At the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula lies the quaint town of Petoskey, population 6,080. In late March, a thick white shelf of ice still covers Lake Michigan, and a few miles north, over the Mackinac Bridge, the Upper Peninsula appears as a grey tangle of virgin wilderness. This isn’t the end of the world, residents say, but you… return to article
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Reader Comments (22)Page 1 of 1 pagesGet Real!
“The problem is that nowhere else in the world do two countries with such disparate relative wealth share such a massive border.”
Not to worry. We are rapidly approaching a common denominator. Our job quality and pay is declining as theirs rises.
-----------------Come on - the real issue for most of us is NOT immigration per se — it’s ILLEGAL immigration, amnesty by any name, slave labor wages and favoring the business community.
The only arrests necessary are the employers. No job — no reason to be here. (This goes for our kids contemplating college also.)
Think about this…
The argument that they do the jobs Americans won’t do. They are being paid sub-minimum wages for now. We’ve seen organized marches and our representatives catering to them. After they get legal status, how long before they “demand” better pay.If the pay were fair Americans would do the work, or invent a machine for it.
This kind of slanted, yellow journalism is what this website accuses as coming from the administration. So I guess it is universal — the end justifies the means.
Posted by whattheheck on Apr 25, 2006 at 8:42 AM Christopher Hayes — Read this… You should be getting one too.
--------------------------------------------Dobbs Blasts N.Y. Times’ Friedman
Firing back at New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, an obviously angry CNN’s Lou Dobbs says the acclaimed foreign correspondent blatantly distorted his position on immigration.
On his “Lou Dobbs Report” Monday night, Dobbs said that Friedman had charged that he is an ardent foe of immigration, saying that the Times columnist had “completely misconstructed, misconstrued everything I’ve said on this broadcast.”
Quoting Friedman as saying that he has been broadcasting an “unmitigated rant against immigration” Dobbs countered that he had “never once ranted or criticized immigration ... that is simply a lie. I am strongly pro-immigration. In fact I would like to see more legal immigration in this country. I am adamantly and absolutely opposed to illegal immigration. As I have said more than once there can be no reform in our immigration laws without control of immigration and we can’t control immigration unless we can control out borders.”
Dobbs asked Friedman that if he was listening he would choose to correct the record.
Posted by whattheheck on Apr 25, 2006 at 11:24 AM Several sites show links between Tanton and his partners to white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a number of articles on John Tanton. www.splcenter.org
“In These Times” has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.
Posted by november on Apr 25, 2006 at 1:10 PM Lou Dobbs is a tool. After all, he graduated from Harvard, with a degree in economics, no less, which proves the point. What can you say about a guy who cites a study on immigration from the National Academy of Sciences to conclude that even though immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars to the American economy, the costs of immigrant labor debit the economy by ten to twenty billion dollars, when in fact the study explicitly concludes that immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars in net benefits to the economy. Or when he states that one third of the American prison population are “illegal aliens” when in fact the accurate citation is that one third of the prison population are not citizens of the US.
I don’t mean to imply that my absence of regard for Dobbs’ inability to produce a fair and balanced summary of the facts is an endorsement of Thomas “Flathead” Friedman, whose misrepresentations of the truth are equal to those of Dobbs.
It’s hilarious to read to the racist rants of people whose great-great-grandparents emigrated from the eastern colonies to extirpate the natives in the western “territories”, whose great-great-grandchildren presumably invade and occupy the cultural terrain of our patriotic homeland.
Posted by Major Major on Apr 25, 2006 at 4:47 PM november - “In These Times” has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.”
Can one be against illegal immigration without being a “white supremacist”? In fact, is there any connection between the two?
Why did you make the assertion above?
Posted by wolf on Apr 26, 2006 at 9:27 AM wolf:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------
november - “In These Times” has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.Can one be against illegal immigration without being a “white supremacist”? In fact, is there any connection between the two?
Why did you make the assertion above?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------Gee wolf, could it have been because of the sentence that was written BEFORE the one you quote? Let’s find out.
“Several sites show links between Tanton and his partners to white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a number of articles on John Tanton. www.splcenter.org”
Yes, it sure looks like it is in that sentence. I guess I _did_ include that for a good reason dontchaknow.
Your strawman is the usual nonsense. No where do I say being against illegal immigration means one is a white supremacist. However, this is the second article in ‘In These Times’ in as many months that uses people linked to white supremacist organizations in the USA to knock illegal immigration.
Having a conversation about illegal immigration is a-ok by me. To invite white supremacists and neo-nazis and people that have been shown to associate with them to the head of the table for such a conversation is not valid.
For you to pretend it is out-of-bounds for me to point out the table for a conversation about illegal immigration in ‘In These Times’ is being packed with questionable sources is absurd.
P.S. Go to GOOGLE & enter
“john tanton” site:splcenter.org
& press Google Search and see for yourself.
Posted by november on Apr 26, 2006 at 10:14 AM november - sorry you got so confused. I set up no strawman, simply asked you - politely - why you made an assertion. What a waste of my - and apparently your - time.
Posted by wolf on Apr 26, 2006 at 11:39 AM wolf- Sorry you don’t understand plain english. perhaps a nice language class would help. After that a quick followup with logic. Your ‘loaded question’ was indeed a ‘strawman’. Feel free to google both terms.
Posted by november on Apr 26, 2006 at 11:46 AM For the folks who haven’t looked up John Tanton on technorati.com:
I found a very thorough disection of John Tanton at www.politicalcortex.com. I’ve included a tinyurl link just in case, since the comments tend to break long urls.
tinyurl link http://tinyurl.com/mjh9p
original url link http://www.politicalcortex.com/print/2006/4/8/21947/90571
Posted by november on Apr 26, 2006 at 2:39 PM Mr. tanton is a true conservative, which ironically these days is a true progressive. Illegal immigration not only artificially raises US population and damages the environment, but allows employers to ignore existing black and white workers, particularly young people who lack experience in jobs. The No Child Left Behind Act will result in millions of high school dropouts. Testing will discourage young people who are not “college” bound or proficient readers. Talented young people who could find lucrative blue collar careers are underpriced by illegal immigrants. Unions are undermined by the illegals as well.
America, like Mexico and every other nation, has the right and duty to its citizens to define citizenship and control its borders and work rules. So-called free trade, pushed thru mostly by Bill and Hilary Clinton, has devastated the working class of the USA. We need to send businessmen who hire illegals(meatpacking, Walmart) to tough prisons, cut off education and medicaid funds to illegals.
Posted by knocko on Apr 26, 2006 at 5:28 PM Knocko,
Right on. I might add the doubling of visas for high tech and other white collar jobs have made it questionable whether the cost of college is worth while.
Mr. Tanton is, in my view, just another diversion from the real immigration issues. Race is not the problem. Mexicans are not the problem. This is a Washington D.C. created mess. Now we are supposed to expect them to clean it up? Give me a break. Send them back on vacation where they can do no more damage.
Maybe it’s time to tar and feather or lynch a tightwad employer or two. No jobs — no illegals.
Posted by whattheheck on Apr 27, 2006 at 1:03 PM An article that whitewashs (no pun intended) the history of John Tantons strong ties to white supremacists gets accolades from folks who then recommend lynchings.
What a suprise. Not.
Posted by november on Apr 27, 2006 at 1:17 PM Yikes!
When people like knocko and whatthehell appear to join the ranks of the liberals and the progressives, you know it’s time to head for the hills and barricade the village gates.
Lynch an employer? Now there’s a novel (presumptive) solution, one worthy of anyone seeking to ingratiate himself with the people he ordinarilly dislikes.
But, seriously, folks. Even fascists are people, even though they themselves would prefer to regard themselves as white people. The State of Michigan, home to a wide variety of fascist organizations, has a long and (dis)honorable history of fascist infatuation. Henry Ford himself was a fascist, when it was fashionable to be fascist. Faced with a growing labor crisis (sharing profits with the people who made them possible is always considered a crisis by the folks who supervise the labor of the people who do the work), the auto industry decided to import Southern black labor to compete with Northern white unionized labor, a typically fascist tactic, and thereby initiated a half-century of racist retribution.
You gotta love these guys. They sure know how to run a railroad.
Posted by Major Major on Apr 27, 2006 at 6:36 PM OK…
The tar and feather/lynching was a bit of hyperbole, but they need to get the message that hiring illegals will not be tolerated. As for whitewashing the Tanton story, my point is quite simple — Tanton is not representative of the objections of most people. (By the way, November, I think it is safe to assume most of the employers here are white. If you find race significant.)
A check of some other websites such as opinionjournal.com will reveal objections to the “conservative” paper’s view on this issue (what’s good for the employer is good for the country) gets predominantly disagreement in response. It has nothing to do with plain old immigration — it is ILLEGAL immigration we object to.
It is totally unfair — to the under paid workers, the would-be immigrants from the rest of the world, the cities and states which must pick up the costs, and to our nation as a whole.
Posted by whattheheck on Apr 28, 2006 at 6:32 AM By the way, whattheheck. I already said discussions of illegal immigration WITHOUT the white supremacists is fine. So you’ve gone from hyperbole to beating a dead horse.
To do a whitewash article on someone with ties to white supremacists ON the subject of illegal immigration WITHOUT pointing out their ties to white supremacists is a horrendous breach of journalistic ethics. And that has been my point all along.
Posted by november on Apr 28, 2006 at 7:05 AM I find that Dr Tanton’s walk across the cultural divide is very interesting, if for no more than it’s rarity. The right wing is full of confused and frightened white guys, so caught up in their racism and bigotry, that they can’t see how they are “pissing in their own soup”.
In a similar way many on the left are against the racism on simple moral grounds, if not that they themselves are at the pointy end of that racism, but cannot get a handle on the devastation a bottomless labor force has on everybodies quality of life (except those who hire that pool and their quality of life is due to their exploitation of that bottomless labor force, and even they are forced to do so because they compete with others who do).
As Dr. Dean has pointed out, those guys should be natural Democrats, and he has taken steps to reach out to them, though in ways less exploitative than Dr Tanton.
Fixing immigration through walls won’t work, any more than walls will keep out drugs, and they can’t even keep the drugs out of prisons. You have to fix the underlying problem.
If the Immigrant benefited from outing his exploiter, and the exploiter had something to fear, illegal immigration would dry up in short order.
As it is, many of the jobs are migrating to China where people are working for wages Mexicans could not afford to take. And that is another greater problem.
Posted by FreeDem on Apr 28, 2006 at 6:40 PM Having stolen the land from the original inhabitants, the thieves were compelled to import slaves to work it, because the indigenous inhabitants could not be compelled to submit to slavery, whereas the people seized from another continent had no other choice. Now their descendants complain about the evils of illegal immigration, as if the emigration of their own antecedants was a virtuous event.
Hilarity doesn’t even begin to describe the convoluted logic employed to justify the moral rectitude of those who profit from the benefits of conquest.
Posted by Major Major on Apr 29, 2006 at 10:17 AM According to Leonard Zeskind, “The New Nativism” in The American Prospect 11.10.05 at
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleI Id=10485****
It was Tanton who founded the anti-immigration movement’s most powerful institution, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). A retired ophthalmologist once active on environmental issues, his interest in immigration was marked in the beginning by an explicitly racial argument. “To govern is to populate,” Tanton wrote in 1986. “Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? … As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
****That cite isn’t given sufficiently to verify it. Someone could perhaps email Zeskind or the American Prospect for more information. But that quote, from way back in 1986, would suggest a somewhat different story about the timeline of Tanton’s ‘evolution’ than the In These Times article suggests.
Posted by JonathanNil on Apr 30, 2006 at 6:43 PM JonathanNil
That quote comes from a memo written by John Tanton in 1986 to the attendees of a White Supremacist conference called WITAN IV. WITAN was/is a White Supremacist group founded by Tanton, which is how he got the attendee list.
You can read the memo here: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=125
Posted by november on May 1, 2006 at 7:12 AM Major Major, you are my hero and the only one speaking with truthfulness and courage. Every time a subject arises, all I find is people who write to tangle things up, show their literacy and do the work the old sophists did in Old Greece but they are never prepared to get to the root of the problem or its causes and rather waste precious space calling each other names or refering to who said what which really doesn’t matter.
If your promoted NAFTA had been fair to other countries you wouldn’t have so many desperate people risking their lives to enter your “paradise”. Don’t fool yourselves, many of us in the American continent (yes, we are Americans too) have your game perfectly identified and are doing our best to act accordingly.
Posted by Maria on May 3, 2006 at 10:19 PM RE: the title “Keeping America Empty,” the USA is far from empty.
This October the US population will hit 300 million, projected by the Census Bureau to reach 420 million by just 2050. Do the arithmetic. That’s 120 million more people in just 44 years! Try this test: ask a fairly well educated person what the US population is and they will probably underestimate by 20-30 million.
That’s more than a doubling of the population in my short lifetime. And you can see the consequences everywhere, in our inability to maintain infrastructure, from roads to levees to schools. And there is the pressure on all natural resources, from wild lands to rivers to fisheries. Water is going to be one of the most limiting resources, particularly in the far west and the high plains, likely made worse by climatic shifts due to global warming.
Whatever one’s take on additional immigration and growth may be, it is ought to recognize this fact that we are already bulging with people.
Posted by questionauthority on May 4, 2006 at 9:03 PM Who do you think is maintaining the infrastructure in this country? In a post-industrial economy where industry migrates to foreign shores in search of zero (or negative) tax rates, cheap labor and the virtual absence of environmental restrictions, the people who once were employed by local industry, both foreign and domestic, are inclined to migrate elsewhere to obtain employment. Many of them end up here, employed by governments which are compelled by the erosion of their tax base to privatize the services they once performed themselves. In other words, they subcontract those services to companies who hire the immigrants, at slaveshop rates, to perform them.
Welcome to the wonderful world of a globalized, free market economy where, apparenly, it’s still possible to blame the immigrants for the erosion of our infrastructure and simultaneously employ them to repair it.
Posted by Major Major on May 6, 2006 at 9:06 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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