They derive their strength in their large, undocumented numbers and just for that reason the free flow from across the border will never stem.
Coming as I do from a family of refugees from Bangladesh displaced by partition and settled in India for a couple of generations, immigration legal, illegal, enforced, or by choice is always of interest to me. My ancestors were driven out of their homeland and had to start their lives over in a new country. Years after the 1947 refugee crisis was over, the tide of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to West Bengal, India rises unabated.…
Article comments
76 - Arch Conservative
When you have Arch Conservative and Bliffle both saying you're wrong....chances are......
YOU'RE WRONG!
77 - Nancy
Sounds to me like we need to call on the scientist down in Texas who's in favor of wiping out 1/2 the world population. Probably isn't a bad idea, if you really think about it. Being totally honest, I myself am certainly not indispensible to the earth let alone society, & all these illegals even less. Ah...what's that Gilbert & Sullivan ditty about "they'd none of them be missed...." Avian flu, where are you? Possible criteria: if you use/consume more resources than you produce in viable output/work, you're outta here. Oh, well. So much for everyone I know....;)
78 - RedTard
"IF it weren't for my people, a gallon of milk would cost $10."
If it wasn't heavily subsidized to hold down the governments pretend inflation number it already would be. Almost every dairy farmer I know is white though, you might have the wrong industry.
79 - Arch Conservative
"IF it weren't for my people, a gallon of milk would cost $10."
Oh really? If it weren't for your people an MRI would cost about 10 bucks too.
[Edited]
80 - Victor Plenty
Every human being has rights, regardless of citizenship or documented immigration status. Governments sometimes fail to uphold those rights, but their failure does not stop the rights from existing. Anyone who cares about the United States Constitution enough to really study its underlying principles would know this.
81 - Victor Plenty
To Richard Brodie (comment #66),
Separate national governments have failed to prevent the slow rise of corporate totalitarianism. People will grow weary of watching national governments repeatedly favor the interests of ruthless artificial corporate "individuals," with devastating effects on the lives of real human individuals.
The prospect of seeing the world's people unite and establish a global system of governance to protect the rights of human individuals is not a utopian dream. It is the last, best hope for the long term survival of human freedom and dignity.
Beyond that, it is the best hope for the human species to survive at all.
82 - Bliffle
Victor: "...the world's people unite and establish a global system of governance to protect the rights of human individuals ..."
Yeah, sure. And the next week it's taken over by the most ruthless corporate and mafia exploiters, targeted because of it's unprecedented power to rule peoples lives and turn them into slaves. Sorta like the Russian revolution, except even bloodier and more oppressive. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The trick is to REDUCE power. Break up monopolies.
83 - Richard Brodie
"the trick is to REDUCE power. Break up monopolies."
Just as you don't want a corporate monopoly over some particular business sector, so you sure as hell do not want a GOVERNMENT monopoly over the entire planet. The signs are ominous that such a movement is underway. And those governments most in favor of such globalistic notions as a UN takeover of the internet, are the most totalitarian ones.
Read this from a CBS news article, and be scared:
"In my opinion, freedom of speech seems to be a politically sensitive issue. A lot of policy matters are behind it." So observed Houlin Zhao, the man who wants to control the greatest forum for free expression in history.
Zhao, a director of the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and a former senior Chinese-government official, is a leader in the United Nations's effort to supplant the United States government in the supervision of the Internet. At a series of conferences called the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held under the aegis of the ITU, the U.N. has floated a series of proposals for doing exactly that ...
Will the registration of a domain name, now a five-minute process for anyone with a credit card, eventually require approval from UNESCO? Will domain-registration fees, currently a few dollars per domain, skyrocket to subsidize websites for countries without electricity?
Houlin Zhao may just be the world's most dangerous man. People like Victory Plenty, advocates, supporters, and ideological enablers of the kind of evil global governance that this Chinese bureaucratic functionary represents, will deserve what they are going to get. Unfortunately the rest of us don't.
84 - zingzing
what really bothers me about the quote is this: "the United States government [...] supervis[es...] the Internet." i know i had to chop that up a bit... so the US gov't supervises the internet? really? what?
so if a "global" gov't were to "supervise" (what the hell is that?) the internet, what would the difference be? does this supervision thing the US gov't is doing only have to do with the US? or do we supervise the world's internet?
if we supervise the world's internet, the hell yeah, bring on the chinese fella and his global supervisors. what right do we have?
either way, what the fuck is the gov't doing "supervising" (what does that mean?) the internet?
color me confused.
85 - zingzing
truth be told, i'm not too afraid of a chinese guy trying to control the internet. ain't gonna happen. so, read the cbs article, and be paranoid.
86 - RedTard
Zing,
Have you looked at the restrictions the Chinese place on the internet? I don't want them controlling what I see either. Our government so far, with the exception of the xxx domain, has largely stayed out and the internet has flourished.
Under UN control the European countries will want to block nazi stuff, the Chinese will want to block most political talk, do gooders will tax the shit out of the rich countries to pay for more aid to Africa, etc.
The great thing about the internet is that it's relatively cheap and you are basically free to say do as you please, both of those will change under UN control.
87 - Richard Brodie
zing: color me confused
You're confused alright. In one breath you say
bring on the chinese fella
implying it wouldn't be such a bad thing, then you turn around and say:
i'm not too afraid of a chinese guy trying to control the internet. ain't gonna happen
implying that it WOULD be a bad thing, just not too likely!
Take one more look at Houlin Zhao's bureaucratic horseshit double-talk:
"In my opinion, freedom of speech seems to be a politically sensitive issue. A lot of policy matters are behind it."
What is he really saying? For him freedom of speech is not regarded as an absolute human right, but rather as an "issue". And, yeah, it's "politically sensitive" alright. The dictators in Beijing are acutely "sensitive" to it. "policy matters"? Yeah, the Chinese goverment's policy regarding the "issue" of free speech is to put people in jail for exercising it, because they rightly see it as a threat which jeopardizes the stranglehold of power they wield over their enslaved population.
And these are the type of scum who would rise to the highest levels of power in ANY global government, such as the one Mr. Plenty foolishly blathers about.
88 - zingzing
oh, twist my words around. ignore what i say. and ignore my questions. why is our gov't "supervising" the internet? and why aren't we stopping them from doing it? like i said, i'm not too afraid of a global "supervision" of the internet, because it's not something you can really "supervise." if it's like anything else in the UN, an extremely weak group of people will sit up there and talk about doing just about nothing. who gives a fuck?
no one is going to let the chinese decide what is free speech or not. jesus. that would be like letting the u.s. make up the rules for fat content. let go of paranoia. if you don't recognize it, it looks like that bong you smoked a second ago.
89 - zingzing
"do gooders will tax the shit out of the rich countries to pay for more aid to Africa..."
what? since when do "do gooders" on the internet get to "tax the shit" out of anyone, especially to pay for "more" aid to Africa? gov'ts tax their own people... not... the internet doesn't tax... what the fuck are you saying?
90 - Richard Brodie
why is our gov't "supervising" the internet?
The "supervision" role our government exercises is to make sure the internet stays free, and that control of the root file is not grabbed by sinister international forces who have a desire to impose various kinds of censorship.
i'm not too afraid of a global "supervision" of the internet, because it's not something you can really "supervise."
It would be very easy to control what can and cannot be said on the internet. The UN has already blatantly admitted that if it can wrest control of domain allocation away from ICANN (a neutral organization which has no political agenda), it will not allow the existence of any website that is critical of its own policies. And governments like China and Vietnam are salivating over the possiblities of being able to stifle speech that THEY don't want to see allowed.
since when do "do gooders" on the internet get to "tax the shit" out of anyone
So far they don't. But with the UN in control, they will most certainly avail themselves of domain resistration fees as a way to raise revenues (which means TAX, in case you don't know) to finance an endless number of boondoogles on their wish list.
91 - zingzing
well, leave the ICANN in control of domain allocation. retain free speech on the internet. i don't think the government should have any role in "supervising" internet. if they do, however, and since this is a "world wide" internet, why not hand it over to the UN, who, if they handle it properly, may be able to actually OPEN UP the internet in those places that live under censorship? wouldn't it do the world some good? obviously, censor-free countries wouldn't stand for censorship.
if china's internet were free, the world would be a better place. if the UN tried to censor anything, there would be quite an uproar, have no doubt about it.
92 - Victor Plenty
If you want to fully understand the US government's role in supervising the Internet, read up on the history of how the Internet came to exist in the first place. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to get started on that.
Briefly, at this time, government agencies do very little management of the Internet. They mainly supervise the protocols used to make the Internet work, and manage some key pieces of hardware that carry the Net's data. Very little is done to restrict any of the content flowing through those channels and using those protocols.
Opponents of continuing US supervision for the Internet claim the Americans will eventually try to restrict international criticism of their government's policies. Opponents of internationalizing Internet supervision claim the UN, China, and others would try to censor American opinions disagreeing with internationalism.
As for me, I am neither a nationalist nor an internationalist. I tend to support world federalism, which is not exactly the same thing as internationalism.
93 - zingzing
ok, let's see what happened the last time the UN tried to stop "america" (read: bushco) from doing what it wanted to. oh yeah. we went ahead and did it anyway. we won't stand for censorship. what do we have to worry about? free up the other countries. see if it works. give it a shot.
or take away any gov't "supervision" of the internet.
either one. i don't care.
94 - Bliffle
"...read up on the history of how the Internet came to exist in the first place. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to get started on that."
Wikipedia is the LAST place I'd look, since they've developed a bad rep. But I don't have an alternative source for you. I know what I experienced in the 50s in grad school, which was that ARPA was just sheets of mimeographed paper with paper titles, school, author and contact info. We sent them around in the US mail. If you wanted one you'd write (phone calls were too expensive, mail was only 3 cents). Then around 1960 IBM let us ride the 1050 network they'd developed to support 1401 computer field problems. The 1050 was (basically) a Selectric typewriter wired to an asynch communications adapter which was usually hardwired to a leased line to a central hub in the southeast US, maybe Raleigh. Pretty primitive. About that time the DoD horned in claiming that many of the papers were written under DoD contract so they had dibs. So it became DARPA. But lackadaisically. The old university guys started developing a computer-to-computer network which became internet. IBM wasn't interested because it wasn't proprietary and DoD didn't like it either for security reasons, so they let it go. The basic architecture defied control, so they weren't interested. I suspect that if DoD and/or IBM had been interested and applied their huge influence that today we'd have some flavor of SNA, and there'd be about 10 users outside the university/military hierarchy, like me and thee. And the general public would have no notion of What Might Have Been. Internet was a stealth project. But all those Big Guys would sure like to control it, and they will try.
95 - Victor Plenty
Those opposed to ratifying the US Constitution called it evil, claiming it would lead to tyranny. They were mistaken.
The paranoia of folks like Richard Brodie will also prove to be wrong. National governments will take their proper place in a worldwide federal system, and tyranny will not be the result.
Government will neither wither away, nor grow to totalitarian dimensions. It will perform its intended role of protecting human rights, when people demand that and remain engaged enough at all times to make sure it happens, rather than letting themselves be constantly distracted.
96 - Pizzdolph
Please read.
Commentary by Frosty Wooldridge
February 26, 2004
Much like the Titanic that sank on April 15, 1912, the Unites States stands at a critical juncture in the history of our nation. Few realize it, but, like the Titanic, this nation smashed into a piece of legislation in 1965 that was never asked for or approved by the American public. Our 'Captain' Lyndon Baines Johnson along with helmsman Senator Teddy Kennedy drove America into an 'iceberg' of massive, unrestricted immigration that opened up the flood gates with the 'IMMIGRATION REFORM ACT'.
At first, the flow of one million immigrants annually wasn't noticed. We offered benevolence. Our country stood large on the opportunity landscape. There was plenty of room and resources.
However, the massive flow of humanity from that ‘hit’ still pours into our country 38 years later and few seem to notice--much like the party-goers and dancers on the Titanic that kept up for hours after hitting the iceberg in the North Atlantic. However, even the invincible Titanic could not survive the onslaught from the constant flow of incoming water--slowly, methodically stealing her ability to stay afloat.
Today in the United States, 70 million immigrants later and pouring in at 2.3 million annually--both legal and illegal--our nation shudders from San Francisco to New York and from Chicago to Miami. We rose from 200 million to nearly 300 million in three decades. What was once a benefit to our country is now a full-scale overpopulation and societal crisis. From stem to stern, our English language is under assault and our schools are drowning in ethnic violence, drugs and gang warfare. In California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, our hospitals suffer bankruptcies from non-paid services for 350,000 annual 'anchor babies'. Ten million illegal immigrants displace jobs from America's working poor and depress wages for many others at a cost of $133 billion annually in lost jobs. Leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas Disease, hepatitis and other diseases 'pour' into our country within the bodies of illegal immigrants who avoid health screening before coming on board the United States. Even worse, clashing cultures with religions that celebrate 'female genital mutilation' and subjugation of women are growing in enclaves around our country. As Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself can not stand."
On the environmental front, our nation explodes toward an added 200 million people that will reach ½ billion past the mid century. We are creating an 'irreversible crisis' with 'unsolvable problems'. California will add 20 million in 30 years. Colorado will add five million by mid century. Arizona will add four million. They already don't have enough water. Florida can not survive another five million people. New York shudders with its population problems. Air pollution poisons what we breathe and massive sprawl devours our once lauded spaciousness. Species extinction accelerates as we add numbers. Much like the Titanic, our standard of living drops and our quality of life sinks with the influx of unrestricted immigration. Soon, we too, will become like the countries of Bangladesh, India and China.
On the employment front, our leaders are outsourcing and offshoring our jobs to Third World countries while they import the Third World into our country. Our Congress created H-1B and L-1 visas that have displaced one million high tech American workers in the past decade. America's middle class is being driven into the unemployment lines. Our schools are becoming dysfunctional towers of Babel with over 140 languages. We can not stay afloat with this kind of linguistic chaos. Additionally, we’re moving toward ‘Third World Momentum’, which means, the more we import millions of Third World immigrants, the more we manifest identical problems.
Yes, we have compassion for immigrants, but it's our country and our children. Their leaders need to take care of them in their countries. Unfortunately, Congress and the leadership of this nation refuse to step below the water line to see how fast we are sinking. We're $6.92 trillion in debt. There were 20 different languages on the California recall ballot. Whose country is this anyway? Our leaders are standing in the wheelhouse totally insulated and isolated from those of us who shovel the coal, build houses, repair cars, teach our kids, drive school busses and plow roads.
On a sobering environmental note, do you want your children ‘struggling’ in our country with an added 200 million more people past mid century? California will add 20 million while each state will add an average of four million. Quality of life and standards of living will sink as the population rises. We can not save the world, but we can destroy our country if we fail to act. The more extreme our numbers, the more extreme our consequences.
Like the Titanic that cracked in half before plunging to the depths because no one stopped the incoming water, the United States like all great nations before us, could sink. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all civilizations rise and fall, and that, “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.”
You can see the signs all around our country. If you look about you, we're shuddering from bow to aft"from the stacks to the rudder. Who is steering our nation and why are they heading toward more icebergs instead of changing course? What can you do? You are just as much an American patriot as Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Lincoln and the soldiers from Valley Forge to the Jungles of Vietnam and deserts of Iraq. It's time to start riding, stitching, writing, charging, demonstrating and fighting for our country within our country. We must enforce a 10 year ‘time out’ immigration moratorium to get our house in order. Go to my web site for specific action items. Send those items to all you know and ask them to do the same. Via the Internet, we might prove Toynbee wrong.
Since our leaders won't stop this invasion of an 'unarmed army' of legal and illegal immigrants, it's up to you. Our children face a dangerous future if we fail to take action. It wasn't George Washington who beat the British army. It was every militiaman who shot from fence lines and trees. It wasn't Ike who won WWII. It was every GI who slung a rifle over his soldier. Susan B. Anthony marched and Dr. Martin Luther King demonstrated. They, in their time, paid the price for defending America so we could enjoy our freedom. This is your time.
[Frosty Wooldridge is a teacher and author who has bicycled 100,000 miles on six continents to see overpopulation up close and ugly. His next book: ‘Incursion Into America’ is due out in June 2004.]
97 - Pizzdolph
Go here to see just how the government is watching the internet. Are our rights being violated? Can the American people organize to even try and make a stand to do something about the immigration problem?
98 - Chicano
Frosty the Snowman is an imbecile. The U.S. will never be like India or China because the U.S. is past the indutrial - age dumbass. CHina is currently going through that phase and India doesn't even know what that phase means. Tuberculosis is not contagious.
As long as America keeps fighting wars for resources and not true democracy, there will always be immigration. Immigration is a natural instinct. Borders are not natural. What's going to kill America is all the stupid people and leaders; ie. Bush. I say, if MExicans were mandated to speak english before becoming citizens 25 years ago, we wouldn't have such a problem. BUt then again, America has never truly given a fuck about minorities has it Pizzdolph.
As long as illegals remain invisible slaves unable to vote or drive, their children will suffer in the inner cities. Not the suburbs, but L.A., Chicago, Miami, Detroit, Houston. Once we give citizenship, they will benefit the country more than they already do by taking higher technology jobs. It took a racist moron to start reform. I thank all the racists out there that brought this issue to light. Thank you 400 or so retarded minute men. Cheers fuckers! haha!
99 - Vikas Chowdhry
A point well made. I wish more people would talk about the interminable wait for the legal work based immigration for knowledge workers. It seems like all Congress cares about is grape/cherry/orange pickers in California.
100 - Richard Brodie
The special treatment for illegals doesn't end with a free pass to violate federal immigration law with impunity.
A time honored American tradition, is getting a family business started on one's own private residential property - think: The Hewlett-Packard Garage. Increasingly onerous and inflexible city codes have made this possiblity more and more difficult, thereby contributing to a slowdown in economic growth at the all-important small business level, with consequent negative impact on the overall standard of living.
City "code enforcement" people, not being pistol packing law enforcement types, are chicken to go into the Mexican barios that exist in every border-state city and town. Backyard start-up activities flourish in those kinds of communities (some legal, like car repair, some illegal, like drug dealing) because the only people city enforcement officials feel safe about harrassing are citizens, in areas of traditional ethnic concentrations.
So on every front illegal aliens are treated with special accomodation, while ordinary Americans are left to pay the price.
101 - SteveS
According to Congressman Gary Miller's website, there are 2.2 million illegal immigrants in California accounting for 32% of the overall total of illegal immigrants nationwide. (as of Sept. 2004).
According to about.com, these illegal immigrants are costing California 10 billion a year. (as of Dec. 2004).
So what we have are over 2 million people who are draining 1/40th of what a single Exxon CEO is draining.
102 - sUrEnO
fuck yall hatrz wit out us yall woulnt be any were Yall hatrz
103 - sUrEnO
FUCK yall
104 - bob
i love beaners
105 - tim
There are kids reading this.