Politco has a hilariously ill-informed piece on immigration lobbying, written by two reporters obviously unfamiliar with the issue. It starts:
High-profile conservative groups are taking on an unexpected cause: passing immigration reform.
A diverse mix of the Washington consultant class is cutting TV ads, revving up the grassroots and advising lawmakers on messaging and strategy in hopes of getting a bill across the finish line this year.
The surprising effort is a new element to the immigration debate — and one that could influence Republican lawmakers reluctant to support the cause.
Wow. Who’s involved in this “unexpected” and “surprising” “new element”? Grover Norquist, who’s been lobbying for open borders for at least two decades.
Who else? The “Hispanic Leadership Forum”, whose front man is Carlos Gutierrez, George W. Bush’s commerce secretary, who was one of the administration’s chief Hill lobbyists for amnesty back in 2006 and 2007.
Also part of this “unexpected” and “surprising” “new element”, according to Politico is ImmigrationWorks USA, founded years ago by Tamar Jacoby, who’s been pushing open borders for nearly as long as Norquist.
And this last “conservative” group is a doozy: the National Immigration Forum. It’s said to be “helping ramp up conservative grassroots support in the Southeast, West and Midwest.” The National Immigration Forum was founded by leftist attorney Rick Swartz; here’s what I wrote about it a few months ago:
The National Immigration Forum’s board includes Angelica Salas, head of the leftist Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) (profiled here by Discover the Networks) and Rick Stolz, head of another leftist group called OneAmerica (formerly the Hate Free Zone), founded after 9/11 to obstruct overdue national-defense measures.
Former members of the Forum’s board include the head of the L.A. branch of CARECEN, which backed the Communists in El Salvador’s civil war and which helped pioneer the “sanctuary” movement to subvert U.S. immigration law. Another former board member, and later an employee, is “Jihad Jeannie” Butterfield, previously head of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as an alliance between members of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Workers World Party, and one of the few groups which welcomed Saddam’s takeover of Kuwait.
Look, I’m all for a big tent, but if the Forum is conservative, the word has no meaning. But then, I can see how the newbie reporters could have been duped, because the open-borders Right has made common cause with these people.
Is this the kind of in-the-know, cutting edge reporting we can expect from Politico? To borrow from MiB, this is everything we’ve come to expect from years of journalism-school training.