Guest Editorial
BY ROBERT ROMANO | JULY 23, 2014
Obama’s not-so-secret HUD plan to resettle millions of illegal immigrants in your community
Act now! Urge the Senate to adopt the Lee amendment to defund Obama’s plan to resettle millions of illegal immigrants in your community!
Last September, the National Council of La Raza issued comments in favor of a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulation, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”
Under the regulation, in October the Obama administration will be empowered to condition eligibility for community development block grants on redrawing zoning maps to create evenly distributed neighborhoods based on racial composition and income.
In 2012, HUD dispersed about $3.8 billion of these grants to almost 1,200 municipalities.
According to La Raza’s comment in favor of the regulation, “Hispanic families often do not know their housing rights and have cited fear of deportation as reason for not reporting rights violations.”
This is telling. By La Raza’s own analysis, then, HUD implementation of the racial rezoning rule will benefit those who “have cited fear of deportation” — that is, low-skilled, low-income illegal immigrants, either those who were outright illegal the moment they set foot in the U.S. or who have simply overstayed their visas. After all, who else would fear deportation?
Therefore, one of the sure effects of HUD’s regime will be to flood unwilling communities with a significant percentage of illegal immigrants.
While the current relocation of thousands, including children, from detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border has garnered national headlines and the ire of elected Republicans including Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Gov. Dave Heineman (R-Neb.), the HUD regulation has largely flown under the radar.
But it’s every bit as important. It’s not enough to arbitrarily implement amnesty — whether through refusal to enforce existing law or Congressional action — the federal government wants to draw the maps of where the new residents will live, forcing local communities to make room whether they like it or not.
And there may be nothing more to it than a cynical partisan motive.
It is no secret that Republicans with their low tax message tend to do better among the middle and upper middle classes, while Democrats with their social welfare regime tend to do better among the poor. The political effect of the HUD rule will invariably be to gerrymander Republican districts at the local level.
Take a Republican state like Texas as a prime example of how this might work. Houston, currently controlled by Democrats, has accepted $38.5 million of these community development block grants. Harris County has accepted another $10.3 million.
Dallas, another Democrat stronghold, has accepted $16.6 million, and Dallas County took $2.1 million.
Austin, too controlled by Democrats, took $7.5 million of the grants.
Republicans at the state level cannot block these grants going to these municipalities, and now, thanks to the HUD rule, by virtue of accepting the grants, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. will get to redraw zoning maps along racial and income boundaries to include more “affordable” units and combat “discrimination.”
It has all the hallmarks of a master plan. Too conspiratorial? It does not take a cynic to see who the winners and losers will be in implementing the racial housing quotas.
In the case of La Raza and illegal immigration amnesty proponents, the likely beneficiaries of the HUD rezoning rule will be Democrat Parties across the country. Both U.S. and immigrant-born Hispanics favor Democrats by nearly 2 to 1 according to Gallup.
What emerges is a plan to resettle as many as 20 million illegal immigrants in specific communities as a pretext to tilt the political scales on the national and local political scenes to favor Democrats.
Fortunately, the House of Representatives has already acted, passing an amendment to the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz) in a close 219 to 207 vote to defund implementation of the regulation.
Now, the bill moves to the Senate, where Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has championed the cause, proposing the same amendment to the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill.
But to get it passed, Senate Republicans will need to unite against the HUD rezoning rule, which amounts to no less than an existential threat to the Republican Party’s continued existence as a viable national political entity.
Are Senate Republicans just going to sit idle while their own states are being federally gerrymandered right under their noses? Failure to take up the Lee defund will be viewed not only as tacit support for the racial rezoning rule, but of national suicide under the inflexible malaise of one-party rule for the next generation.
Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government. Read more at www.NetRightDaily.com.
