A new Zogby survey reveals a dramatic break between clergy and parishioners on illegal immigration.
On Dec. 29, I spoke by phone with Stephen Steinlight (stephen.steinlight@gmail.com) of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Stephen: “As I have claimed for a long time, the American Jewish establishment is not the authentic voice of American Jews. They have taken a monolithic extreme position in favor of open borders, amnesty, increased immigration. They have sought to disempower law enforcement.”
“Jews should be patriots. This country has earned their love. It is the safest and best place for Jews outside of Israel.”
Luke: “So how goes the great fight to keep you from speaking in synagogues?”
Stephen: “They’ve had some success. Certain organizations where I spoke on many occasions, such as Hadassah… The legal department at Hadassah ruled me out. I spoke in about 26 chapters around the country. The audience loved everything I had to say… The average member of Hadassah doesn’t even know that Hadassah has a position on immigration. That’s not why they’re in the organization. They claim to have 300,00 members. My guess is not 3% know that the organization has a position on immigration. If they knew what the position is, they’d be horrified by it. The same thing with Bnai Brith. I’ve spoken to many chapters. A chapter president asked me if Bnai Brith has a position on immigration. When I told him, he was horrified.”
“In the old days [to get speaking engagements], we’d take out an ad and I’d get tons of calls. Now I have to do a lot of the legwork myself. I’ve got to get in touch with synagogues and Jewish organizations to get gigs. I’m still getting speaking gigs but they’re harder to come by. The word is out that I am controversial. That’s the kind word. What’s strange about that is that all I am doing is expressing the views of the overwhelming majority of the American people.”
Luke: “What is Hadassah’s position on immigration?”
Stephen: “They support comprehensive immigration reform, which is shorthand for doubling legal immigration, giving amnesty, and all the things that come with it… Given the way the immigration engine operates, that would mean the lion’s share of additional immigration will come from Mexico. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation estimated that if comprehensive immigration reform were to pass, that would give us 66-100 million additional people from Mexico in the next 20 years. Jews should understand that if that were to happen, they would be outnumbered in the U.S. by Mexicans 50-1. The political implications should be obvious. This country would become overwhelmingly Hispanic. This is a group with high levels of anti-Semitism and a different set of policy priorities.”
Luke: How’s Gideon Aronoff [president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society]?
Stephen: “He’s now the chair of the board of the National Immigration Forum, the leading lobby group for open borders immigration and amnesty. He is the head of the most radical organization on this issue in the entire United States. He is the man who is specializing in bringing us Somali immigrants into the United States. This is a country that is a hotbed of jihadism. Some 20 Somali Americans went off to fight jihad in Somalia. A little Mogadishu is being created in Minneapolis. It is a place of crime and Islamic fanaticism. That’s Gideon Aronoff’s ongoing gift to the American Jewish community.”
“The man slandered me and got away with it. It’s a disgrace to the American Jewish establishment that somebody could get away with doing something like that and not a voice would be raised in opposition, in fact other people chimed in. The Anti-Defamation League defamed me based on no information. They did no independent research into these crazy charges. An attorney from the ADL who said that there’s something fishy about this guy Steinlight.
“I’m thinking, what’s fishy about me? I was a professor for 20 years. I worked for the Holocaust Museum. I worked for the National Council of Christians and Jews. I worked for the American Jewish Committee. I worked for an anti-slavery group. Then I worked for the Center for Immigration Studies. What’s fishy about me? One could say I’ve lived a life of civic virtue.
“Hadassah did the same thing to me. They took politically-motivated charges from a corrupt organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the subject of exposes in The Nation magazine, the Harpers and by the Montgomery Advertiser, which talks about it as a grubby money-making mill. They’ve hired one black lawyer in their history.”
Luke: “Do you have any sense about the black community and immigration?”
Stephen: “There’s no community in the country as brutally affected by immigration. About 17.5% of Americans can’t find enough work. A high percentage of that is African-American.
“When you look at surges in immigration since 1990 and you look at surges in incarceration rates of African-American men between 19-40, they overlay perfectly. African-Americans are the ones who are losing jobs most to immigrant Mexicans. The competition with cheap immigrant labor is dropping the floor on wages and working conditions.”
“Save me from the tikkun olam Jews. I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘tikkun olam‘ is merely code language for radical multiculturalist post-Americans. They’re not concerned about justice. They have a left-wing, politically correct, moronic multi-culturalism. Where are they when it comes to the African-American community? My guess is that African-Americans are no longer chic.”
“Why has the Congressional Black Caucus not been at the forefront of the battle against open-ended immigration by low-skilled workers? The answer is that in the year 2000, they cut a deal with the Hispanic Caucus, saying that as long as you don’t run Hispanic candidates against sitting African-American candidates, we’ll support open borders immigration. It’s kinda I’m all right, Jack. So as long as my incumbency is OK, I don’t care how miserable this is making my community.
“I toss this out to African-Americans. There’s too much deference shon to leadership, whether it’s in the church or in politics. The African-American community needs to take a much more jaundiced eye towards its leadership. They have clearly sold out its community.”
“Immigration is a zero-sum game. Some people win and some people lose. It’s not a wonderful thing for everyone. One of the big losers is African-Americans, as well as young people entering the job market. Teenage unemployment is the highest in 30 years.
“While this is happening, the Feds are bringing in 125,000 foreign workers every month. The uber loyalty [of Paul Krugman and company] is open borders. That’s the god they’re willing to sacrifice everything for. This has become the holy of holies for the elites on the Left.”
Luke: “How have our difficult economic times and rising unemployment affected the immigration debate among the elites?”
Stephen: “Not at all. At the president’s job summit at the White House, not a single person talked about the impact on jobs by foreign labor. It was the 800-pound gorilla in the room. We have millions of people in this country illegally stealing jobs and destroying the social safety net. They’re not earning nearly enough to pay the taxes to support the public programs that they’re bankrupting and which will they be dependent for decades.”
“That the illegal alien who stole in last night commands my moral sympathy to the same degree as an impoverished fellow American, that’s a post-American totaly deracinated point of view I can’t comprehend, yet this is the mindset that’s driving these people.”
“We can stop them from doing their worst. There will be no comprehensive immigration reform soon, but we don’t need comprehensive immigration reform to have a disaster on our hands.
“If immigration continues on its current trends, we will have a 56% increase in our population by 2060. That means 167,000,000 additional people. Do we want that? But that’s what’s coming.”
On the very day that Obama is telling top executives they need to be cutting pay (you know to be sure the wealth is more evenly distributed) someone sent me news that Gideon Aronoff, CEO of one of the Top Ten (Volag) Government Contractors, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, hasn’t cut his. This while newly arrived refugees are completely freaked out because of the dismal jobs outlook, some even fearing eviction.
Four staffers jobs were axed at HIAS which seems to have fixed this non-profit’s balance sheet without Mr. Aronoff experiencing any personal financial pain.
In other cases, top executives have simply viewed their own salaries as one of many expenses that the organization could consider cutting
