Not since Todd Akin’s comments about rape and pregnancy has the Conservatism Inc. Establishment targeted a Republican as they have immigration patriot Rep. Steve King R.-Iowa). In fact, Salon has actually dubbed King “The Todd Akin of immigration” [By Alex Seitz-Wald, July 26, 2013]
This has disrupted (good!) the GOP House Leadership sly promotion of the so-called KIDS Act, which is basically the DREAM Act, under a different name from the bill that all but eight Republicans, only two of whom are currently in Congress, voted against in 2010. It’s final proof that House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are simply on the wrong/ Chamber of Commerce side of the immigration issue and are looking for ways to sneak this year’s Amnesty/ Immigration Surge legislation past their caucus.
King responded to the incessant blather about “undocumented” valedictorian DREAMers (still apparently the preferred nomenclature, I guess KIDSers doesn’t have the same ring to it) by pointing out that they are a small minority of the millions of illegal aliens.
He said:
“Some of them are valedictorians—and their parents brought them in. It wasn’t their fault. It’s true in some cases, but they aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents. For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.”
(My emphasis). Needless to say, Leftist groups screamed racism, and professional pseudoconservative amnesty scamsters like Grover Norquist and Token Republican Hispanics like Rep. Raul Labrador ululated about how this would hurt GOP “outreach.” [Raul Labrador: Steve King comments ‘reprehensible’, By Ed O'Keefe, Washington Post, July 24, 2013]
However, what was atypical though not terribly surprising, was that the GOP Establishment joined in.
John Boehner opined that “What he said is wrong. There can be honest disagreements about policy without using hateful language.”
Eric Cantor echoed that “I strongly disagree with his characterization of the children of immigrants and find the comments inexcusable.”
Worst of all, Rep. Ted Poe (R.-TX), who chairs the House Immigration Reform Caucus, tweeted: “Such inflammatory and hateful comments are out of touch with reality and do nothing to fix our broken system.”
Former Rep. Tom Tancredo founded the House Immigration Reform Caucus and almost every immigration patriot in the House is a member. King made a bid to lead it earlier this year, but lost to Poe. That the leader of the caucus that supposedly should be fighting the GOP leadership on the KIDS act would not only use Leftist buzz words like “hateful” and “inflammatory,” but also use the open borders cliché “fix our broken system” is deeply disappointing—but insiders who know Poe tell me it’s not surprising.
(In contrast, Tancredo, who is now running for Governor of Colorado, has written a brave and powerful defense of King: Steve King is right about the KIDS Act, Daily Caller, July 26, 2013.)
And even in a one sentence denunciation, King’s GOP Judases still get their facts wrong.
The truth will not prevent Boehner and Poe from calling King’s comments “hateful.” But it’s worth establishing that what he said was what VDARE.com calls a “Hatefact”—something that is true but cannot be said in our current Cultural Marxist tyranny.
Which requires knowing two figures:
1) how many potential KIDSers are drug smugglers
2) how many are “undocumented” valedictorians.
Unfortunately, as Tom Tancredo noted, “since illegal aliens are by definition ‘undocumented’ and neither the Obama administration nor anyone else is doing a statistical profile on their border-crossings” we cannot measure King’s smuggler-to-valedictorian ratio with perfect accuracy. Maybe that means King should not have suggested an exact ratio, but the context of his comments made it clear that he was not really attempting to cite a statistic. And the evidence is overwhelming that the Main Stream Media systematically downplays the existence of minor drug smugglers and over-inflates the importance of “undocumented valedictorians.”
Breitbart.com’s Matthew Boyle wrote an excellent piece listing several MSM articles citing government statistics and anecdotal evidence about an increase of drug smuggling by minors. Exclusive: White House, GOP Leadership Ignore Facts to Attack Steve King, July 4, 2013.
For example, the Christian Science Monitor reported “In 2012, 244 minors faced drug-smuggling charges in the Tucson sector, compared with 122 in 2011. By the end of this May, the number was already 154.” Along key stretch of US-Mexico border, more kids running drugs, By Lourdes Medrano, July 16, 2013
As Tom Tancredo put it in his Daily Caller article:
[t]he fact that there were nearly 400 minors arrested in just one of the eight border sectors in the last 18 months—to say nothing of the young smugglers who have avoided detection—suggests that King’s ratio of smugglers to valedictorians may be in the right ballpark.
Fair as always, Tancredo did acknowledge that some of these minors may be US Citizens, saying “high school students are recruited to smuggle drugs because, as citizens, they can leave and reenter the U.S. easily.”
But I would add that, in addition to illustrating another problem with birthright citizenship, this problem would increase exponentially if the KIDSers become US citizens.
So how about those valedictorians? This number is even harder to measure. While we have government statistics about minor drug smugglers, we must rely on MSM and congressional boosterism of the handful of undocumented valedictorians who heroically come “out of the shadows” to testify before Congress and meet with the president of the United States—without, of course, any consequences at all.
Moreover, while I presume numbers of these undocumented valedictorians do exist, I am reminded of the famous exchange about honor students from Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Journalist Peter Fallon interviews the teacher of Henry Lamb (the black teenager who was allegedly victimized by a Great White Defendant, a la Trayvon Martin) to try to find out about the student’s high school performance. After an exasperated exchange, the teacher says:
You're thinking about 'honor students' and 'high achievers' and all that, and that's natural enough, as I say. But at Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School, an honor student is somebody who attends class, isn't disruptive, tries to learn, and does all right at reading and arithmetic.
Fallon responds "Well let's use that standard, is Henry Lamb an honor student?”
For the rest of the novel, the MSM calls Lamb an “honor student.”
While I can’t establish how many undocumented valedictorians exist, I know that Hispanics drop out of school at three times the rate as Whites—and, let it be noted, nearly twice the rate as blacks.
And I also know that the average SAT score for a Mexican-American, is 217 points lower than a white American.
Further, I also know that not all valedictorians are created equal. The Fisher v. Texas case was fought over Texas’s 10% plan, which dictated the acceptance of the top 10% of every Texas high school into the University of Texas. As Texas schools were largely de facto segregated because of residential patterns, a student at the top 10% of a school filled with non-Asian minorities was objectively less qualified than a student at a more heavily white and Asian school. (The Supreme Court eventuallu punted).
Here’s a specific example: When I type in “Undocumented valedictorian” into Google, the first story that shows up is a puff piece entitled “Almost-deported valedictorian Daniela Pelaez helps introduce immigration reform bill.” [By James Eng, US News, May 30, 2012]
Eng’s article tells us that Miss Pelaez (pictured right) was the valedictorian at North Miami Senior High School and was to attend Dartmouth this fall.
But according to US News and World Report, the North Miami Senior High School is 1% (ONE per cent) white, 1% Asian, 85% black, and 13% Hispanic. 73% of the class is “economically disadvantaged.” Only 15% of the class is proficient in Math and 30% is proficient in reading. [North Miami Senior High School Overview]
I do not know Miss Pelaez’s SAT scores, or how she would fare at a less diverse and “economically disadvantaged” a.k.a. competitive high school.
But I do know this: attending Ivy League colleges, with or without the benefit of racial preferences, is not a job that Americans won’t do.
"Washington Watcher" [email him] is an anonymous source Inside The Beltway
