James Walsh's Immigrant Problem

According to his Newsmax bio, columnist James H. Walsh has a long history of serving as a trial attorney and litigator for various state and federal governmental agencies, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

If Walsh prosecuted his cases they way he writes his column -- misleading and error-filled -- some reversals could be in order.

While Walsh's Newsmax archive shows columns dating back only to July, Walsh had been writing irregularly for Newsmax well before that -- a September 2008 column, for instance, bashed Obama over his ties to ACORN, and an October 2007 column insisted that illegal immigration is "lay[ing] siege to the nation.

Walsh has also been getting stuff wrong for about as long. For instance, a March 30 column falsely claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "told an audience of immigrants that U.S. immigration laws are 'un-American,' suggesting that they need not be obeyed, startling rhetoric for a woman in the line of succession for the presidency." In fact, Pelosi called immigration raids that separate undocumented parents from their documented children -- not all immigration laws -- "un-American." Walsh also offered no evidence that Pelosi ever suggested that immigration laws "need not be obeyed."

Following in the footsteps of fellow Newsmax columnist James Humes -- who fabricated a quote by Obama -- a May 21 column by Walsh began by purporting to quote Obama adviser David Axelrod as saying, "The 'TEA Party' movement is an unhealthy mutation from public dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s economic policies." But that direct quote doesn't exist. The full context of Axelrod's remarks -- apparently taken from an appearance on the April 19 edition of CBS' "Face the Nation" -- shows that he is specifically responding to the issue of states seceding from the union when he referred to "an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that's unhealthy." Axelrod never called the tea parties an "unhealthy mutation."

A May 4 Newsmax column by Walsh asserted of the April 15 anti-Obama tea parties: "There were no insults of persons or groups, and even the messages critical of Congress and the president were respectful. There were no vitriolic attacks on elected officials, no name-calling, no hate signs, no slogans of racism." In fact, there were numerous signs that engaged in hateful attacks.

And Walsh wouldn't be a member in good standing of the ConWeb if he wasn't likening Obama to Nazis, which he did in a July 2 column:

ObamaCare legislation would finance universal health care by eliminating the most fragile among us. Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had elaborate plans for the disposal of unwanted fetuses, the handicapped, and the elderly.

Walsh used his August 4 column to repeat discredited falsehoods about health care reform. Walsh mouthed a discredited talking point that the reform bills "include provisions for mandatory 'end-of-life counseling' or 'advanced care planning consultation' for all seniors (defined as anyone 65 years of age or older) to be scheduled every five years." In fact, such consultation is not mandatory.

Walsh also claimed that "The proposed legislation would require all hospitals, health clinics, and medical staff to provide for abortions." In fact, as the Washington Post reported, abortion is not explicitly mentioned in any of the major health-care bills under consideration in Congress; therefore, there cannot be an abortion mandate of the kind Walsh claims exists.

But as the title of his column indicates, Walsh's main focus is supposed to be on immigration. And as his anti-liberal falsehoods and vitriol suggest, Walsh is virulently against all immigration, legal and illegal, and isn't afraid to make up things to press his point.

Indeed, in his Aug. 4 column, Walsh also engaged in a host of smears of immigrants (for wanting an American lifestyle) and of Obama for purportedly favoring eugenics:

Immigrants, legal and illegal, need to realize that the U.S. lifestyle that attracted them may not survive in the new Obama America. Immigrants could find themselves in a totalitarian nation. Globalist Democrats see abortion as a population-control measure, and leftist “progressives” ensconced in the Obama administration see it as a tool in social engineering, adopting the disgraced eugenics of the past.

But as ConWebWatch has detailed, the highly restrictive pre-1960s immigration policy to which some conservatives -- including Walsh's fellow Newsmax columnists Ralph Hostetter and Barry Farber -- would like to see America return was driven in no small part by the same eugenics and racism Walsh considers to be "disgraced."

Walsh continued his pattern of misleading smears of immigrants in his Aug. 31 column. But first, a little demagoguery of Obama:

The Obama campaign for change was designed to move the United States from its discriminatory past to a secular-progressive Utopia. It’s good to recall that in George Orwell’s utopian barnyard, some animals were “more equal than others”. A borderless nation, universal healthcare, energy taxes to end climate change, and reconciliation in lieu of war make up the Obama administration’s 21st century agenda. The president and his radical Democrat supporters rely on simple slogans, political operatives, a pliant newsmedia, a sycophant academia to exploit racial frustrations, and class warfare. Not in vain did Obama study at the knee of Saul Alinsky, architect of the anarchy that has come to be known as Chicago politics.

In fact, Alinsky died when Obama was 11, and there's no evidence whatsoever the two ever met, let alone that Obama "studied at the knee" of Alinsky.

Walsh is particularly upset that Obama "received 74 percent of the Hispanic vote, in return for his support of comprehensive immigration reform with a 'pathway to citizenship' for illegal aliens and their extended families," which Walsh baselessly depicts as "amnesty."

Walsh claimed that Obama faces an "immigration dilemma" because "The Obama administration realizes that U.S. citizens are opposed to benefits, including medical care, for foreign nationals in this country illegally, while immigrant advocates demand healthcare coverage for illegal aliens in the current bills." He then claims that a ban on illegal immigrants receiving benefits under health care reform is "a ruse, for Obama plans to put 'undocumented' aliens on a pathway to citizenship, thus solving the dilemma, even if it bankrupts the country."

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Walsh also played fast and loose with numbers, writing, "Immigration advocates place the number of illegal aliens from all nations at 11 million to 12.5 million. Other demographers put the number at from 20 million to 36 million undocumented immigrants." Walsh doesn't state who those "demographers" are who support that much higher figure -- meanwhile, the federal government and even the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies back up the lower number.

Nevertheless, Walsh insisted on treating the higher number as accurate: "Of the estimated 47 million uninsured in the U.S., nearly half may be in the country illegally." But even conservatives who consider that number of uninsured to be overstate to be inaccurate, like CNSNews.com, claim that the final number includes "9.73 million foreigners" -- which includes people here both legally and illegally.

Walsh concluded with a little more fearmongering: "The double whammy of universal healthcare and comprehensive immigration reform during a recession could signal the end of the United States as the Founding Fathers envisioned it." Walsh's racially based fearmongering and misinformation can't be doing much for the republic, either.

Walsh's Sept. 8 column repeated much of that immigrant-bashing, going on to attack changes in immigration law in the 1960s -- and thus hinting that he would like to return to that racist, eugenics-driven old immigration policy -- complaining that they "reflected Democrat support for quotas favoring Third World nations, a broadened amnesty concept, and creation of a family unity provision to bring in the old folks, once the young folks get situated." Walsh then engaged in a bizarre smear of those immigrants from "Third World nations":

Family unity remains a tenet of immigration advocates. Many immigrants, including those from China and Hispanic nations, respect and revere their elderly. Traces of ancestor worship still permeate many of the world’s cultures. For example, a recent issue of Architectural Digest featured a home in China with a floor plan designating a separate suite for “the grandparents.”

Walsh again played fast and loose with the number of alleged illegal immigrants, claiming that there are "12 million to 36 million illegal aliens currently residing in the United States. Splitting the difference, 24 million illegal aliens could be an acceptable number for calculations." He also again misleadingly claimed that "45 million to 50 million 'Americans' lack proper health insurance. A guestimate is that half the uninsured are non-citizens."

Walsh repeated those dubious numbers again in his Sept. 28 column. He then quickly descended into paranoid ranting:

They are aided and abetted by liberal Democrats, radical Hispanic groups such as La Raza (The Race), leftist academicians, the liberal media, and groups financed by the likes of George Soros –– elitist billionaires who would buy their way into an oligarchy.

Add to this list the America haters, those individuals who choose to see only evil in their homeland. The strategy of these latter-day one-worlders is to foist an image of a morally bankrupt nation, something that America has never been, from its Paleo-Indians to its patriotic legislators struggling against agents of change in Congress –– agents that would destroy the nation to achieve globalist goals.

The Obama administration is intent on reshaping the demographics of the United States by way of open-borders immigration. Poorly educated, easily led, illegal aliens will be naturalized by a looming Obama amnesty. Thus it is not a lie when the president says that no illegal aliens will be covered by Obamacare. His intent is to naturalize them all.

Walsh alluded once more to the alleged (racist, eugenicist) utopia of pre-1965 immigration laws, stating that "For the past 44 years, Congress has jumbled the nation’s immigration laws by catering to immigrant special interest groups rather than to the citizens they allegedly represent."

Walsh also went on a mini-rant against public education, claiming it is "busy instilling in U.S. youth a self-loathing that ridicules the nation’s ethos and its record of bloody sacrifice for the nation and the world." He adds, "In lock-step, the liberal news media demonizes the United States and spins the news to meet its goals." As if his employer, Newsmax, doesn't spin the news to meet its own goals.

Walsh insisted again in an Oct. 12 column that Democrats illegal immigrants will be covered in health care reform, concluding: "Open borders and the subservience of the United States to all comers may prove to be the means to the end the radical left seeks: the end of U.S. sovereignty and the Republic form of government."

Walsh can't seem to decide who he hates more -- immigrants or Democrats.