National Review, February 1, 2013
You know an amnesty push has started in earnest when the smears against immigration hawks begin. No, I don't mean the left-wing smears calling us right-wing nuts — those are perennials. I mean right-wing smears calling us left-wing nuts!
As things started getting worked up last time, the Wall Street Journal and then-congressman Chris Cannon took the lead. (My response at the time is here.)
This time, the first shot in the smear campaign showed up at Grover Norquist's weekly meeting this past Wednesday, where this flyer was distributed, claiming that the Center for Immigration Studies, which I head, is a bunch of euthanizing, baby-killing eugenicists. This is obviously a steaming pile of feculence, but does point to the fact that immigration doesn't split along conventional right-left lines, but rather is an up-down issue. That means elites — whatever they think about other issues — lopsidedly favor increased immigration and lax enforcement, while the public — again, whatever their other views — are disproportionately hawkish.
That means conservatives on both sides of the debate are allied with liberals. The liberals I work with, among my donors, board members, and staff, are patriots concerned first and foremost with the well-being of the American people. I think they're mistaken on a lot of other issues, but that doesn't really matter because immigration is the only thing CIS addresses.
The liberals the expansionist side works with — well, let's just say "well-being of the American people" is not the first thing a lot of them think of when considering a policy issue. For example, the flyer I linked to was distributed by one Mario Lopez, president of a lobbying group called the Hispanic Leadership Fund, which includes on its board Mel Martinez, Grover Norquist, Linda Chavez, George P. Bush, and others — conservatives and libertarians all, even if they're all wet on immigration. But the flyer Lopez distributed at Grover's meeting was actually produced by the leftist National Immigration Forum (it says so on the flip side), an open-borders umbrella group funded by the Ford Foundation and George Soros.
The National Immigration Forum's board includes Angelica Salas, head of the leftist Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) (profiled here by Discover the Networks) and Rick Stolz, head of another leftist group called OneAmerica (formerly the Hate Free Zone), founded after 9/11 to obstruct overdue national-defense measures.
Former members of the Forum's board include the head of the L.A. branch of CARECEN, which backed the Communists in El Salvador's civil war and which helped pioneer the "sanctuary" movement to subvert U.S. immigration law. Another former board member, and later an employee, is "Jihad Jeannie" Butterfield, previously head of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as an alliance between members of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Workers World Party, and one of the few groups which welcomed Saddam's takeover of Kuwait.
What are conservatives doing working with such people? And I don't mean just a temporary alliance of convenience but actually distributing their materials and sitting on their boards?
I'm proud to make common cause with patriotic members of the center-Left to make the case for better immigration policies. Many on the pro-amnesty right are working intimately with people who are, at best, post-American and, at worst, anti-American. I welcome a debate on which of us has made the better choice of allies.
[Editor's Note: This post has been amended since its initial posting.]