Borking Immigration Hawks

The pro-amnesty Right is borrowing its views and its tactics from the Left

By Mark Krikorian

Remember this?

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens  -- Ted Kennedy demonstrating the Leftist talent for distortion and defamation

The high-immigration Right has borrowed not only its immigration-policy views from Ted Kennedy, but now his political tactics as well. Grover Norquist, Linda Chavez, American Conservative Union president Al Cardenas — and Senator Marco Rubio — have launched a campaign to bork those on the right who disagree with President Obama’s immigration plans.

The immediate basis of the smear campaign is an article in Human Life Review claiming that the organizations working for less immigration — the advocacy groups Numbers USA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and my own think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — represent a cabal of abortion-crazed leftists motivated not by concern for the well-being of America but by a hidden population-control agenda. (I don’t say “cabal” for effect — that’s actually the word used in a Politico op-ed by the president and policy director of the American Principles Project.)

Don’t take my word for it — read the Human Life Review piece. Ramesh Ponnuru is right that the review’s editors, like everyone else involved in this attempt to stifle debate, “should be embarrassed.” The article declares that “to CIS, seemingly every supposed problem in the world can be solved by decreasing the size of the human population.” CIS is said to be “openly terrified of increases in national population.”

This is hilarious stuff for anyone who’s read my postings at NRO. (More than a decade’s worth are listed here.) What’s more, the Census Bureau projects that future immigration (rather than the decisions Americans make about how many children to have) will add 100 million people to our population over the next half-century. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that a government social-engineering program of this magnitude will have implications for our quality of life. But CIS has never taken, and will never take, any position on abortion or euthanasia — or on the flat tax or defense spending either, for that matter.

This effort closely parallels a campaign started by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007 to marginalize mainstream immigration skeptics as Klansmen and skinheads. That effort is explored in some detail here, in a piece by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Jerry Kammer, who is now with CIS.

Both the SPLC and the current smear campaign started with the publication of a report that served as the focal point for other groups. The SPLC published a report designating FAIR a “hate group” (as it did later with the Family Research Council), just as Human Life Review published the above-mentioned article, written by one Mario Lopez of the Hispanic Leadership Fund (whose board includes Norquist, Chavez, Cardenas, the governor of Puerto Rico, former senator Mel Martinez, and others). Other organizations then pointed to the reports in follow-up op-eds, press releases, panel discussions, and closed-door meetings. The SPLC report was key to the National Council of La Raza’s “We Can Stop the Hate” campaign and to the establishment of America’s Voice as a “war room” for the open-borders Left. The Human Life Review article has served the same purpose at Norquist’s Wednesday Meeting and for presentations by Alfonso Aguilar of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

This latest effort is the conservative version of declaring CIS, Numbers USA, and FAIR “hate groups,” and the goal in both cases is the same: to silence dissent and thus avoid a debate that Norquist and the SPLC would lose.

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British health service foots £1m bill for Polish expectant mothers living in England to return home to give birth

British taxpayers are forking out almost £1million a year for pregnant Polish women to go home and give birth in their native country, it emerged yesterday.

Under European Union rules, set up to provide emergency healthcare between member states, hundreds of Polish women are returning to their families to have their children, with the NHS picking up the bill.

Last year around 500 Poles living in the UK went back to their native land to give birth.

Given that the average cost to the NHS per birth is £1,631, Polish births alone cost the British taxpayer around £850,000 in 2012.

The situation has become more acute following the influx of immigrants into the UK from Eastern Europe over the past decade. Under EU regulations, anyone who comes to Britain to earn a living can fill in an S2 or E112 form, which entitles them to free treatment in any other member state or Switzerland.

The same applies to British women living in a European state.

Latest figures reveal that there were 1,132 cases last year where Britain paid for treatment in European Economic Area countries or Switzerland. Some 995 cases, or around 90 per cent, related to maternity care.

Of these, 519 were for treatment in Polish hospitals, with 174 cases in France and 90 in Germany. There were 74 cases in Slovakia, 49 in the Czech Republic and 21 in Hungary.

The figures are more than double that of 2010 when just 442 of the 1,498 cases related to maternity care.

Gerard Batten, UKIP spokesman on home affairs, said: ‘This is yet another example of how membership of the EU means the UK public purse is being plundered. People fleece us for whatever they can get. Unfortunately all these things are totally legal. We can only put a stop to it by leaving the EU.’

To obtain an E112 form, an NHS consultant must first agree that treatment abroad is right for the patient.  The patient must also gain approval from the local health authority and the Department of Health.

Patients are treated under the same care conditions as residents of the country they go to. In nations where state healthcare is not free, the patient may have to pay a percentage of the cost.

Tory MP Chris Skidmore said: ‘When this scheme was set up it was meant to cover for emergency treatment.

‘This particular EU area should be renegotiated when the Prime Minister sets out a repatriation of powers.’

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘Under EU rules, anyone working and paying tax where they are living, including Britons living abroad, can request treatment in another EU country.

‘This is particularly common in maternity cases where some people prefer to be around family and friends.’

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