Strange Bedfellows - Left and right on immigration
Articles
Rep. Chris Cannon, the White House point-man on immigration, last week picked up the ball with a "Dear Colleague" letter to members of Congress informing them that "It has come to my attention that many of the anti-immigration groups also have an anti-life agenda." This came on the heels of a congressional hearing last Wednesday which Rep. Cannon turned into an inquisition about which immigration restrictionists had lunch with which other immigration restrictionists (I am not making this up — watch the whole hearing here.)
This kind of venomous lying and guilt by association are par for the course in the fever swamps of the web, but are startling in the halls of the U.S. Congress and the pages of the nation's largest-circulation newspaper...
On June 6, 2002, Rep. Cannon received the Excellence in Leadership Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), a leftist group created by the open-borders Ford Foundation. At the fundraising banquet where he received the award, he said that "We love immigrants in Utah. And we don't make the distinction very often between legal and illegal. In fact, I think Utah was the first state in the country to legislate the ability to get a driver's license based on the matricula consular [the Mexican government's illegal-alien ID card] and of that I'm proud." (listen to his speech, taped from C-SPAN, here). In this speech he also praised pregnant women sneaking into the United States in order to have U.S.-citizen children; recognized the member of his own staff who was "translating what MALDEF would like to do into legislative language"; and described himself as an example of the phenomenon that, in politics, "as you come to the extremes, you actually get close together."...
Believe it or not, there are numerous liberals (though few members of their elites) who are concerned about admitting a million-plus immigrants a year. The divide is between the patriotic and the non-patriotic Left. Liberals who worry about America's poor oppose mass immigration; liberals whose advocacy for the poor stems from their loathing for America want more immigration. Liberals who love America's environment and quality of life are concerned about immigration; liberals who express their hatred for America through environmentalism support more immigration.
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