Patrick Cleburne has pointed out many times over the years that comment threads at online articles about immigration are typically dominated by comments quite compatible with the immigration-sanity focus here at VDARE.com.  For example, in a late 2006 post, Cleburne lauded "the articulate ferocity" of readers' reactions to an op-ed by Hispanic grievances-specialist Ruben Navarrette.

Recently, I noted that these good comments (from the VDARE.com point of view) often attract strong approval, in the former of "thumbs-up" votes, from other readers.  (In contrast, the bad comments typically attract little enthusiasm and are often the targets of good comments in response.)

Both phenomena are consistent with Brenda Walker's frequent assertion here that the American public generally wants immigration to be "legal, controlled, and reduced."

This phenomenon of strong immigration-sanity sentiment among commenters was apparent once again at a June 25 article about Congressman Luis Gutierrez's [D-IL] hissy fit on the House floor that his Republican colleagues still hadn't moved legislation for comprehensive immigration capitulation.  By now, we can take such commenters' responses as routine.  Except that this article (Luis Gutierrez: House GOP's Time Is Up on Immigration, by Elise Foley) appeared in ... the Huffington Post.

The "HuffPo" (always referred to as "the Puffington Host" by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto) is straightforwardly acknowledged as "liberal" in Wikipedia's article about it.  And top stories at HuffPo as I write this include 5 Political Operatives Just Hammered Women And Workers and Hobby Lobby Still Covers Vasectomies And Viagra, both in the wake of today's Supreme Court decisions.  Sampling the comments at the latter two articles reveals them to be preponderantly from the left, i.e. approximately as hysterical as the articles and their headlines.

But the comments at that article about Gutierrez are heavily against his bleating complaints, i.e. they don't fit the "progressive" mindset we generically associate with the HuffPo.  Here are some examples (with typos fixed):

Rosalie Beyer

Why not just save time and money and "FOLLOW THE EXISTING LAW"??????????

That has 169 thumbs-ups. Marcia Ripple Williams attracted 107 up votes with this one:

Our immigration laws are not being enforced. That's THE POINT AND THE ONLY POINT! We don't need new laws, period. ENFORCE THE EXISTING LAWS NOW BEFORE THIS COUNTRY IS A CESSPOOL LIKE THE COUNTRIES SOUTH OF THE BORDER!

Commenter Fred Alyeska received 63 approvals for this observation and suggestion:

Yes, Mr. Gutierrez, remove the consequences (deportation) to illegal foreign nationals breaking our immigration laws on the books. We now see how well that is working and have to look no further than our southern border where the masses are invading our country because of lax and failed immigration law enforcement! Maybe all these 60 to 70 thousand detainees now in our southern border states should be shipped to your district for room and board!

 

And one Steven Haws wrote the following allegory that's a warning to both Dems and Repubs:

Here is the story of a man who caught a snake, and by holding it behind the head, he could keep the snake from biting him. While he was showing off how scary he was to have a snake he could threaten others with, but remain safe himself, the snake wrapped itself around the man's arm, and constricted until the man, out of pain, had to release the snake's head, expecting it to simply drop off and slither away. Unfortunately the snake continued to squeeze, and repeatedly bit the man until he, the man, collapsed, and later died. What he thought was a prize, and a weapon, was eventually the cause of his own demise.

If you allow illegals (snakes) to come in, and give them amnesty so they will vote for your party, pretty soon, they will not only have the numbers to sway the national vote to your party (weapon/threat), but they will eventually also have the numbers to dictate the political position of your party (squeeze), and they won't just slither away. Once they control you, instead of you using them, whose interests do you think they will care about, theirs, or yours (demise)? We're a pretty short sighted people.

A 2002 VDARE.com contribution by Brenda Walker made the same point as Haws, specifically for long-time southern California Democratic hack Congressman Howard Berman, who had a scrap with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund [MALDEF] over redistricting.  Wrote Brenda, "Why have a liberal when you can get a real Mexican, [the heavily-Latino electorate figures]."

That Democrats might have motive to actually think sensible, patriotic thoughts about immigration is also implicit in a recent opinion piece at Real Clear Politics (Liberals Delude Themselves About the Tea Party, by Jack Kelly, June 29, 2014) with this concluding paragraph:

So far, only Republicans have listened to Tea Party concerns. But dissatisfaction with obese, arrogant, incompetent, unaccountable government is spread across the political spectrum. Democrats soon may regret having turned a deaf ear.

Still, getting enough Americans, in general, to think sensible, patriotic thoughts about immigration — and then act on those thoughts — probably remains our greatest challenge.  As His Excellency John Derbyshire wrote in 2003, in an article (I Was An Illegal Alien) that revealed his own five years of (initially fearful) immigration sin:

Getting Americans to think seriously about immigration ... is uphill work. There is resistance to be overcome at the deepest level of the national psyche. ... Nations, like individuals, have their own ineradicable quirks of personality. It is a peculiarity of Americans that they cannot be brought to think seriously about immigration. The two best immigration-restrictionist books of recent years have been by Peter Brimelow, who is an immigrant from England, and Michelle Malkin, daughter of recent Filipino immigrants. If you have been through, or sufficiently close to, the immigration experience, you think about it a lot. Otherwise, you don't think about it at all, and can't be made to. Take it from me, a sometime illegal immigrant: getting this nation to concentrate on immigration reform is going to be hard work all the way.

And, indeed, a more recent HuffPo article, by Elise Foley, on immigration (Obama Announces Plans For Executive Action On Immigration, June 30, 2014) has an unfortunate preponderance of comments, by obvious civic illiterates, to the effect that the president clearly must act, since the House Repubs haven't.