That just about every pundit for a "newspapers of record" — not to mention virtually all commentators in other mainstream media — are flacks for the Obama administration and uncritical devotees of open-borders immigration and amnesty is among the worst-kept political secrets in America. Throughout the Obama presidency, the chattering class has remained fiercely supportive of both, though its primary allegiance appears to have swung from the man to the issue. Read more...

It's axiomatic that the nation's leading pollsters, in what amounts to a tacit conspiracy, have for years falsified their reports about the deep disquiet an overwhelming majority of the American people feel about our broken immigration system. This near-universal disinformation has played a key role in the effort on the part of the political and fiscal elite to prevent immigration from emerging as a major national political issue. Read more...

His eyes fixed on November 6, President Obama is desperately trying to stop hemorrhaging political support in a Hispanic community outraged by the success of his administration's data-based deportation policy and whose vote is potentially critical in several swing states he won by a razor's edge in 2008. It has sent some 400,000 illegal aliens home a year for a total of about a million during his time in office. A frenetic effort is now on to shift gears and show results well before the election. Read more...

When ordinary folk espy what they believe is impending disaster, it's not unusual for them to experience desperation, embrace unreason, and imagine conspiracy lurking everywhere. When those crying "conspiracy" are cool-headed mainstream pundits who are opposing a political trend that challenges their household gods, however, it's likely they're consciously fear-mongering. Crying wolf means there's much at stake, persuasion hasn't worked, and they're out of arguments. Read more...

There should be a rung in Dante's Inferno for those, like the president, who violate the oaths they've sworn, in his case upholding the rule of law – immigration law not excluded – but whose attempts to subvert it are so maladroit he's failed to placate the electoral demographic for the sake of whose votes he betrayed his pledge. Since the 2008 election where they may have made the difference in several swing states, his Hispanic support has plummeted from 66 to 50 percent. One thing, at least, is fairly certain about his "new deportation policy": it won't staunch the bleeding. Read more...

It's axiomatic something good is happening on every occasion when the Jewish Establishment suffers a sharp, humiliating public rebuke in its effort to impose its political will on Americans who are Jews and care deeply about issues of great moment to Jews, such as the security of Israel. It's proof many in the community have withstood decades of propagandizing by an increasingly leftist and unrepresentative Establishment whose pretense to speak in their name looks ever more hollow. It also demonstrates that they've refused to succumb to ceaseless moral bullying by political leftists in the pulpit. In short, a great many can still think for themselves, are able to discern a cheap political ploy no matter shrouded how it is in high-flown rhetoric, and are getting angrier and angrier about the Establishment's evident preference for its "progressive" domestic policy agenda, including open-borders immigration, over the security of Israel. Read more...

The mainstream punditry has long treated as a fait accompli that the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election is safely in Obama's corner and will, as in 2008, likely tip the balance in swing states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, perhaps even Florida. But this looks extremely doubtful, even in a presidential election in which immigration will finally emerge as a major issue. In fact, the reason this proposition is so dubious is precisely because immigration will be a major issue. Read more...

"You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!"
-- Obama to Sarkozy on Netanyahu

Despite the high seriousness of its title, in "Election 2012's great religious divide" columnist E.J. Dionne produced a piece in yesterday's Washington Post so trifling and muddled the phrase "once-over-lightly" suggests, by comparison, a work of Hegelian weightiness. Read more...

No other contemporary issue in American social policy has anything remotely approaching the same capacity to unhinge the 4th Estate as immigration policy. The subject transforms ostensibly rational, civil members of the chattering classes into wide-eyed fanatics who regurgitate self-righteous moralistic rants in what has become a form of ritualized tribal behavior especially among the left-liberal post-Americans that form a solid majority in this coterie. Read more...

Spending a part of every summer vacation in South Wellfleet at the far end of Cape Cod was a rite of childhood, one I revived when my daughters were little and then again, many years later, about a decade ago. The Cape is blessedly much the same, though there's more than a touch of the Malling of America on Route 6, the main drag, and Provincetown is more evenly divided nowadays between gays and straight people. Read more...

In 2004, I broke the Jewish Establishment's informal code of silence and went public about the inevitable impact of massive illegal immigration, by far the greatest part Mexican, on the interests of Americans who are Jews, warning over time it would erode if not altogether nullify Jewish political clout. Being a messenger of bad tidings is never enviable: one's metaphorical fate is to be shot. However, the news was long overdue, and someone had to deliver it. I went ahead, though I knew I'd almost undoubtedly play the role of Cassandra: predict the future and not be believed, and worse. Read more...

The old leftwing weekly The Forward, like every national Jewish paper and virtually every regional or local one, adheres to the Jewish Establishment’s line on immigration, advocating an unspecified incarnation of the radically subjective policy termed “comprehensive immigration reform,” denoted increasingly by the less menacing-sounding, more user-friendly appellation “immigration reform.” Virtually identical robotized editorials appear ad nauseam in the Jewish press demanding the passage of “immigration reform,” arguing on the basis of the worst eisegesis, out-of-context and mistransla Read more...

The DREAM Act amnesty, the sole piece of immigration legislation to come before the 111th Congress where it was defeated despite the fact that the Democrats got pretty much everything else they wanted in an unethical Lame Duck session where dead men walking acted as if they had received a fresh mandate, refuses to die, at least die a quiet, seemly death. Read more...

From my earliest days at CIS, a principal target for my speaking engagements has been Florida's slowly northward migrating Jewish heartland, and I've addressed every sort of Jewish audience prepared to listen, excepting those already stone-deaf or on life-support, though truth to tell, on occasion I've spoken to groups bordering on both. In sundry settings I've made our case to thousands in the aggregate. Read more...

The title of the Washington Post story poses a timely question of great importance: "Why does Fresno have thousands of job openings - and high unemployment?". However, the writer refuses to provide an honest answer by leaving unexplored and ruling out of the equation a vital area of inquiry, including readily available supporting data. Read more...

Time alone will tell whether a one-word revision the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) made to the title of its feature on the reaction of Jewish Establishment organizations to the president's State of the Union Address heralds a long overdue, stubbornly resisted recognition of the changed political realities among American Jews or whether it's merely a transient, one-off reaction to getting hammered in a "gotcha" moment. Read more...

Though Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was mostly right if overly optimistic when he said, "no lie can live forever," many that eventually succumb don't die easily. Some cheat death for a long time because of extraordinary life-support. Read more...

The incongruence between the grimly inhospitable political climate in the new Congress for the robotic liberal agenda of the Jewish Establishment and what comes across as equanimity about a minor focal readjustment in some and delusionary myopia among other "Jewish groups adjusting agendas for new GOP-led Congress" recalls Albert Camus' closing observation in The Myth of Sisyphus, his classic essay on life's inescapable meaninglessness. Read more...

Despite execrable historical roots, the primary rhetorical strategy employed in the Washington Post editorial "Immigration impasse ahead" (given a different title online) is the Big Lie. Whether consciously or not, its authors effectively turn George Orwell's critique of mass disinformation in 1984 into praxis to make their central point. Read more...

My blood up, I was anticipating the prospect of tearing to shreds the astoundingly specious social analysis and "political lessons" allegedly to be derived from the mid-term elections about "the Hispanic vote" in 2012, as well as the ugly appeal to herd instinct to be found in Politico's piece "Hispanic vote a 2012 wild card". Read more...

A deeply rooted psychic need on E.J. Dionne's part to engage in almost-daily bouts of histrionic moral accusation have found a rich vein to mine in the immigration debate, and he's incapable of letting an opportunity go to waste no matter how lame the result. Read more...

It surely comes as no surprise to any one capable of recognizing a push poll that the American-Jewish establishment, employing ones sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has, for years, faked data regarding American-Jewish attitudes to immigration and immigration policy – very seriously misrepresenting the true state of opinion among American Jews. The establishment's goals are obvious: maintaining an illusion of communal consensus and, even more importantly, conveying a false impression to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Read more...

Though Thomas Friedman's New York Times column "America's Real Dream Team" squandered a teachable moment, copping out by failing to offer an explicitly political condemnation of America's current immigration policies and the unending campaign for "comprehensive immigration reform," he indirectly demolished both. Read more...

Following CIS's release of the survey "Religious Leaders vs. Members: An Examination of Contrasting Views on Immigration," the usually loquacious spokespersons for the Jewish Establishment have had little to say other than to downplay findings which reveal a Jewish community split down the middle over immigration between enforcement and legalization. What's more, lopsided majorities of respondents took positions on key policy questions strongly predictive of opposition to amnesty. Read more...

But there’s also, I believe, a question of priorities. The Fed sprang into action with the prospect of wrecked banks; it doesn’t seem equally concerned about the prospect of wrecked lives. The kind of sustained high unemployment envisaged in the Fed’s own forecasts is a recipe for immense human suffering – millions of families losing their savings and their homes, millions of young Americans never getting their working lives properly started because there are no jobs available when they graduate. If we don’t get unemployment down soon, we’ll be paying the price for a generation.

The FBI’s latest annual “Hate Crimes Statistics” (the 2008 report was released last month) is by general consensus an unscientific, even haphazard measure of the frequency of criminal offenses committed against persons or property motivated, to employ statutory parlance, “in whole or in part by bias.” The FBI cautions us about the unreliability of the figures in several prominent places in the accompanying narrative. Read more...

The political/culture war waged against Fox News (part of a larger effort which includes stigmatizing opponents of mass immigration) has taken a surprising twist. Read more...

In a recent article in the Jewish weekly newspaper Forward, "HIAS Still Aids immigrants, but Most Don't Resemble Sergey Brin," Gal Beckerman describes the metamorphosis in the historical mission of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society: "HIAS has moved beyond its narrow focus on Jewish refugees alone and refashioned itself into a defender of immigration rights." (Sergey Brin is the Russian-Jewish immigrant billionaire who co-founded Google and recently contributed a million dollars to HIAS.) With the notable omissio Read more...

In a blatant display of the partisan card stacking which routinely debases the intellectual and ethical currency of Congressional hearings on "immigration reform," Sen. Charles Schumer (D, NY) last month chaired a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and Border Security titled "Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Faith-Based Perspectives." Even a fig leaf of balance was missing; the minority wasn't allowed its fractional quotient of witnesses. Read more...