Now that Passover (Pesach) has started, it's worth looking at the results of Jewish pro-amnesty groups' campaign called Progress by Pesach, to light a fire under Congress and the White House to get moving on "comprehensive immigration reform." This is of more than parochial interest because the effort was led by HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, whose president, Gideon Aronoff, is now chairman of the National Immigration Forum (the national umbrella group for open-borders advocacy) and as such the paramount chief of the amnesty movement. (This is the same guy Derb debated a couple years back.) It was supported by all the big national Jewish organizations, and there was a concerted effort to blacklist one of the few dissenters, the Center's Stephen Steinlight.
So, how'd they do? The organizers must have known they were going to have a hard time, because they set the bar very, very low — just 10,000 e-signatures for the online petition. This should have been easy to do, given how politically engaged and generally liberal American Jews are. As the blogger Kvetcher noted, "10,000 out of millions. What a joke for a program claiming to speak on behalf of American Jewry. ... How hard was it to find 10,000 U.S. Jews to just e-sign something backed by the major Jewish organizations?"
Apparently, too hard, The total number of signatures was ... 3,500. And even some of the signatures they did get were bogus. If this is any indication of the coolness toward amnesty among a left-leaning group during Great Depression II, then this trial balloon launched today by the White House in the New York Times is going nowhere.