Patrick Buchanan recently called for the impeachment of George Bush over the issue of immigration.

Now, I don’t think Buchanan really thinks this is going to happen–though I still think he’s shown tremendous leadership on this issue.

However, let’s look a bit more carefully at the arithmetic of impeachment. It would require 218 congressmen to vote for impeachment to get the Senate involved. At present there are 202 Democrats in the Congress–90% of them would be hard pressed to not vote for Bush’s impeachment–which could include both charges around failure to support immigration law and charged related to the Downing Street Memo.

There are 85 members of the Immigration Reform Caucus (all but a few are Republicans). There are several Republican congressman like Dennis Hastert who have strongly opposed expansion of immigration but are not members of Tancredo’s Immigration Reform caucus.

If most of these folks would support impeachment (and stop just supporting major donors like they did with CAFTA and the Singapore Chile Free trade act), it could happen.

The Senate would be much harder. The Senate vote would require a tw0-thirds majority. Still, there it would take just 22 Republican Senators–the folks with B+ or above ratings from Americans for Better Immigration) to convict George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Conviction of both–without appointment of a new vice president–would be necessary to get Dennis Hastert in the White House

I would suggest again this is the only realistic way to get an immigration reformer in the White House. The immigration crisis has been created by wealthy interests for whom a loose immigration policy is virtually a license to print money.

Though Tancredo might make a heroic run for the White House, the current betting indicates he has a very slim chance of actually winning-and no one else with a similar record is showing up on the charts at all.

I think this immigration crisis will be seen by future generations as far worse than most of us even at VDARE.COM have been willing to contemplate.

Those concerned about immigration need to stop acting like this is some kind of minor problem we have lots of time to address-which is how the Immigration Reform Caucus has been acting. Returning the US to a high wage, high productivity economy is going to be difficult. Repatriating even a large portion of over ten million people without creating lasting hatred of the US in Latin America is going to be difficult. I’m not sure if Dennis Hastert is up to this difficult job.

We must start addressing immigration using what resources are available-and as soon as possible. I seriously doubt President Hastert would fail to enforce immigration law violations by US employers. At minimum, as the new head of the centrally-controlled GOP, Hastert would have a chance to seriously contain the influence of wealthy donors.

If Hastert isn’t really up to the task, in 3 years we’ll have a chance to elect someone else-after some of the more obvious solutions to the immigration crisis have been tried.

Reading John Brimelow’s recent post “Mexico: Do We Want to Import This?” reminded me of a funny story one of my students told me.

Maria had returned to Mexico for Christmas to visit her elderly parents. While driving to their house, a “policeman” signaled for her to pull over for speeding.

When Maria protested that she had been driving well under the speed limit, the “policeman” said, “Look, we can take care of this here or I can write you a ticket and you’ll have to spend all day in court dealing with it.”

Since Maria had been through this drill before, she handed him $20 and drove off.

A few kilometers down the road, another “policeman” stopped her for the same reason. “But I just paid an officer less than ten minutes ago,” Maria told him.

“Yes,” he replied, “but that was in Zone 10. Now you are in Zone 11.”

How nice to read in Tuesday’s Washington Post [Bush Pledges Action on Borders | Southwest is promised Agents, Jail Space for illegal immigrants, byPeter Baker August 30 , 2005 - Access requires free registration:]

Two weeks after the Democratic governors of Arizona and New Mexico declared states of emergency along the border, Bush used a Medicare speech here to promise residents an increasingly robust federal campaign that will deploy more agents and provide more detention space to stop those trying to sneak into the country. “We have an obligation to enforce the borders,” It’s important for the people of this state to understand your voices are being heard in Washington, D.C.,” Bush said. In emphasizing beefed-up enforcement, though, he made no mention of his stalled proposal to grant temporary guest-worker status to millions of illegal immigrants…Bush drew strong applause in Rancho Cucamonga when he vowed to enforce border control.

Great credit for this shift is due to The Minuteman Project and, also, to the two Western Democratic Governors who smelled the coffee.

But, somehow, one hears an echo of that great campaign pledge “Read my lips: No new taxes“, the breaking of which triggered Pat Buchanan’s heroic campaigns.

Michael Fumento, who has frequently heaped scorn on amateur bloggers, now has a blog himself.

Check out his response to some hatemail he got recently regarding his recent column on the decline and fall of Nativo Lopez ,[Michael Fumento: A Race-Baiter Falls from Grace] where his correspondent questioned Fumento’s right to criticize black and Hispanic leaders :

I would have thought you’d have gotten the idea from my column criticizing a Hispanic that I don’t subscribe to the notion that it’s forbidden to criticize someone outside your own racial or ethnic group. I am a homo sapien; they are homo sapiens. That is my standing. Those they oppress are human beings; that is my motivation.

The complaint that that whites don’t have the right to criticize black leaders is one that’s never heard in reverse; from Martin Luther King bashing Goldwater and Reagan, to Julian Bond comparing Republicans to terrorists, no one has suggested for forty years that they don’t have the right to criticize someone outside their “own racial or ethnic group.”

The Minutemen expect to patrol four states in the month of October, on both the Northern and Southern borders. If you want to participate, you can sign up here:Register as a Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Border Watch Volunteer.

K. C. McAlpin, Executive Director of Pro English, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for making English America’s official language said that he may support legal action against the Dallas Independent School District for its recent vote that will require some principals to learn Spanish.

Under the terms of the school district’s decision, in certain schools where the Hispanic enrollment is high, principals would be mandated to learn Spanish within three years.

[Dallas County Requires School Administrators to Learn Spanish or Else; Texas Plan Gives Principals Three Years]

McAlpin said that the school board has its priorities backwards, explaining:

“If the Dallas schools are failing in their responsibility to teach school children to speak English because they continue putting them in bilingual classrooms, the school board should address that failure rather than accommodate it by forcing school administrators to learn the students’ language.”

I am reminded of the Stockton Unified School District in California where, several years ago, administrators discussed the idea of forcing teachers to learn southeast Asian languages like Cambodian, Laotian, etc.

But the idea died out when the administrators realized that no one in California taught those languages.

And there was the additional problem of classroom demographic turnover. That is, while a teacher’s class may be predominantly Vietnamese this year but by the time she mastered Vietnamese several years down the road, her classroom might have consisted mostly of Russian speakers.

Let’s hope the Dallas case, through legal action if necessary, meets the same fate as Stockton’s ill-conceived plan.

Despite the blitherings of defeatists willing to expand H-1b Guest Worker visas to contain illegal immigration, it appears the Bush administration is caving in on the topic of border enforcement-at least rhetorically-without such concessions.[Bush gives in to pressure over illegal migrants By Francis Harris in Washington, Telegraph, UK]

The claim that “Right-wing critics say the only workable solution is to punish American firms employing illegal migrants.” ignores the range of opinion on this topic. Gaylord Nelson, Barbara Jordan, A. Philip Randolph, and David Brower are not examples of “right wing critics”.

Border security enhancement is an important step-but it is far from certain that Bush and Chertoff can be trusted on this point. They’ve had lots of time to address this issue. Why now? Furthermore, minimizing the side effects of enforcement of immigration law is going to become even more important. I also expect we have only seen the start of populist outrage against the wealthy US elites that have profited from the practice of illegal immigration-and immigration expansion in general.
Bush’s about face is not without reservations among immigration restrictionists:

“If you have a boat with numerous holes in it, the boat will sink unless you plug all of the holes effectively,”said Michael W. Cutler, a former senior immigration enforcement special agent who is now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington research group. “He is only addressing a few of the holes, meaning he may slow the flow but it will not solve the problem in the long run.” [Homeland Security Chief Tells of Plan to Stabilize Border, By Eric Lipton, NYT, August 24, 2005]

Do click on this link to see a fascinating photo of California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez as he visited Mexico a couple days back. He appears to be making a rather curious salute, an action explained unclearly in the AP caption:

California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, left, salutes towards the flag while listening to the national anthem as he stands with Beatriz Paredes, who hopes to become the candidate for Mexico City Mayor under her party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in Mexico City, Mexico on Friday Aug. 26, 2005.

Nunez’s fascist-style salute makes it obvious that he is not saluting the American flag but the Mexican one; however AP confuses the issue by use of the word “the” (as in “the” national anthem). Nunez’s unAmerican gesture reveals an agenda inappropriate for an important elected official from the state of California.

Imagine the outrage if an American politician used the Nazi salute in Berlin in the mid-1930s. But visibly disloyal behavior is normal among many California elected Hispanics, whose allegiance has gone south, if it ever left.

Many despise the famous economist-turned-NYT-op-edster for his fanatical hatred of George W. Bush, but I feel that it’s generally useful for America if the President, with all his powers to mold opinion, is relentlessly confronted by an individual as smart and hostile as Krugman. I certainly wouldn’t want every pundit to imitate Krugman, but his intense specialization in figuring out ever possible way Bush has blundered plays a valuable role in the media food chain.

Yet, there’s one set of people that Krugman hates even more than Bush, and that’s us immigration realists. So, we’ve recently been treated to the bizarre sight of Krugman intentionally pulling his punches against Bush on Krugman’s own topic of expertise, the economy, because Krugman refuses to mention the I Word. In “Summer of Our Discontent,” Krugman writes:

For the last few months there has been a running debate about the U.S. economy, more or less like this:

American families: “We’re not doing very well.”

Washington officials: “You’re wrong - you’re doing great. Here, look at these statistics!”

The administration and some political commentators seem genuinely puzzled by polls showing that Americans are unhappy about the economy. After all, they point out, numbers like the growth rate of G.D.P. look pretty good. So why aren’t people cheering?

Some blame the negative halo effect of the Iraq debacle. Others complain that the news media aren’t properly reporting good economic news. But when your numbers tell you that people should be feeling good, but they aren’t, that means you’re looking at the wrong numbers.

So far, so good. Now, you’d think that at this point Krugman would bring out the Big Gun in punching a hole in Bush spin about economic growth: the fact that, as Edward S. Rubenstein has relentlessly documented for years at VDARE.com: jobs, indeed, are not going to American families. Instead, they are going to immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. Rubenstein wrote:

As usual, the government makes no serious effort to measure immigration’s impact. Hispanic employment is the best proxy we have for the month to month increases in the immigrant workforce, since about 40 percent of all Hispanic workers—and an even larger share of new Hispanic workers—are immigrants…

Since the start of the Bush Administration (January 2001), Hispanic employment has risen by 2.585 million, or 16.0 percent. Non-Hispanic employment is up by 1.720 million, or 1.41 percent.

But, for anybody familiar with Krugman’s prejudices against immigration skeptics, it’s no surprise that he instead lets his latest column dribble off into anti-climax. He’d rather let the Bush Administration off the hook than admit that immigration realists have a point.
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The news that California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) continues to urge Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a border emergency is good for three reasons and bad for one.

[“Governor Urged to Call Border Emergency,” Nancy Vogel, Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2005]

First, something positive might actually get done about illegal immigration in California. Schwarzenegger insists that there is no “emergency.” But anyone with eyes in his head can see that the state is buckling under the weight of illegal aliens.

Second, Nunez’s support for strong steps to control illegal immigration is a move in the right direction toward building a Republican-Democrat coalition that will ultimately make it impossible for one party to charge the other with “politicizing” the issue.

Third, with Arizona and New Mexico on record that their states are in an emergency and with California and Texas approaching a similar announcement, those of us who have predicted for decades that illegal immigration would ultimately end in social chaos and financial crisis are publicly vindicated.

But on the down side, Nunez’s coming out included a trip to Mexico for a meeting with President Vicente Fox.

But why? We already know what Fox wants… a “migratory” accord! And why should we care what he thinks anyway?

Must the taxpayers foot Nunez’s traveling expenses just to give Fox the opportunity to pontificate again?