NJ GOP Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month

We have midterm elections coming up this fall, including the usual raft of elections for one-third of the U.S. Senate. In among those is one for junior Senator from New Jersey, the late Frank Lautenberg’s old seat, currently held by Cory Booker.

So who have the Republican Party put up to run against Booker for this Senate seat? A chap named Jeff Bell, that’s who.

Bell is an old GOP war horse. To be precise, he’s 70 years old, a Vietnam vet (Army), with a long career in think tanks and political consultancy. He’s run for a New Jersey Senate seat before — in 1978, bless him, where he lost in the general, and again in 1982, when he lost in the primary.

Well, so here’s Jeff Bell challenging Cory Booker for a New Jersey Senate seat. He’s busy sending out fliers and emails to Republicans. One recipient passed on one of those emails to me.

From: Jeff Bell Subject: Hispanic Heritage Month

Dear friend,

I want to wish you a Happy Hispanic Heritage month.

But rather than dish out trivia or talking points, I want to tell you why it’s important to me as a conservative candidate.

Ronald Reagan once said, “Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.” Maybe that’s politically incorrect to repeat in 2014. But I do agree with the premise behind his assertion: if the Republican Party makes the case to them, Hispanics will vote GOP.

But they do have a problem now. Our party has been unwelcoming. Republican members in Congress have refused to consider a path to legalization for those who came here illegally over the years, or an expanded guest worker program that is open to low-skilled workers, not just Ph.D.’s. President Reagan tried to solve this problem in 1986, but the law he signed that year left out access for immigrants who want to come here and work temporarily without becoming citizens. It’s led to the crisis we have today of millions of people who came from Mexico and elsewhere and simply stayed because neither the law — which actually makes it a misdemeanor — nor our border security encourage people to come here the right way.

I like Rush Limbaugh and have been interviewed by him on other topics, but I have to say that I fundamentally disagree with his assertion that those who immigrate here from Mexico are registered Democrats in waiting. Hispanics in the U.S. have the highest rate of business creation among all ethnic groups — and more than double the national rate. Moreover, they tend to share conservatives’ beliefs that life begins at conception and marriage is composed of a husband and a wife. They are as good a prospect at voting Republican as any immigrants to America from anywhere in the world.

If elected, I’m headed to the U.S. Senate to fight for a comprehensive immigration reform plan that includes a generous, market-based guest worker program so we don’t repeat the crisis that stems from 1986. I’ll fight against the special interests like Big Labor to get this done. As we achieve success, I believe Hispanic voters will move toward the GOP. Immigration may rank for many of them relatively low in a poll of issue priorities, but our party’s stance on it has served as a barrier for them to consider the rest of our agenda that would appeal to Hispanics …

That’s it, that’s as far as I can go. This Republican candidate is offering raw, unadulterated immigration boosterism, shilling for the treason lobby.[Citing Ronald Reagan, N.J. Sen. Cory Booker opponent Jeff Bell calls for immigration reform, By Matt Friedman, NJ.com, September 25, 2014]

And just look at the evasions and untruths there. Mexicans believe that, quote, “marriage is composed of a husband and a wife”? Homosexual marriage was legal in Mexico City before it was legal in New York — a year and a half before. Quote, “the crisis that stems from 1986″? The nature of that crisis was, that the southern border was not sealed, as had been promised in the 1986 law, because the agricultural lobbies wanted a flow of cheap labor. Big Labor is against mass immigration? Say what? Which planet is Jeff Bell living on?

Bell’s email illustrates the sneering contempt that both big political parties have for people who are skeptical about the benefits of continuing mass immigration — which means, on the polling data, an actual majority of Americans. We have no-one to vote for.

Let’s suppose you are a non-Hispanic New Jerseyan who is dubious about the benefits of mass immigration. You might, for example, be a computer programmer who lost your job when your firm hired in cheaper workers from India on H-1B visas. Or you might have run a small home-improvement or landscaping business employing Americans that lost out to less scrupulous firms using illegal-immigrant labor. Or perhaps you watched over the years as a quiet old working-class part of your town got taken over by tattooed gangbangers from El Salvador.

Or perhaps you think that the good old U.S.A. can produce all the high-school dropouts it needs, and doesn’t need to import them from other countries; or that forty million Mexicans settled here is enough Mexicans; or that opening a seedy bodega in a back street isn’t exactly up there with Walmart and Google in “business creation”; or that our nation’s laws should be respected, and people who break them should not be rewarded with the great boon of U.S. citizenship.

Suppose, in other words, you are an immigration skeptic in New Jersey. Who are you going to vote for to fill your junior Senate seat: Democrat Cory Booker, who is graded F-minus on immigration issues by NumbersUSA? Or Republican Jeff Bell, who — it could hardly be more obvious — is bought and paid for by the cheap-labor lobbies?

Is it any wonder that 3 million non-Hispanic white voters stayed home in the 2012 election? What’s the point of voting when both major-party candidates are singing the same song on an issue crucial to the future of our nation?