(The twisted view of Open Border Advocates)


"And on the subject of Arellano’s deportation, he remarks, “Anyone (who believes) that what happened to her and her son is something that we should witness again is obviously someone who’s not living on this Earth."


Ceding the Immigration Debate to Right Wingers
Harsh talk intensifies, rally attendance declines and Democrats go AWOL

~ By GREG KATZ ~

Photo by Alan Mittelstaedt
~ Does the low turn-out portend a Republican victory in 2008? ~

You might not know it from listening to ever-cautious Democrats, but what passes for a national conversation on immigration is as heated as ever.

The normal background noise is still present: Lou Dobbs and Fox News continue to spew their signature rhetoric. Across the country, anti-immigration groups continue mobilizing their supporters onto the Main Streets of every Midwestern town that will have them.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney’s assault on Rudy Giuliani for governing a sanctuary city dominates recent radio ads. And last week, right here on the streets of downtown Los Angeles, unmarked cars and plainclothes officers corralled the once-sanctuaried illegal immigrant Elvira Arellano, separated her from her son, and sent her to Tijuana, where she was apparently welcomed as a hero.

Considering all this you might expect that Los Angeles – with its enormous population of recent immigrants both legal and illegal – would be in a very public frenzy over the state of immigration policy reform, but the opposite seems to be true. Case-in-point: the amply named We Are All Elvira Arellano and Saulito Coalition, an ad hoc team of pro-immigrant groups, organized a rally to protest Arellano’s deportation last Saturday. It was an undeniable disappointment for its organizers; only 500 or so people turned out.

To be fair, the rally wasn’t the first immigration event with a lower-than-predicted turnout – just consider the dramatic drop-off from the 500,000 LA protesters on May 1, 2006 to the 30,000 that showed up for a similar event one year later. “They don’t seem to have achieved much of their stated aim, except to really tick off the American people that watch them,â€