Why Are Immigration Reformers Failing in the Primaries?
By • 1/9/08A few weeks ago, Marcus Epstein wrote an article for VDARE claiming that while Tom Tancredo hadn’t garnered much electoral support, he had scored a victory by forcing the other Republican candidates to change their positions on illegal immigration. There is much truth to the claim. The most dramatic example is Mike Huckabee, who was very liberal on immigration while he was governor of Arkansas, but now positively shouts from his campaign website that he will never support an amnesty bill and will build the fence. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani do not breathe a whisper about amnesty on their campaign sites either, although we know that, deep down, both of them crave it. Rather, they highlight their plans for border enforcement.
Nevertheless, there was always something odd about Epstein’s claim: if Tancredo was really so triumphant, why did he poll so poorly? Why did Duncan Hunter, another candidate who placed immigration front and center, fare likewise?
The last, best hope for immigration reformers is Mitt Romney, but his performance in Iowa and New Hampshire has been disappointing. Romney made immigration reform a leading issue in his campaign and has hammered McCain on his sponsorship of last year’s amnesty bill. McCain’s reaction supports Epstein’s thesis: rather than defending the bill, was forced to lie about it, claiming that it wasn’t amnesty.
Given the unpopularity of the McCain bill, you would think that Romney’s strategy would have worked and that he would have knocked McCain out for good. Nevertheless, talking tough on illegals doesn’t seem to be working for Romney either. New Hampshirites prefered Amnesty John. Moreover, head-to-head polls show that McCain is the candidate with the best chance of defeating Hillary or Obama. American voters seem to be schizophrenic on immigration.
How to explain the contradiction? During the debate over amnesty last year, William Kristol published an article in the Weekly Standard called “Y is for Yahoo” in which he said Tancredo and the House Immigration Reform Caucus were turning Republicans into a demagogic, “Know-Nothing” party.
The answer, as best as I can make out, is right there. The immigration reform movement still bears the taint of Yahooism. Anyone who supports issues that have even the slightest whiff of white racial consciousness about them automatically triggers a deeply engrained revulsion among Americans, who suspect either that he is ignorant, xenophobic, hateful, fearful hick himself or a cynical demagogue trying to stir up a lynch mob.
If whites are to win, our only hope is to undertake a long, arduous examination and deconstruction of these stereotypes. Simply talking about IQ and crime and the rest of it has plainly not worked. What’s needed is a whole “cultural studies” of anti-whiteness and the development of a strategy for reversing the deadly clichés that hold us back.
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Ron Paul is good on immigration and he was a small chance of winning. Other than that, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson would do something about illegal immigration but not as much as Paul.
I don’t think that the restrictionist candidates’ problems had anything to do with their immigration message. It has to do with other factors. Romney is a Mormon/flip flopper, etc.
John PM and Kevin Carter,
You don’t address my main question. Since amnesty is so unpopular, why did McCain even have a chance? And why didn’t Tancredo or Hunter catch on?
Romney has “smashed McCain’s kneecaps” on amnesty about 38 times already! It’s not working.
For all the distortions in this piece, the writer has a point: Anti-immigration strategy fails
“You don’t address my main question. Since amnesty is so unpopular, why did McCain even have a chance? And why didn’t Tancredo or Hunter catch on?”
There are three main reasons for McCain’s ongoing “viability” Ian:
1.) McCain is the Republican “darling” of the media. He has been propped up by them for the last 6 months, since his campaign imploded over the amnesty issue in July. If that had been Huckabee or Romney, they would be deader than a fish 6 months out of water; in politics free media can work wonders and it has, for No Brains McCain.
2.) He has name recognition and is a Senator of long good standing with the Republican/Washington establishments. He has been largely supportive of President Bush on most issues and offers little to no threat, to the aforementioned establishments in our capitol. Or put another way, remember 1996 and the Buchanan versus Dole fiasco? Yes, the establishment does protect their own, particularly when they are feeling threatened.
3.) Voters have short memories in this country and are largely far stupider than can be imagined. Certainly Romney has attacked this fool on the amnesty issue, however he simply lies and says that is not what he wants to do. The idiots in this country, often hear what they want and don’t bother with the “painful process” of thinking the ramifications of what is being suggested through too thoroughly. Heck, isn’t that what Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are for; they do the “thinking” so that others don’t have to?
As for Representatives Tancredo and Hunter, they are both only Congressman and have a strong support among those who understand the issue of illegal immigration. For whatever reason, Ron Paul has overshadowed them as the “outsiders’” alternative candidate for a good long time; he remains pretty solid on this issue, he just came out recently as being all for ending this “anchor baby” nonsense. He is also suddenly taking his lumps for this, read this linked article:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca
Being marginalized and smeared by the media can work “wonders” too, just not the kind that the candidate in question would want!
I don’t have an answer, but Iowa and New Hampshire are mostly white, so the voters there don’t have a clue about what immigration will mean for their state later on. If I lived in one of those states, I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a site like this. http://inverted-world.com/cms/images/smileys/ohh.gif But, I live in California, so I know a bit more about the vibrant cultures of our new neighbors than those nice, innocent white people in white states. The Miami Herald article says Hispanic voters will be more of a factor in other primaries. Well, that may be more than offset by white voters who have the experience of having Hispanic neighbors.
I think that illegal immigration in Iowa, and even more so, in New Hampshire, is more in the realm of the theoretical for those native to those states. There are relatively very few illegals in those parts (in fact, few minorities at all), so the natives up there have little personal experience of the benefits of all that wonderful diversity.
It’s easy to think that all people are the same, and that differences are only skin deep. I grew up around a lot of Mexicans (assaulted by a Mexican gang once), but had no idea what it was like to live around blacks. When I got to know, work, and live among blacks, I came to my own realizations and conclusions about them. Long before the advent of the internet, personal experience taught me about real racial differences.
Iowans and New Hampshire voters have little to rely on except what is filtered through a willfully mendacious, PC driven press and academia. Most of them never even get a whiff about crime statistics, and the host of other social ills that attend large populations of blacks and hispanics, so carefully sanitized is the news they get. They’re surely not reading sites like this.
Further, more than just the lack of personal experience with minorities and illegals, it’s no doubt the constant drumbeat of the ludicrous “diversity is our strength” mantra, and of course, the downright unnatural “whites as cancer” idiocy that saturates the culture, along with the attendant fear of being called a racist that stifles the (in normal times) natural inclination towards preservation of one’s self, family, and in the larger scheme, tribe.
That’s my theory, anyway. And maybe it doesn’t hold water, because guys like JD Hayworth in Arizona were prominently anti-illegal (in Arizona no less!) and got defeated.
It always amazes me how whites are the only group that does not work to further its own interests and survival. All other groups are extraordinarily group conscious and advocate for themselves. Only in whites is this natural inclination considered aberrant and “racist”.
It’s not the artificial boundaries that make America a desirable place to live. It’s the people that created the country, as it is in all of Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. When the people that created these functional, desirable societies are gone or subsumed, so too will be the desirable societies. The Third Worlders that arrive in droves daily will not be changed by America. America will become Third World.
So very strange that this seems so self-evident, and that such a relative few seem to share this view (which used to be taken for granted as obvious truth a mere 50 years ago). Certainly Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t see things that way (let alone the leftist hippies and self-loathers).
I guess some people won’t see the writing on the wall until “MS13” is spray painted on their own living room walls.
The sad thing is that if people don’t wake up until they have personal experience, it’s pretty generally too late by then.
It means their communities are already overrun.
As to solutions on how to awaken people before that happens, I think the internet is the obvious and logical place to try to reach the unawakened. Race realists ought to put links to relevant racial stories whenever possible. I believe links to sites like Amren and this one will open a lot of eyes (which probably means that government suppression of sites like this are not long in coming). God knows the main stream media will not be covering things from a race realist’s perspective.
Ian, John PM, et al; we so often see detailed how multiculturalism has harmed the West, but I rarely read what people think actually will happen in the years to come. Do you think that whites will ever regain a racial consciousness, and if they do, when do you think that might happen? What would precipitate such an awakening? Will it be in time to actually do something to retain a homeland that resembled the historic America pre-1965, with possible national boundaries redrawn (the Civil War II scenario)?
Will we simply be subsumed and miscegenated into an America that is Third World?
Would love to read your thoughts on the matter. To me, it seems that things will come to some sort of head within 20 or so years, and it will be economically and demographically driven. If there is a serious economic downturn (possibly even on the order of a depression), I think the house of cards that is multiculturalism will have explosive consequences, and people will align much like they do in prison; that is, on strictly racial lines. That will be the horrible legacy of the traitorous hippies and Marxists that seized power in the 60s and inflicted multiculturalism on us.
Those are pretty gloomy scenarios, but in my mind, they’re real, and they’re not very far off in the distance. It’s a matter of doing nothing and being subsumed into third world chaos, or choosing courses of action made more difficult by delay (how difficult, I cannot say, but Balkanization and war are a distinct possibility if history tells us anything). If the economy remains strong, I could see white Americans staying in their slumber right into minority status; the subsumed scenario. If there is an economic downturn, it could get ugly fast, as in violently ugly, but even without a serious economic downturn, as the illegal tsunami moves ever forward, and the percentage of hispanics grows larger, crimes against whites might reach some critical mass where whites wake up and say no more being preyed upon. In times of plenty, whites have so much to lose and do not fight back as a group, if they fight back at all. In lean times, when we’re all fighting over scraps from the same shrinking pie, one would suspect that natural inclinations and group alliances would prevail.
I don’t know if there’s ever been a successful multicultural society in the history of mankind. If someone knows of one, please point it out.
This unnatural self-loathing on the parts of whites (liberals), and the policies it has spawned over these last 50 years has already been disastrous, and is sure to end painfully. Painful, because, even if we prevail, it will likely have been becuase of some Balkanized group/racial war that took place, and painful, because losing (or doing nothing) means our children and all our progeny are relegated to Thirld World status. And all this will have happened in less than 100 years at the hands of our own kind and our own “leaders”. Pure insanity. An inverted world indeed.
This went well beyond opining about why anti-illegal immigration candidates faired poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, but at the end of the day, it’s all part of the same bigger problem. In theory, humans as one big happy family sounds great. In the real world, it has never been that way when multiple races and cultures share the same turf. There will be winners and there will be losers, and America’s present policy is suicidal for its historical majority.
The recent flurry of ICE raids may have fooled the inattentive into thinking that the problem is being seriously addressed. They also may not have got the word that the border fence has been effectively killed. The coverage of the latter event has been minimal.
http://www.steinreport.com/archives/20080110.html (…) Buried in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill of 2008 - a catchall spending measure to take care of all the business Congress didn’t get around to completing during the budget process - is language that virtually ensures that the promised fence will never be completed. These provisions, the majority of them authored by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), scale the project back from a mandated double strand of fencing to just a single fence. And even the single fence probably won’t ever be built because another Hutchison provision requires that the Department of Homeland Security consult with a slew of federal, state and local government entities, along with countless interest groups, the town dog catcher, and the book-of-the-month club. A third provision added anonymously requires that these consultations be completed before a single inch of fencing is built. (…)
To J Kent, regarding:
“Ian, John PM, et al; we so often see detailed how multiculturalism has harmed the West, but I rarely read what people think actually will happen in the years to come. Do you think that whites will ever regain a racial consciousness, and if they do, when do you think that might happen? What would precipitate such an awakening? Will it be in time to actually do something to retain a homeland that resembled the historic America pre-1965, with possible national boundaries redrawn (the Civil War II scenario)?”
My personal thoughts on these matters, trend toward a sort of “half way” scenario unfolding for the USA. In such a situation, the point you make about whites collectively coming to the conclusion that enough is enough, “no more being preyed upon” and this becoming a politically driving force for us as a group. This will occur most likely in the next 10 to 20 years, when we are somewhere between 62% and 55% of the population; under such circumstances, we will likely still be somewhere between 80% to 75% of the national electorate?
Enter, the opportunistic strongman, the American Caesar; an individual who realizes that exploiting the very legitimate fears and anger of the American people at being subjugated by diversity’s dictates, and manipulating existing “laws” and “precedents” of the executive branch, will allow him to establish a police state. The tricky part being, is this simply a totalitarian multicultural outgrowth of the “tolerant” authoritarianism we now live under; or is it a racially driven reactionary manifestation, that is dedicated to eradicating the utopia of cellophane rainbows and balsawood maypoles? This will largely depend on what the American people “think” they want at that point in time, never an easy prospect to gauge. Do they still “think” they want diversity, but free of interracial crime and violence; or are they moving toward the revelation that diversity is a synonym, for interracial crime and violence?
Either way, the USA will see itself trading “freedom” for “security,” thanks to our current diversity binge.
Either way, God help us all!
Best wishes to you J Kent,
John PM!
To Ian Jobling, regarding:
“The last, best hope for immigration reformers is Mitt Romney, but his performance in Iowa and New Hampshire has been disappointing.”
Take heart Ian, Governor Romney isn’t dead yet in these primaries and caucuses; he did win 2/3rds of the delegates (8 of 12) in the Wyoming caucus and has a war chest of about 32 million dollars on hand. Michigan is the next primary and he is likely to win that one. Thus, he will have won half of all these party exercises in “democracy,” by the time South Carolina is to be decided.
As Hillary Clinton proved last night in New Hampshire, 2008 still remains too early to call. Ironically, I was ruefully glad she did win there; this may seem shocking given the glee that I expressed at her defeat in Iowa, but seeing the anti-white “mainstream” media wrong about the now “inevitable” presidency of Obama, was equally enjoyable. As Patrick J. Buchanan observed on MSNBC’s Hardball today, they were ready for an Obama “coronation” and got “egg on their faces.”
Comrade Obama, may have just had his Stalingrad there? He had “momentum” that was not realized in terms of votes and delegates, plus his money isn’t quite matching the Red Queen’s.
John McCain is even in worse shape, in terms of cash; he is as deep in the red ink, as are his Red views of “immigration” steeped in the Marxist “elitists’” anti-white hate. He only got a bounce last night, that Governor Romney could break (if he plays his cards right) like the German “bulge” in France of 1944.
Governor Romney must firmly grab the amnesty issue and swiftly smash Comrade No Brains McCain’s political kneecaps with it, along with Comrade Huckaboob’s worthlessly treasonous face on the “birthright” citizenship issue.
It is not a question of being “too hard” on these issues, it is only one of inconsistent and imagined “finessing” of it!