Immigration Clearinghouse

William Gheen of ALIPAC, came out with his spin today on his abysmal failure to mobilize America’s against needed immigration reform.

One of his claims was:

We spoke out and we were heard, and the results are that a sustained wave of new supporters are coming in to ALIPAC as people rush to sign up for our e-mail alerts, and our Facebook and Twitter accounts, which are now the strongest social media accounts on either side of the immigration debate!

There is not a lot of truth to that claim, as is the case with most of William Gheen’s proclamations.

It is explained in depth in this article titled ALIPAC Feeling Challenged by Volunteer-Run Network

As usual, William Gheen is exaggerating.

His numbers on Myspace and Facebook are not even close to impressive and he has 6900 followers on Twitter, courtesy the fact that he follows more than 7500 people. Obviously, people usually reciprocate and follow back. ALIPAC has been on the web since September 2004 and yet, there is nothing impressive about the pageviews it gets when compared to recently established promigrant spaces:

ALIPAC stats is the little teeny (rhymes with Gheenie) blue line slithering like a snake across the bottom of the graph

Nonetheless, his exaggerations turn into outright lies a little later:

Our biggest competitor and the current leader out of all of the pro/con groups are the Dream Act Amnesty activists with their large financial budget. While ALIPAC is kicking their tails on Twitter, they are ahead of us on Myspace with 5,569 supporters and 43,070 people in support of their cause on Facebook!

It is a huge compliment that William Gheen considers a handful of undocumented youth to be his main competitors rather than the multi-million Reform Immigration for America. But he is certainly wrong about any ‘large financial budget.’ The DREAM Act network is volunteer run and funded by undocumented youth who are working 2-3 jobs at a time, struggling to afford college, bearing the brunt of deportation proceedings while living in poor social conditions.
But this is also the same volunteer-run network that put on 108 actions in 26 states last month and ‘mock graduation’ events in 16 states this past June, drawing thousands of participants for these grassroots actions. By comparison, William Gheen has only 24 people signed up for his astro-turf ‘tea parties against amnesty’ in over 3 states on November 14! The fact that nativists can only draw about two dozen protestors is not news to anyone. But William Gheen, just be honest about who you are competing against: less than a dozen unfunded, undocumented youth who simply want to stay and contribute to this country, through passage of a legislation that will benefit only about 300,000 educated young people.
If that is your biggest competition in your battle against what you label as amnesty, good luck winning the war.