Some come here to sell black tar heroin, the latest “drug of choice” being marketed to middle-class American youth in cities around the United States. Police report a nationwide network of illegal aliens selling this new potent and deadly form of heroin from Mexico. Since 1998, deaths in Ohio from heroin overdoses have tripled. The LA Times reports these illegals “have focused on middle-and working-class whites,” 11 further burdening the middle class with a lethal addiction.
What’s more, not all illegals are actually doing productive work.
In fact, a significant percentage of them are not here to work.
They’re here to work the system.
They make up a “shadow economy” and they take advantage of valuable resources, including health care and financial aid, without contributing to the taxes that pay for them. In fact, even those who work cost taxpayers substantially more than a family of citizens. The Center for Immigration Studies reports, that “illegal households created a net fiscal deficit at the federal level of as much as $400 billion.”12 The middle class must pick up the tab.
Criminal aliens are increasingly becoming a burden on our Federal prison system as well, accounting for more that 29 percent of all prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities. The percentage of all federal prison inmates is even higher.13 The percentage of illegals in prison jumps dramatically when we focus on California: Investors Business Daily reported in 2005 that about half the prisoners in that state were illegals, adding to the financial burden average Americans are strapped with.
And despite the fact that illegal aliens take jobs from American citizens in an economy where the unemployment rate among citizens remains close to 10 percent and real unemployment is closer to 20 percent, Barack Obama is determined to create a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens rather than deport them so that Americans can do the jobs they’ve usurped.
La Raza and MEChA: The Subversive Base of a Chicano-Leftist Takeover
Illegal immigration, especially from Mexico and Central and South America is not a new phenomenon. In fact, as far back as the middle of the last century, Chicanos were assuming a racial and cultural identity within the United States that would become a movement which spread throughout the American southwest and California. In his 1960 novel, The Ferguson Affair, about southern California attorney William Gunnarson’s solving a complex series of murders, author Ross MacDonald makes one of the first mentions of the term la Raza as a description of how Hispanics refer to themselves. Gunnarson is being lectured about his implicit racism by Detective-Lieutenant Harvey Wills, who offers this:
You may not realize it, but you don’t like cops, and you don’t like Spanish people. If you want to practice law in this town,
do it effectively, you’re going to have to get to know la Raza, understand ‘em.
When Gunnarson asks, “What does la Raza mean?” Wills answers that the term is what “they call themselves….It’s a proud word, and they’re a proud people….They have a lot of ignorance, a lot of poverty, a lot of crime. But they make a contribution to this town.”
Things have changed significantly in the ensuing five decades. La Raza, which is Spanish for “the race,” is now an official organization, not just a nickname. The National Council for La Raza (NCLR) receives tens of millions of dollars in federal grants annually. La Raza is a subversive anti-American “Hispanic advocacy” group that is determined to, as its founding document, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, says, reverse the “brutal gringo invasion of our territories.”14 Its members have wormed their way into city, county, and state governments, and into schools throughout the southwestern U.S. and California, bringing with them a philosophy that promotes flouting the law in support of its goals.
The list of La Raza’s subversive goals is very long.
First, they favor the abolition of the border between the United States and Mexico as one of the steps to their reclaiming portions of the American southwest and California from Americans who allegedly “stole” the territory from its rightful Hispanic owners. NCLR and its sister group, MEChA (Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), have expressed the intention to “liberate” the mythical territory of Aztlán, which stretches from areas occupied by pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico up into the southwestern United States and California.
Illegal immigration is part of a strategy to enable La Raza to take back territory that it feels was “stolen” from it by the United States. Aztlán is seen as the “birthplace of the Aztecs,” and it includes California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and areas in Texas and Colorado. Abolishing the borders between the United States and Mexico to enable illegal immigration into the United States is one of the most effective strategies they propose to work toward that goal.15
Let’s not mince words.
The two groups hate the United States and all that it stands for.
Antonia Darder, who teaches “cultural studies” at Claremont Graduate University, recently received a standing ovation at an annual La Raza Youth Conference held at UCLA for the purpose of promoting Aztlán culture. She said, “Capitalism is the root of domination. Racism and sexism exist because capitalism requires it…. We’re here because U.S. foreign policy in Latin America has forced us here.”16
The “Mechista” philosophy holds that “Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture.” The philosophy supports “Chicano nationalism” in a characteristically totalitarian way, claiming that “we must be consistent in our thinking and our actions.” It makes it clear that MEChA members are “Chicanes and Chicanos of Aztlán reclaiming the land of our birth (Chicana/Chicano Nation).”17
Another of the critical goals of La Raza is the granting of amnesty for illegal aliens. Achieving this also means working against enforcement of laws to stop illegal immigration. Several groups, including the Red Diaper Doper Babies of the American Civil Liberties Union and La Raza, among others, have petitioned President Obama to drop Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) agreements, which authorize state, county, and city law enforcement personnel to arrest illegal immigrants.
The incompetent Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is said to be working on revising the agreements to focus on arresting only illegals who are fugitives from justice. As usual, the Obama administration simply ignores the fact that being in this country illegally is a crime in itself, and our Homeland Security Secretary actively works to bypass the enforcement of federal law, to the detriment of our national security, precisely what Napolitano is charged with protecting.18
One of the first things the new Congress did in its first session after the election of 2008 was to prepare the way for re-introducing comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Senate bill S 9, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is titled “Stronger Economy Borders Act of 2009.” The problem is that it’s precisely the opposite of what that title implies! Make no mistake about it. The liberals like to say one thing and do the exact opposite in order to mislead the sheeple. This bill includes language that encourages legitimizing illegal aliens in the service of improving the economy. It echoes the sentiments of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who has said, “Immigrants must be brought out of the shadows so they can fully contribute to our nation’s future economic and social well-being.”19
In addition, Barack Obama addressed a group from the National Council of La Raza in November, 2008, shortly after the election, promising amnesty to illegals. Among the things he said?
We need to offer those who are willing to make amends a pathway to citizenship. That way, we can reconcile our values as both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws…. We should require them to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship—behind those who came here legally. But we cannot—and should not—deport 12 million people.
Obama’s offering the same rhetoric that informed the ill-fated Teddy Kennedy—John McCain Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. Tha
t bill resurfaced in March, 2010, when Obama met with his staff in order to try to jam through a new version of immigration reform with the same provisions as Kennedy-McCain before mid-term elections.20
What’s being proposed here is nothing less than anti-American legislation that makes a mockery of the rule of law. It’s also an indication that Obama is nothing less than a brazen revolutionary who will stop at nothing to ramrod his subversive agenda down our throats. The will of the people be damned! The president is beholden to NCLR, MEChA, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
And by the way, if you think Barack Obama is about to support any legislation that makes learning English mandatory for Hispanics or anyone else for that matter, then you need to readjust your thinking. In fact, promoting Spanish-English bilingual education is another of La Raza’s foundation principles, despite the fact that bilingual education has done enormous harm to the prospects of Spanish-speaking children in California.
Until 1998, California’s liberal educators and administrators, along with La Raza and MEChA and other Hispanic separatist activists, countermanded the wishes of 85 percent of the state’s Hispanic population by perpetuating bilingual education. In effect, they were reverting to the “separate but equal” doctrine of education outlawed in the late 1950s in the United States. California Proposition 227, which passed with a landslide majority in 1998, outlawed bilingual education. By August, 2000, the average reading scores of the state’s more than one million Hispanic elementary students had improved more than twenty points across the board.21
The Hispanic and left-liberal education segregationists were dumbfounded.
This misguided cultural vanity, which somehow sees Hispanic culture as superior to “gringo” culture, has led to the need for Hispanics to insist on pursuing yet another leftist goal: Racial and ethnic preference for Hispanics—in other words, “affirmative action”—in areas such as hiring and college admission. Even though it’s clear that Hispanic students are perfectly capable of competing with their peers of any race if they’re given the tools with which to compete, the champions of Hispanic separatism aren’t willing to provide them with the tools.
No, they’d rather Hispanics be given a free ride, the same special treatment that has done so much harm to Blacks’ ability to make real progress in the classroom and in the marketplace. Underlying this agenda item is, of course, the ultimate desire to become the dominant ethnic and cultural force in America. You can bet that La Raza wouldn’t allow English to be taught in its Spanish-only classrooms.
Two other closely intertwined La Raza goals, allowing illegal aliens to get drivers’ licenses and giving the right to vote to illegals, are part of a broader conspiracy to gain a permanent Democratic majority at the polls. Eleven states already issue drivers’ licenses to illegals, and illegal aliens use them as “breeder documents.” Once you have a driver’s license you can get on an airplane, rent an apartment, and open a bank account. It’s a passport to a fraudulent existence, because it makes it look as if you’re legitimate. In most states, you can use a driver’s license as identification when you register to vote, and so it’s a free pass to cast an illegal ballot.22
La Raza and Racism in the Obama Administration
As its name suggests, La Raza (NCLR) is an overtly racist organization.
Its ultimate goal is to see one “race” of people (Hispanics or Chicanos) conquer another race (Caucasians) by rapidly taking over the latter’s social territory. Here’s one of the many ironies associated with La Raza’s and MEChA’s desire to take back the birthplace of the Aztecs for “Chicanos”: the Aztecs were not Chicanos, of course, but Indians. What’s more, the Spanish, from whom Chicanos are descended, are the original imperialists, having conquered and destroyed Central American Indian civilizations centuries ago.
Simply put, La Raza doesn’t represent an ethnically pure population.
It’s the conqueror calling the conqueror guilty.
Of course, La Raza and MEChA aren’t going to listen to that argument. Their logic is as twisted as their goals and their methods for achieving them. Their ancestors include the Spanish conquerors who brutally decimated the Indian populations of South America in their own imperialist expansion into the new world, and NCLR members are no less tied to “European imperialism” than are the Americans from whom they seek to reclaim portions of the United States.
NCLR’s best-known member is newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a dismally under-qualified, racially biased woman who insisted in a speech she gave in 2001 that “I would hope that a wise Latino woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The remarks were published a year later in, appropriately enough, the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal of the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law. Yes, the commies at California’s most radical leftist university have a racist law journal.
What did you expect?
The Almanac of the Federal Judiciary cites comments by Sotomayor’s peers describing her as “a terror on the bench.” The Supreme Court nominee “abuses lawyers,” “she really lacks judicial temperament.” And finally, “she doesn’t understand [lawyers’] role in the system—as adversaries who have to argue one side or the other. She will attack lawyers for making an argument she does not like.”23 She’s yet another reason why I say the stench on the bench is making me clench.
Sotomayor had amassed an ugly record of judicial incompetence before she was confirmed as Supreme Court Justice. Among other things, she had her decisions reversed on appeal more than 60 percent of the time! 24 Her approach to the law is at best sloppy and uninformed, and, as her testimony in her Senate confirmation hearings revealed, she’s a truly second-rate intellect. Sotomayor used the phrases “imminent domain” when she meant “eminent domain” and “providence of Congress” when she meant “province of Congress.”
She also referred to her “story of knowledge” when she clearly meant to say “store of knowledge.” And she used the phrases “vagrancies of … the moment” and “the national labor relationships board,” the latter possibly a dating service we’re not familiar with. As “allahpundit” describes her gaffes, “she only ever claimed to be wise, not to have the vocabulary of, say, the average 10th-grader.”25
She’s the judge, by the way, whose racial and gender bias led her to rule—along with two other judges in the three-judge panel of which she was a part—against twenty New Haven firefighters, eighteen white and two Hispanic, receiving the promotions they rightfully earned in a competitive examination. Her denial of the firefighters’ promotions was in response to a challenge by seven African-American firefighters who did not score high enough on the test to earn advancement to Lieutenant or Captain. Soto-mayor ruled in the Blacks’ favor on the grounds that they had been discriminated against on the basis of race.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Sotomayor, saying that her ruling unfairly discriminated against the people whose performances merited promotions, two of whom were Hispanic, by the way. Sotomayor’s ruling was essentially a race-based affirmative action decision, in this case one which the courts correctly reversed. In the process, though, the firefighters waited the better part of seven years, their careers on hold, for justice to be served.26
Most thinking Americans understand that the quality of empathy, which Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor value much more highly than they do true judicial temperament or respect for the U.S. Constitution, is better applied to raising one’s children and giving to charity than to judicial decisions. In the current environment, empathy for anyone bent on breaking the law in order to subvert the United States is precisely what is needed from a racist judge in the continuing war against freedom, religion, and capitalism that the Obama administration is so intent on pursuing.
The real problem is that Sotomayor’s racism seems to be her primary qualification for a Supreme Court judgeship in this most racist of administrat
ions. In other words, she’s the perfect choice for a judge in the American legal system, which exists, in Obama’s and other leftists’ eyes, as a tool for the imposition of the “politically caponized” principles on the American people. Such a court system is at the service of its administrators’ political agenda, and it ridicules any attempt at impartial justice.
In addition to Obama’s managing to get a highly unqualified La Raza member on to the Supreme Court, La Raza is also well-represented in the Obama administration. Cecilia Muñoz, NCLR’s Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation, has been appointed Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. Muñoz has been a La Raza member for eighteen years, and she’s also on the boards of directors of Center for Community Change and the Open Society Institute.
In other words, she’s a career activist and community organizer, not unlike the president himself. And Cid Wilson, a member of the board of directors of NLCR and the LatinoJustice PRLDEF (Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund) is an appointee to the Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino.27 Obama also appointed John Trasviña to the position of Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment Practices. Trasviña is a long-time civil rights attorney and president and general counsel for the Mexican American Defense Fund, as well as a board member of the NCLR Lawyers Association and the Latino Issues Forum.28
In another example of the arrogance and blindness to the wishes of the American people—not to mention the laws of the United States—that characterizes this administration, Obama appointed Maria del Carmen Aponte to the position of Ambassador to El Salvador. This despite the fact that when Bill Clinton appointed her in 1998 to be the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, the vetting process revealed that she had intimate ties with the DGI, the Cuban intelligence agency. She’s a committed communist who was also a board member of NCLR, and shares its subversive goals. The nomination was withdrawn, but it stands as a marker of the arrogance and incompetence of this administration.29
Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security Page 24
