Immigration Round-Up

Its May 2nd, 2006 and the world didn’t come to the end. Captain Ed as always has solid analysis of what happened:

It appears that the nationwide strike by illegal immigrants and their supporters caused some headaches but little immediate economic impact, as outside of Denver, Chicago, and Los Angeles most demonstrations attracted significantly fewer numbers than earlier rallies. Despite numbering in the tens of millions, the demonstrations only mustered a few hundred thousand opponents to the get-tough approach taken by the House, forcing local employers to shut down but hardly causing a blip in the routine for most Americans:

Pretty good summary, then he adds this analysis:

However, in a story that will likely have immigration hardliners talking for days, the AP reports that twenty-five percent of the children in the Los Angeles School District failed to attend classes today. After all, LAUSD’s annual budget for its 746,000 students is over $13 billion, or about $17,000 per student. If the walkout caused 25% of the students to strike, that puts the annual educational cost for illegal immigrants at around $3.25 billion — just for Los Angeles.

And that’s just in one school district. Hmm, raises interesting issues regarding school overcrowding. Now, he did give a revised calculation that put the figure closer to $2 billion. Still, a billion here, and billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money being lost due to illegal immigration.

This march really made no impact on my life and most Americans didn’t feel it outside of LA. According to the Statesman, all we had today in Idaho was a rather insignificant demonstration of 50 people that was dwarved the hundreds who marched down to the Capitol a few weeks ago.

I don’t anyone whose going to be more sympathetic after today. I don’t think its possible this is really working. Its making some people pretty mad.

My wife referred me to the “>Yahoo News boards which tend to be pretty far left have been full of a lot of outrage. Here are some highlights:

They’re illegals. My Russian neighbors (who are legal immigrants) are really pissed. They said,”Who the Hell are they to get ahead of everyone else who obeyed laws.” They’ve been faxing Congress too. I love it.

Now, there’s 57,000 messages on there and some racists in the midst of it, but there’s a lot of anger by people across the fruited plain at the entire situation and its not all racial.

Over at WhereIStand, Jallard, a left-leaning poster who spends a lot of time criticizing the Bush Administration went off with a little bit of profanity regarding the illegals and the Spanish version of the national anthem. He concludes: “Before I was sympathetic, but now send them back.”

Glenn Reynolds proposes that a backlash is just what the far left wants:

Right now you have lots of immigrants who want to be part of America. The A.N.S.W.E.R. people have been stoking these demonstrations not because they want to help illegal immigrants, but because they hope to provoke a backlash that will make them angry at America instead. They don’t have short-term ameliorative political goals — they want shock troops for the revolution.

I’ve got to tell you that I think there’s a point to this-somewhat. I don’t see a whole lot of this as a desire or some great love for America. With or without the backlash, as Lou Dobbs writes:

Some illegal immigration and open borders activists in the Hispanic community are deeply concerned about the involvement of the left-wing radical group. But others, like Juan Jose Gutierrez, whom I’ve interviewed a number of times over the past several months, manages to be both director of Latino Movement USA and a representative of ANSWER.

As Gutierrez told us on my show, “The time has come…where we need to stand up and make a statement. We need to do what the American people did when they pulled away from the British crown. And I am sure that back in those days many people were concerned that was radical action.”

You’ve got to face the fact that while a backlash may help ANSWER, they’ll be more than happy if we take this lying down. At some point, when we’re dealing with massive demands on our infrastructure, we reach a point where tolerance must give way to wisdom and it must be said that enough is enough and that if ANSWER and the illegals want to attack our nation’s laws and sovereignty, so be it, but America will be defended.

Illegal Immigration

—–