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| Romney's Six Point Education Plan | Romney's Health Care Solution |
How Will Immigration Issue Break?
by Christopher Chantrill
April 11, 2006 at 4:42 am
ON MONDAY APRIL 10th, the streets of America were again filled with demonstrators demanding U.S. citizenship for illegal immigrants. The battle of immigration continues.
There are two questions here. How will the demonstrations affect the fate of immigration bills now in Congress, and what will be the political effect down the road?
Democrats are encouraged by the demonstrations. Writes Charles Hurt in the Washington Times,
Democrats on Capitol Hill favoring citizenship for illegal aliens say they have been buoyed by the massive rallies across the country... Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat and a leading backer of such legalization bills, invoked civil rights icon Martin Luther King when he spoke at yesterday's rally on the Mall.
But then Democrats love huge political demonstrations. It reminds them of their finest hour in the 1960s civil rights revolution. Indeed, a show of force in the streets always sways the political class. It instinctively yields to the most passionate political actors. We can expect a comprehensive immigration reform of some kind this year, one that addresses border security and also addresses legalization of residency status.
The other question is the overall political effect on the 50-50 nation. In the New York Post John Podhoretz takes the organizers of the demonstrations to task. If the Democrats think it will help them at the polls they are wrong. “They are riling up the GOP base, which has been pretty disheartened lately and needed a bit of riling.” But when it comes to the long term political impact Podhoretz reserves judgment.
The direction all this will take in years to come is unknowable. It may align Hispanics with the Democrats in the long term. On the other hand, it may drive more Democratic voters of modest means into the Republican camp, offsetting the Democratic gain.
Exit poll data show that Hispanics vote more Republican the more they prosper. Only blacks remain Democrat whatever their economic status. So what would happen if blacks decided that a pro-immigrant Democratic Party was an anti-African American party?
The truth is, we don’t know. The outcome of every battle is unknowable until it is over.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Comments:
Posted by: Patricia Stokley on 04/24/06 1:08pm
Does anybody remember the Alamo? I bet if I hung the iraq flag (not on your or mine life) I would be strung up by the neck for sure. This is America not mexico. Hanging another flag other than the Red, White, and Blue is Treason. Ask those silly people If we were to go to war with mexico, Which side would they protect and defend. Remember The Alamo?
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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