Pro-amnesty advocates will try to co-opt Sunday’s commemoration of the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma–one of the most seminal moments in the civil rights movement and the history of the country–to again push the false narrative that amnesty for illegal immigrants is the new civil rights movement.
The Alabama Coalition for Immigration Justice is mobilizing and will bus amnesty advocates for the march, which will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the seminal march for voting rights for black American citizens. According to AL.com, the group reportedly declared that, “throughout the weekend, immigrants will stand with thousands of others converging in Selma at this historic moment to affirm their role in the struggle against racism and oppression.”
As Breitbart News has emphasized, “the civil rights movement of the 1960s was about ensuring that black Americans received all of the rights they were due as citizens of the United States while today’s pro-amnesty movement is about demanding full rights for non-citizens who entered the country illegally.”
But that has not stopped amnesty advocates, like gay activists have tried to do with their movement, from trying to tie the amnesty movement to the black civil rights movement.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), for instance, has declared that the amnesty movement is “our Selma.”
“This is our Selma and we will walk, we will march, we will be arrested, we will do anything and everything it takes to make sure families are protected in this nation,” Gutierrez recently said.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR) recently invoked the voting rights and civil rights marches and said at an “Immigration Day Action” event that the amnesty movement is the civil rights battle for millennials. He also bluntly admitted that the amnesty movement “will decide who is in charge of this country for the next 20 or 30 years.”
Even Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who was beaten on that fateful Sunday while heroically marching for voting rights that were being denied to U.S. citizens, has tried to tie the amnesty movement to the civil rights movement.
He again did so again at a February 25 event at the Washington D.C. on the civil rights movement that left a Democrat in attendance dismayed. Donald A. Collins, a Democrat who lives in Washington, D.C., was disheartened that someone he considered a “true hero” was pushing comprehensive amnesty legislation. He pointed out that “not all African-Americans share this delusion” that the amnesty movement is the new civil rights movement.
“Regardless of his political position on this issue, Lewis will always be a hero to this Democrat,” Collins recently wrote. “But the catastrophic impact of his Open Borders position on the upward mobility of so many young African-Americans, especially the 25% of young African-Americans who are unemployed in the District of Columbia, cannot be justified or permitted.”
He added that if Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and “Lewis think that letting in endless numbers of aliens, legally and illegally, will ensure Democratic hegemony, they are sadly mistaken. They are inspiring a rebellion by an increasingly widespread and diverse group of Americans who are watching their quality of life utterly collapse.”
“More and more Americans are experiencing the negative consequences of mass immigration. They know wages are declining. They see unemployment rising. They are witness to the collapse of our rule of law,” Collins continued. “John Lewis may have been right in the past, but no progressive can support transforming America from a middle class nation of under 200 million people in 1965 into the projected 500 million poverty-stricken Americans of 2050. Fighting for equality means fighting for the victims of mass immigration, including African-Americans, the unemployed, and the working class.”
Collins added that “the fight against mass immigration isn’t in contradiction to the Civil Rights movement. It’s part of the same struggle.”
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow has repeatedly written to President Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus to warn against the detrimental impact that massive amnesty legislation will have on struggling black Americans trying to climb up the economic ladder.
“The obvious question is whether there are sufficient jobs in the low-skilled labor market for both African-Americans and illegal immigrants,” Kirsanow wrote last year. “The answer is no.” He added that grants of amnesty to illegal immigrants will also “serve as a magnet to prospective illegal immigrants and further depress employment opportunities and wages for African-Americans.”
In the 1990s, Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and the late Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) did not sound like today’s black Democrats on immigration.
When Senators were attempting to loosen restrictions on employers hiring illegal immigrants, Scott reminded Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) that “America does not have a labor shortage.”
“With roughly 7 million people unemployed, and double that number discouraged from seeking work, the removal of employer sanctions threatens to add additional U.S. workers to the rolls and drive down wages,” she wrote. “Moreover, the repeal of employer sanctions will inevitably add to our social problems and place an unfair burden on the poor in the cities in which most new immigrants cluster–cities which are already suffering housing shortages and insufficient human needs services.”
Jordan (D-TX), who chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, said that “it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”
“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,” Jordan said during one Congressional hearing.“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.”
Last week, National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO) simply asked, “Where are the Barbara Jordan’s of our times?”
The former officers emphasized that the “American people are trapped in a conundrum” because “they find themselves appealing to Congress to effectively address nationwide Immigration Insecurity while fully realizing that Congresses failure to insist that current Immigration Laws are fully enforced is precisely what has lead to the current crises.”
President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush, who failed to get the comprehensive amnesty legislation he desired when he was president, will attend the “Bloody Sunday” march. More than 100,000 people are expected to be in attendance in Selma for the festivities.