Chicago-Style Immigration Reform

Whose aunt was caught as an illegal alien? Whose aunt was denied asylum and ordered deported in 2004 by a federal immigration judge? Whose aunt defied this order and stayed in the U.S., living in H.U.D.-financed housing in Boston? When caught a second time, whose aunt was allowed to repetition for asylum instead of being deported in 2009? Whose aunt found another federal judge who voided the previous deportation order and granted her political asylum on May 17, 2010?


If you answered President Barack Obama, you should get a prize. He is the nephew of Zeituni Onyango, a native of Kenya. She entered the country originally on a visitor's visa, which she overstayed. What made the difference between the outcome of her case in 2004 and 2010? Could it possibly be that having your nephew elected President of the United States gave her special privileges and status not enjoyed by other illegals? Is this what we can expect from immigration reform under Obama? For a Chicago politician, it would be business as usual.

Hot off the British Press: Obama’s Illegal Alien Aunt Living in Boston Public Housing

Barack Hussein Obama has an aunt living in Boston public housing who is in the United States illegally, according to an Associated Press story published by British papers, The Guardian and The Times. Her name is Zeituni Onyango; she is the half-sister of Obama’s father. She entered the United States on a tourist visa about nine years ago, then sought asylum when it expired. An immigration judge denied her request and ordered her to leave the country four years ago. She never did. She attended Obama’s installation as a U.S. Senator in 2004. Instead, Zeituni “lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.” She received a weekly stipend from the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) as a “volunteer resident health advocate between December 2007 and August this year.” She illegally donated $260 to Obama’s presidential campaign, using the BHA office’s mailing address. (James Bone, ET .al, “ Found in a rundown Boston estate: Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango, “ The London Times, October 30, 2008 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5042571.ece)

In Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, he calls her "Auntie Zeituni" and describes her as "a proud woman" with a steady job as a computer programmer in Nairobi, Kenya. However, he acknowledged that Kenya had “no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people burdened by similar hardship.” Obama went on to say, “Now I was family, I reminded myself; now I had responsibilities.” (Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, Three Rivers Press, New York, NY, 1995, p. 329) Zeituni explained to Obama many of his father’s complicated family relationships.

Zeituni took Obama to visit another aunt [Sarah] in the rapidly expanding shantytown at Mathare in Kenya. He described it as “miles and miles of corrugated rooftops.” They walk down an unpaved road where there were “on either side rows of small hovels, their walls a patchwork of wattle, mud, pieces of cardboard, and scavenged plywood.” Zeituni leads him to a concrete building where Sarah lives in “a small room, ten feet by twelve.” (Ibid. p. 331-2) Sarah chastises Obama for taking so long to visit her. She admonishes him, “Look how I live. Why don’t you help us, instead of these others?” (Ibid. p. 333) Before leaving, he gives her the equivalent of $30 in shillings. Zeituni explains, after they leave, “This is what happens to old women who have no husbands.” (Ibid. p. 334)

Zeituni went on to warn Obama to learn from his father’s life. “If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family.” (Ibid. p. 337) Evidently, Obama took his Auntie Zeituni’s advice to heart.

Publication of this case “led to an unusual nationwide directive within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requiring that any deportations before Tuesday's election be approved at least at the level of the agency's regional directors,” according to an AP report. Boston'S Mayor was mystified as to how Zeituni could have been allowed to rent in public housing under a deportation order. When confronted with the facts, William McGonagle, deputy director of the BHA, imitated Colonel Klink of Hogan’s Heroes, protesting “I know nothing about it and I've got no comment.” (Nedra Pickler, "Obama says he didn't know aunt's illegal status," The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7972198) Later, McGonagle acknowledged that Zeituni had been a public housing tenant for five years. “She has been an exemplary resident,” McGonagle said. (Jessica Fargen, "Campaign confirms Obama aunt in South Boston," The Boston Herald, Oct. 30, 2008, http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/2008/view/2008_10_30_Barack_Obama_s_aunt_living_in_South_Boston_housing_project)

Is this not typical of leftwing liberals? Obama wants to spread your wealth around to take care of people like his aunt. Yet, he fails to spread his own wealth around to help her or his half-brother George who lives on $1 a day in a Kenyan hovel. So much for liberal compassion.

Barack Hussein Obama Will Not Be America’s First Black President

Even if elected, Barack Hussein Obama will not be America’s first black president. He would become our first biracial president, if the American electorate were foolish enough. It is as inaccurate to say Obama is black as it would be to call him white. He is neither; his ethnicity is biracial.

Why does this matter? Well, words mean things, as Rush Limbaugh frequently repeats. And, some would like to make this election about race, when it is not and should not be. The race card is being played already among some Obama supporters.

Jack Cafferty on CNN’s “Cafferty File” segment of The Situation Room dealt the race card on Thursday. His question asked, if Obama is not elected, does it mean that America is still racist? This question will be asked more frequently the closer we get to November 4th, especially if Obama’s poll numbers continue their downward trend. Cafferty just happened to be the first one I heard do it, but it was predictable.

The premise of the questions is: If whites do not vote for Obama, it must mean they are closet racists. It is a subtle play on white guilt. It might work, too, if Obama were black, but he is not. Obama is as white as he is black. During the early primaries, this reality posed a problem for many black voters; Obama was not black enough for them. Since then, black voters have joined Obama in his denial of his white heritage. This allowed him to clinch the Democratic nomination.

This denial may be new to other blacks but not to Obama. By his own admission, Obama has been denying his 50% whiteness since his early teens. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he remembered: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race [white] at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”(1)

Obama disdained his white grandparents’ and mother’s Midwestern roots. He wrote:

Theirs [his white grandparents] were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins…the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty…where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams…(2)

About his white grandparents’ reaction to the marriage of his white mother to his black African father, Obama opined:

Whether Gramps realized it or not, the sight of his daughter [Barack’s mother Ann] with a black man offered at some deep unexplored level a window into his own heart. Not that such self-knowledge, even if accessible, would have made my mother’s engagement any easier for him to swallow. In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky…The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard. And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be; a trial that would pass…

The family from Wichita had in fact moved to the forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Dr. King’s magnificent dream. How could America send men in space and still keep its black citizens in bondage? …With his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age.(3)

Abandoned children often turn their missing parent into an idealized, heroic character. The pain of abandonment is too difficult to feel in its full reality. Therefore, abandoned children transform their pain into an intense, if misplaced, identification with the missing parent. Often, this is accompanied by an equal rejection of the parent and family who did not abandon them and is present in their lives. In fact, abandoned children often blame that parent for the missing parent’s leaving.

This was certainly true of Obama. He developed a fantasy vision of his African father and heritage while rejecting his mother’s. He wrote: “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”(4)

Writing of his father Barack Obama, Sr., Obama, Jr. admitted:

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father…The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader – my father had been all those things…It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin [Luther King] and Malcolm [X], [W.E.B.] Dubois and [Nelson] Mandela.(5)

Living in Hawaii with his white grandparents as a teen, Obama recalled:

I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight…I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant…I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood…(6)

On the basketball court, Obama befriended “blacks close to my age…whose confusion and anger would help shape my own.” Only rarely would he remember guiltily that he had white blood coursing through his veins:

White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first…Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray [a black friend] about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false…Our rage at the white world needed no object…no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure.(7)

Not only can Obama still not admit to being partially white, but also on his first trip to Kenya, he denied he was American. In an encounter in a Nairobi marketplace, Obama’s half-sister Auma translates a comment from an old woman, “’She says that you look like an American to her.’ ‘Tell her I’m Luo,’ I said, beating my chest.”(8)

No, Barack Hussein Obama can never be our first black president any more than he can be our 43rd white president. Obama could become our first biracial president. Too bad, if that should happen (God forbid), he would not want to be identified as an American president. No, as his writings prove, he would be our most racist president. Wake up, America.

1 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, (Three Rivers Press, New York, NY) 1995, 2004, p. xv
2 Ibid, 12-13; 15
3 Ibid, 22-23
4 Ibid, 51
5 Ibid, 220-221
6 Ibid, 75-76
7 Ibid, 80-81
8 Ibid, p. 310