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.
Move? I don't think so.
It will happen without you.
You bet, if it happens, I wont be an accomplice to it.
But, given the fact that we could never stop people from coming across the border from the south, the only fair thing is to end the silly hoops for people coming here from virtually anywhere.
Open the borders to all healthy people who aren't crooks.
That's not to say we should allow them to get wealfare, but if they come here to work, let them.
Yes, but cheaper for who? Cheaper for the employer, yes. But don't forget that little thing you learned in Econ 101 about Externalities!
Somebody else will pay those costs!
Lets see, Pat Buchanan is against it and the likes of Loretta Sanchez are all for it.
Interesting to see who some of you stand with.
I don't remember his exact policy positions, but I remember distictly understanding that his goal was to change the laws, not enforce the un-enforcable laws we now have.
Which is rather awkward because 9/11 called for a serious policy change, enforcement of our laws. Bush's 2000 agenda evidently didnt fit in with the right thing to do. So we have a war on terror with the borders wide open and no leadership on this issue. Now we have Fox telling us his plans for America.
That is the real essense of the problem we face. We could survive the mass immigration from one single defunct culture if we didn't have the enemy within trying to destroy our way of life.
We can not survive both. Simultaneously.
Good grief, you can't possibly be serious, we would be overwhelmed with immigrants from Mexico and every other third world country. You must be one of those open border libertarian types to suggest such a thing.
Pre-1986 we have 300k illegals. Amnesty brings in 3million. Now we have 12 million. There has been a rather large difference in the degree of the problem recently. It seems to revolve around amnesty. That happens to be why people are pissed about amnesty right now.
Come on. Going after someone who wants to pick beets has nothing in comon with going after someone who wants to commit mass murder.
As for "borders wide open". I took a tour of the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin a few months ago. It's quite obvious that if someone want's to get across a border, they're going to find a way to do it.
The way to stop both illegal immigration AND terrorism, is on the streets. Hopefully, streets outside the US.
I disagree. I think the difference is the "critical mass" of mexicans in particular places.
When I was in the Air Force, I stuck pretty much on-base when I was stationed in Germany. I listened to Armed Forces radio, and watched AF TV.
My point is that once a critical mass of illegal mexicans, being taught in mexican in school and seeing mexican on TV is hit, THEN the floodgates open.
Bottom line, they got here and stayed here easily before amnesty, and they still do. Amnesty was meaningless.
LOL! Frightening isn't it?
What are all these potential fruit pickers and hotel maids doing now? This isn't a question of Americans being unwilling to do these jobs it's a question of Americans doing other things. You could hiring them away with fantastic salaries for fruit picking but you'd have fewer people working for more money and that would result in fewer businesses. You also wouldn't be using the skills that most blue collar and white collar workers have.
We could just as easily say that the vast vast majority of middle easterners are here to work. Even those that have broken the rules on immigration.
The way to stop both illegal immigration AND terrorism, is on the streets. Hopefully, streets outside the US.
The terrorists have already displayed several times that they are on our streets too. The point isnt just about the border itself but cleaning up the illegal problem as well.
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