Federale, who blogs at federaleagent86.blogspot.com  and also on VDARE.com, is an anonymous member of the Federal immigration enforcement bureaucracy who—unlike John Morton and the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama—actually believes in immigration enforcement.

This is a fringe political position shared by up to 80 percent of the American people, but not by many members of either the Democratic or Republican “leadership”.

Federale  recently spoke out, in NRO, RINOs, Illegals And Amnesty against Kevin D. Williamson, [Twitter] a National Review editor, who wrote in Perry and the Illegals [NRO Corner Blog, September 23, 2011] that since Plyler v Doe required Texas to provide primary education for young illegal aliens, Perry wasn’t actually surrendering much:

“What Texas has decided, under Rick Perry, is to treat Texas high-school graduates like Texas high-school graduates for the purposes of calculating college tuition, including those who were brought here illegally by their parents, with a couple of [Bogus, as Federale explains] provisos…”

In the course of saying this, Willliamson wrote “I was once an illegal immigrant myself, so maybe I’m biased by experience”. This caused Federale to refer to him as “NRO's resident illegal alien”.

(We’ve criticized Williamson before, here. He just authored a National Review cover story reprising a Bill Buckley golden oldie by accusing Ron Paul of being too close to the John Birch Society, and dragging up the old Ron Paul Report accusations).

In a post today (September 27), Williamson defends himself against the charge, or rather the admission, of being an illegal alien. He noted that he was in an illegal immigrant in India, where he worked without a work permit, displacing an Indian worker in what is still, per capita, a very poor country.

But he didn’t make that clear in his original piece and Federale can hardly be blamed for Williamson’s lack of clarity.

I hope the Indian worker whom Williamson displaced didn’t actually starve to death. (But said worker is probably an H-1b in San Diego.)

Williamson starts out

“There is nothing like writing about illegal immigrants to bring out the rubes. Some coward hiding behind a pseudonym, to whom I will decline to link, [VDARE.com note: Jerk!] writes:

“National Review has surrendered to the radical left and is slowly adopting the Obama Regime Administrative Amnesty. It all centers around the ratchet effect, abject surrender, and much ignorance on immigration law.”[Answering a Few Critics, September 25, 2011]

Because Williamson is being a jerk about not linking, I have no idea if he’s reading Federale’s blog, or VDARE.com. Really, this is childish—if you quote something, you’re obliged to link to it, so your readers can get the context.

 As for the charge that Federale is an anonymous coward, well, Federale is an anonymous law enforcement officer, with a gun, badge, bullet proof vest, and Federally-backed life and health insurance, for those times when illegals get really dangerous.

Yes, he describes himself as bureaucrat. But even if these days he spends most of his time in a cubicle, it’s scandalous for a scribbler like Williamson to call him a coward.

Refuse to be identified publicly is almost universal among whistle-blowers in law enforcement agencies. For example, there’s “Jack Dunphy”, NR’s own resident anonymous member of the LAPD, whose columns all come with the note

“Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author’s nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.”

No, they don’t, and might get him fired or reassigned. See INS Stomping On D.C. Sniper Whistleblowers, By Michelle Malkin,November 13, 2002. That’s because civil service protections don’t actually protect you from retaliation if you’re identified with anything that can be called a “hate group” or have an opinion that might constitute a “hostile environment”.  

 I can’t count the number of people—policemen, prosecutors, assistant attorneys general, teachers—fired or harassed for opinions no more conservative than used to be common in National Review, because they didn’t speak anonymously.

I will also remind Williamson that people have been fired from National Review  for opinions that used to be common on National Review.

However, I will absolve him of being NR’s resident illegal immigrant. NR’s resident illegal immigrant is actually, believe it or not, John Derbyshire,  now a naturalized American citizen, who labored illegally on a tourist visa in 1973. Derbyshire discusses this in a column titled I Was An Illegal Alien:

“This column led to some accusations of hypocrisy when I started writing articles arguing for immigration restriction and the repatriation of illegal immigrants. I don't see the case myself. A poacher may become a gamekeeper, a burglar may become a cop (certainly in Washington D.C., to judge from recent stories about screening procedures for the D.C. police force). It certainly never occurred to me, during my own spell of illegality, that I was the victim of unjust laws, let alone ‘racism,’ ‘nativism, or any of the other nonsense words used so freely by current defenders of mass illegal immigration. If the authorities had told me to leave, I would have left promptly and without complaint. The current twenty million — or whatever it is — persons illegally resident here should be told to leave, and they should likewise leave without complaint.”

This is the actual conservative position. It’s not Rick Perry’s, it’s not Kevin Williamson’s, and it’s not, apparently, that of many of the management and staff at National Review.

In a blog post earlier today, I mentioned the incredibly pro-immigration rants of John Podhoretz, Daniel Griswold, the late Richard Nadler, and Williamson. Because it’s been so long, I forgot to mention Jonah Goldberg,  but he’s still there. This was in the context of Rich Lowry’s modified limited mention of the problem of legal immigration—which, let me repeat, “must now be safe to say this, or trust me, Lowry wouldn't say it!”

NRO editor Jay Nordlinger thought Romney's answer on "Texas, illegals, and college tuition" in which Romney took the pro-American position that the US has to "turn off the magnet of extraordinary government benefits" like $100,000 off of a four year college education, was

 “[C]old, crabbed, and bad. He might have shown an ounce of sympathy — even an ounce, while holding to his position. All good politicians do this.

“Would it have killed him to hint that Perry had a tough problem to deal with? That there are two sides to the question? That life is complicated, occasionally?"

No, that’s a bad idea. We want conservative leaders to see simple things, like “Stealing is wrong.” In an article on Willie Horton, I wrote

“The primary message of conservatism is this: ‘Life is not like that.’”

“When John Lennon sang Imagine, conservatives said ‘Life is not like that.’

“When President Bush talks about ‘the good-hearted people who are coming here to do jobs that Americans won't do,’ we say ‘Life is not like that.’"  

Well, when Williamson says "it’s hard to blame the kids for their parents’ wrongdoing" or Rich Lowry says "If Perry had wanted to avoid raising the hackles of Republicans with the imputation of heartlessness, he could have borrowed the staple Bush line: 'Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande'", we have to say “Life is not like that.”

The kids (now great big 20 year olds, and under the proposed DREAM act, a possible 35 years old) are the beneficiaries of their parents’ crime, if they didn’t come to America by themselves as teenagers.  Giving illegals free tuition is not only wrong in itself, but (as even Mitt Romney can see) is a magnet for more illegals.

Family values do stop at the Rio Grande, or, as I’ve said before , or to put it another way, Mexican family values start there. Differences between Mexican and American family values include drinking customs, safety and health, respect for women, and women's' rights, sexual harassment, and the age of consent. The age of consent in Mexico is twelve.

All of this seems to be invisible to Lowry, Williamson, and Establishment “conservative” thought, because they’ve imbibed the modern dogma of anti-discrimination and have failed to see the problem with Bush’s compassionate conservatism.

This illegal alien tuition thing is a classic case of a “preventable evil” that National Review, and the Beltway Right in general, refuse to see clearly enough to prevent.

James Fulford [Email him] is a writer and editor at VDARE.com