI Director Kenneth Kaiser, the bureau’s criminal division chief, says gangs have largely followed the migration paths of [illegal] immigrant laborers.

Just doing work Americans won’t do, I suppose.

Michael Barone sees more evidence for his recent suggestion that a sharp decline in illegal immigration may be coming:

Remittances to Mexico in calendar year 2008 fell by 3.6 percent, which apparently was twice as much as experts projected. This is a big hit to Mexico’s economy; remittances are Mexico’s second biggest source of hard currency, after oil exports.

Michael Barone writes that this may be the beginning of a period in which Latino immigration will be substantially lower than it has been the past 25 years.

People move, I have come to think, in pursuit of dreams — or to escape nightmares. One of those dreams — home ownership in America — now seems much less attainable than it did just six months ago, with thousands of foreclosures and with subprime loans to low-income buyers presumably a thing of the past. Meanwhile, birth rates in Mexico and much of Latin America took a sharp turn downward around 1990, which means that those entering the workforce there in years hence will have less competition for jobs — fewer nightmares.

Being enthusiastic about American values should be more important than having an occupation currently in demand:

[People like Mark Krikorian and Pat Buchanan] say that we should only be looking for immigrants who have skills that we need right now in the job market, but that’s the wrong way of thinking about immigration. We need immigrants who are enthusiastic about becoming Americans, who want to take advantage of the myriad opportunities of this country to better themselves and become strong and faithful members of their local communities. In short, what should matter is not what an immigrant knows but what an immigrant wants.

This is hard to argue against, but the problem is that the latter is much more difficult to establish than the former. We can’t read people’s minds yet.

BBC News:

Of the 700,000 illegal immigrants thought to be in the UK, about 400,000 are in London.

[...]

[Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson] acknowledged that illegal immigrants had broken the law and should “in principle” be deported, but he added: “Unfortunately it is just not going to happen.”

(Via Londonist.)

It’s a funny picture, but the purpose of immigration is to ensure that the country gets new citizens who will make it better – not to accept everyone who is unhappy with his life. I don’t think there’s room in America for 73% of the population of India and 52% of the French. If you want to move to the best country in the world, you need to prove you have some value for it.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s views on illegal immigration, according to Wikipedia:

[he opposes] discrimination on the basis of immigration status for providing state services, including such things as public housing, in-state tuition for public universities, and drivers’ licenses.

Simply brilliant.