Posted on 01/09/2004 12:56:02 PM PST by JohnGalt
Real Message of The Bush Amnesty
by Pat Buchanan
If George Bush’s amnesty for between 8 million and 14 million illegal aliens is enacted, you can kiss the old America goodbye.
Consider what the president is saying with his amnesty. He is telling us that he cannot or will not do his constitutional duty to defend the states from invasion. He is saying that he simply cannot or will not protect our borders or enforce our immigration laws. He is saying he will no longer send illegal aliens back.
Not long ago, this would have produced calls for impeachment and cries that, “If Bush won’t enforce our laws, let’s elect a president who will.”
By offering amnesty and residency to millions who broke in line, broke our laws and broke into our country, Bush is not only rewarding wholesale criminality, he proposes to legalize it.
His amnesty will send this message to the world: the candy store is open, and the Americans cannot protect it. Now is the time to bust in.
As there must be billions of people willing to come and work for a fraction of our minimum wage—and exploit our social safety net—the number who could come under the Bush guest-worker program is almost infinite.
Imagine a car wash that employs 40 African-American, Latino, and white working-class folks at $8 an hour each. A new car wash down the street opens up, offering 40 new jobs at $5.15 an hour. No Americans apply. Under Bush’s proposal, that employer would be free to go to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, round up workers, and bring them in.
The new car wash with its foreign workers then drives the old car wash with its American workers out of business. Taxpayers are then forced to subsidize the newly unemployed—and pay for the medical care, food stamps, rent supplements, welfare, and schooling of all the new immigrants and their families, provide legal services when they get in trouble and pay for more cops to police their neighborhoods.
And every child born of a guest worker would, under our 14th Amendment, become an American citizen, automatically entitled to all the benefits of citizenship. Meanwhile, Bush’s amnesty will do nothing to halt the illegal invasion that continues to this hour. If you would know what America’s social, cultural, and fiscal future will look like, take a ride through Los Angeles, capital of Mexifornia.
But why did President Bush pick now to propose as explosive an idea as amnesty, when it seemed he was holding a winning hand on the issues of taxes, national security, the economy, and gay marriages?
One sees here the cynical ploy of “Boy Genius” Karl Rove. With the filing deadlines for the Republican primaries having passed and no GOP opponent, with no Third Party challenger from the Right, and with Dean the likely Democratic nominee, Rove knows conservatives are boxed in. In the old cliché, “The conservatives have nowhere else to go.”
So Rove is executing an “apertura a sinistra,” an opening to the Left, pandering to Hispanics and Mexican President Vicente Fox, to whom Bush is to pay a visit.
But Rove may be too clever for the president’s good. For there is no hard evidence that Hispanics, other than those militants who detest Republicans, are demanding amnesty. And with Bush’s spending on foreign aid soaring, his deficits rising, and the White House refusing to veto a single spending bill, Rove & Co. may have stretched conservative loyalty to the breaking point.
For some conservatives, this amnesty will snap it. They may just get on their hind legs and fight, for huge majorities have repeatedly registered opposition to any amnesty for illegal aliens. How is the president helped by a bloody battle with his political base in an election year?
Half a century ago, Dwight Eisenhower, informed there were a million illegals in the United States, most of them from Mexico, ordered them sent back. The project was called “Operation Wetback.”
Ike was a strong president. But in George W. Bush, we have a leader unwilling to pay the political price of doing his duty and enforcing the immigration laws of his country because he fears the reaction from the media elite and Mexican-Americans.
When it comes to standing up to truly powerful ethnic lobbies—the Hispanic Lobby, the Cuban-American Lobby, the Israeli Lobby—Bush wilts and folds every time. Nor is it a healthy sign for the future of our republic when its president offers an amnesty to law-breakers, rather than doing his painful duty to protect his country from what has now become an unstoppable foreign invasion.
The real threats to America’s survival do not come from the Sunni Triangle. They come from within, and unfortunately we have a president who either does not understand them or will not look them in the face.
Thank you for injecting this bit of Socialist demagoguery, which has been used since the 1920s to try to split up mainstream Americans over old ethnic antagonisms. It is not an argument, of course, against anything that Pat has written. Just a demagoguish appeal to old prejudices.
Now if you want to discuss the differences between the rural Irish who came to America in the 1800s and the Mexican Mestizo of today, I am sure that someone will be happy to accommodate you. And that need not be limited to merely the differences between legal and illegal immigration; not even to the difference between having an open frontier and suffering from gridlock and unemployment in virtually every major urban area. It would also involve a comparison of the similarities between Irish Society and the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic Society of most of the Founding Fathers, and a lot of other areas of greater compatibility.
But you do not want to discuss such questions. You would rather appeal to Irish American resentment at the way someone's Grandfather was treated a hundred years ago, to try to divide those who identify with the ongoing ethos of America. And to what end? That there be no place on earth, where the continuity of that ethos may be assured? Well, permit the rest of us, who love the America you would destroy, to stand fast for what better men than either you or I, vouchsafed to us.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
So Pat says.
But I'll be right up front and admit it. I don't want the US to become North Mexico. Mexican culture is fine to visit, but I don't want to live there.
At the same time, we've got a huge problem, and we can't just deport millions of people. They're human beings just like me.
Beyond whatever Bush is doing, we also need a serious assimiliation program. English classes. American history classes, like they did 100 years ago to assimilate the Italians and Irish. Stand up every morning and say the Pledge of Allegance.
And get rid of the stupid limitations on people immigrating from places other than mexico so that maybe we get back to a "melting pot" instead of a segregated mexican vs. american culture.
My boss is Canadian, educated at Cambridge, and he's got to jump through all kinds of hoops to stay here and keep his family here. It's stupid to give him such a hard time, while it's impossible to prevent farm workers from coming across the border.
It will do no such thing. There was nothing preventing them from coming here before, there still isn't. Nothing's changed.
Geeze. That's the same argument the left has been making, saying attacking in Iraq will just make more terrorists. Like there weren't plenty in the first place.
You got it. And they'll elect Howard Dean.
In his speech Bush claimed the "guest workers" would come here, work for a period of time, and leave. There is absolutely nothing in his speech about preventing them from bringing their families along. He proposes to let in more of these "willing workers" - and will leave us with the tab for their huge appetite for socialist services. And with their anchor babies, there'll be no way of them leaving.
If it should come to that I'm still wondering how our police are going to end up killing a bunch of people. You know we've had refugee camps before.
Do the victims of illegal's crimes matter at all? Do those stories every make the national news and get personal? Maybe we should compare the crime rate of deportation to illegal immigration? Does it even occur to you that people are paying with their lives and suffering the rape of family members because of this situation?
Well, I know one hospital that will not. The Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte, CA was forced to close its doors last night because it went broke. One guess what the reason was.
But then we have gotten used to that here in Mexifornia. You folks soon will too. Enjoy your Aztlan!
He also said now the floodgates will be open and to expect millions more.
BTW, the bill also states that these "workers" will be allowed to bring their immediate families if they can prove they have a way to provide for them.
10 million+, 4 immediate family members = another 40 million. 50 million people.
Our population is only 290 million in this country.
If you are right you are still wrong I guess.
damn
That's my whole problem with it, nothings changed. Rewarding those who came here illegally while making everybody else who have been patiently waiting in line jump thru hoops just strikes me as bad policy, not to mention unfair to those who have played by the rules.
No way will I be part of this.
I remember him saying that he would fix our immigration problems. Most people would believe that a President sworn to uphold the law would mean that he was going to enforce the law. What he actually has done is failed to uphold the law.
You'll have to move. It will happen without you.
It IS difficult to communicate a nuanced opionion in a few sentences, particularly when the heat is rising.
I don't like the idea of a future mexican culture in the United States. Mexican culture is corrupt, and economicly backward.
BUT, we have a huge problem, that DID NOT begin the day Geo. W. was sworn in. He did try and handle this in 2001, in a way that he had talked about during the election of 2000. But the hints of a policy change that were communicated in early Sept 2001 got sidetracked a bit on 9/11.
Making mexicans "legal" would actually be taking away an advantage they have in hiring. They would thereafter be subject to all minimum wage laws and open for unionization. At that point, why would an employer bother hiring someone with limited communications skills, when he could hire someone with the same wage expections without that problem?
I studied history enough to remember the "Trail of Tears" sent Cherokee Indians into Oklahoma Territory. Huge numbers of them died. This talk about deporting millions of mexicans reminds me of this debacle, and despite whatever qualms I've got about living in "North Mexico", I still can't see sending millions of people down the road into the unknown. That's just not right. We let them in here, over decades of time. It's just not right to change our mind now and get serious about inforcing a law that existed when they got here.
So I say, everybody should be welcome in America. Just learn English, join the American culture, and become one of us.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.