Canada’s Quisling CBC and other media seize every opportunity to ridicule the immigration-related statements of U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump. Most of them know nothing about Barbara Jordan, the African-American Congresswoman who led the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in the mid-1990’s. The goals of Ms. Jordan and her group were far more sweeping than those of Trump. They wanted to introduce laws which would reduce substantially both illegal and legal immigration to the U.S. Their reason : both legal and illegal immigration were serious threats to the job hopes of millions of Americans, particularly those of Blacks.
Legal / illegal immigration has had the same negative effects on the lives of millions of Canadians, yet our Quisling CBC and other media cheer-lead it. They ridicule Trump in order to stifle the development of any such movement in Canada.
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The following is a shortened version of a tribute titled “Remembering Barbara Jordan and Her Immigration Legacy “. It was written by Jerry Kammer of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
(1) Twenty years have passed since the death of African-American, former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan on January 17, 1996. She was 59 years old, a beloved
national figure who for the previous two years had been chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
(2) Jordan’s death cut short that final public service. (Her work on that Commission) represents the high-water mark of bipartisan efforts to stop illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration by asserting a vision of the national interest over the left-right coalition of ethnic, business, and political interests that seeks more immigration and less enforcement.
(3) Born in 1936, Barbara Jordan grew up in segregated Houston, daughter of a preacher who moonlighted as a warehouse clerk. As the Washington Post would report, “her parents pushed her to excel … and they would criticize her for imprecise diction and any report card that contained a B rather than all A’s.”
(4) Jordan attended Houston’s all-black Texas Southern University, where she became a star debater and graduated magna cum laude. In 1966 she became the first black woman ever elected to the Texas state senate. There she took up the cause of the working poor. She pushed through legislation that gave the state its first minimum-wage law, an accomplishment that the liberal Texas Observer hailed as “a near miracle”. In 1972, Jordan became the first African-American elected to Congress from Texas since Reconstruction.
(5) Jordan’s friend and fellow Texan, journalist Molly Ivins, described her as “a woman of magisterial dignity” who encountered prejudice and condescension at the legislature. “We always said that if Hollywood ever needed somebody to play the role of God Almighty, they ought to get Barbara Jordan.”
(6) Jordan was a freshman member of Congress serving on the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon because of crimes connected with the Watergate scandal, which had burgeoned into a constitutional crisis. It was a period of national trauma and uncertainty. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Jordan gave a ringing speech in defense of the Constitution….
(7) The Washington Post published the complete text. It articulated the urgent need for the country to come together to assert the rule of law against a president who had usurped it. “She believed that Americans had to be united in a common bond of respect for the Constitution.”
(8) At the 1976 Democratic National Convention, Jordan gave the Keynote address : “We are a people in search of a national community, attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create a society in which all of us are equal. … The great danger America faces [is] that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups : city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private
wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?”
(9) At the Democratic National Convention in 1992, she again gave the Keynote Address. In 1993, after being elected President, Bill Clinton appointed Jordan to chair the Commission on Immigration Reform. She took the place of Cardinal Bernard Law, whose term expired at the end of the Bush presidency. Had Law continued as chairman, he certainly would have pushed it in a direction far different from that pursued by Jordan. Law, the archbishop of Boston, shared the beliefs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which called for expansive immigration policies and an embrace of illegal immigrants.
(11) Jordan assumed leadership of the commission at a time of growing national alarm about illegal immigration. The mood was especially tense in California, where voters the following year would approve Proposition 187, which sought to deny benefits to persons not authorized to be in the United States.
(12) Jordan often talked of the need to strike a balance between two immigration policy values. “The Commission decries hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country,” she said. “At the same time, we disagree with those who would label efforts to control immigration as being inherently anti-immigrant. Rather, it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”
(13) “Unless this country does a better job in curbing illegal immigration, we risk irreparably undermining our commitment to legal immigration.”
(14) Jordan, who said “a well-regulated system of legal immigration is in our national interest,” was one of the last liberal Democrats to warn against the destabilizing danger of illegal immigration.
(15) Jordan wanted to be part of a national effort to manage an urgent national problem. That is why the commission’s first report, which took an unambiguous stand in favor of enforcement of legally established immigration limits, was titled “U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility”:
“Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”
(17) The commission did reach consensus on the issue of cutting off the jobs magnet with a computerized registry of all persons authorized to work in the United States. Its recommendation to curtail legal immigration had one dissenting vote, from commission member Warrren Leiden of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
(18) Jordan Supporter and Liberal Michael Lind offered this lament about Liberal activism:
“Why have liberals been silent about the economic effects of immigration on their natural constituency, the working poor, and black workers in particular? One reason is the inability of liberals to say no to any apparently generous program, particularly if it aims to help those in poor countries. Another is the influence of Hispanic groups seeking to enlarge their constituencies. Many affluent opinion-makers in politics, the media and academia themselves benefit from a never-ending supply of low-wage immigrant maids, janitors, receptionists and other poorly paid, non-unionized employees.”
(19) Lind named Jordan as one of the “few courageous liberals … [who] have dared to bring up the relationship between mass immigration and falling wages.”
(20) The Commission on Immigration Reform drew the following important conclusion :
“The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser-skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force. Many American workers do not have adequate job prospects. We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder.”
