If politics makes for strange bedfellows, how much more so when it comes to immigration policy. The most recent evidence of this was a public hearing on an amendment introduced in the Georgia House of Representatives.
The bill is short and simple: It would require the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) to maintain statistics on the number of foreign prisoners in its custody; What percentage do they make up of the total number of state prisoners, broken down by nationality? and, importantly, those against whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reported detainees with the intent to take them into custody to begin deportation proceedings upon their release. In addition, these figures would have to be made publicly available.
At the hearing, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), argued against the bill. We know this courtesy of DA King, who attended the hearing and took a photo of the sign. in the sheet.
This brings us back to the question of strange bedfellows, in this case the SPLC and CAIR. Hold:
The SPLC tends to denounce a variety of other organizations or individuals whose views it does not share as racists, anti-Semites, hate groups, homophobes, xenophobes, whatever. Sometimes this gets the SPLC into trouble – like when they contacted Dr. Ben Carson had to apologize for putting him on her “extremist watch list,” or when she called Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist.” and was forced to settle a lawsuit for more than $3 million and a public apology. There have been op-eds in liberal newspapers like the Washington Post suggesting that the SPLC has lost its credibility, and even the liberal magazine Politico has asked the same question. Yet the SPLC, which has a huge war chest of donations from serious liberals, remains unrepentant. (Disclosure: The Center for Immigration Studies, of which I am a member, is suing the president of the SPLC and the head of its “hate” operation under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for labeling our organization as a hate group.)
CAIR is a completely different organization. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal criminal case against the Holy Land Foundation, a fundraising arm of the terrorist organization Hamas. The United Arab Emirates classifies CAIR as a terrorist organization due to its ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Just last April, a Los Angeles CAIR official found himself in an uproar after he was exposed by the media for comments in which he compared Israel to the brutal Islamic State, which tortured swaths of Iraq and Syria during its brief rule , beheaded, crucified, and…stoned to death, infidels, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals (exactly the kind of people SPLC claims to want to protect).
So it seems that the only thing these organizations have in common is an aversion to any form of immigration control or anything that brings to light the kind of data that the bill might require.
Returning to the Georgia bill, King notes that one Democrat arguing against the bill even went so far as to predict “race wars” in Georgia's penitentiaries (listen here starting at 7:10).
Race wars? Really? About collecting data? I am amazed and remember the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo because they had the audacity to use astronomical facts to determine the shape of our world and the nature of our solar system. Of course, if you don't opt for facts, you can always join the Flat Earth Society.
One wonders what this Democrat's views on global warming are and whether he would, one way or another, join in suppressing legitimate data and scientific findings in order to reach a clear conclusion. Almost certainly not.
Likewise, one might think that collecting data on Georgia prison inmates, including aliens, would be a fairly innocuous requirement – why hasn't the Georgia DOC already done this on its own initiative? But in the turbulent world of immigration, nothing is ever easy.
