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.
I guess they aren't as wonderful as you would have us believe. Even you are admitting they are criminals first and foremost.
Again --- sending people back to their own homes isn't like removing them from their homelands and putting them on a reservation. Even the Pope told Vicente Fox that Mexico belongs to it's indigenous people and it's indigenous people belong to Mexico. That's also what the Mexican flag is all about --- the symbol of their historic homeland.
Your analogy would only make sense if we were taking over Mexico --- kicking the people off their farms and lands and sending them to live in a reservation.
Well except for that big delay after 9/11.
As for the naysayers who constantly carp at Bush without offering solutions: "They have no credibility with me" after blowing "ample opportunity" to make improvements.
I guess we've been remiss in our duties..Not the govt.
Absolutely. That is what is so deplorable about the situation as it exists--and I'm speaking about the victims in both the American citizen population & the non-citizen/ illegal immigrant population. The current situation makes it virtually impossible to find the lawbreakers and, furthermore, many crimes, particularly those against the illegal immigrants, go unreported.
Do those stories every make the national news and get personal?
Yes. Malvo, to name a really famous one. Yes. Workers piled & locked into trucks dead of heat exhaustion/ suffocation.
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.
How many do you think they have to ''kill'' for it to cause a sensation? Answer: The police don't have to ''kill'' anyone. A couple of toddlers dead from scorpion bites, an old man dead of heatstroke, a 15 year old girl horribly disfigured when a candle flame burns the tent in which she was sleeping, a young parent who commits suicide because his/ her dream for a better life has been shattered--how does that play on the nightly news, in the eyes of the world? For that matter, how does it play in the hearts of Americans? There is no way you can confine this debate to strictly the political/ legal arena and that is why the United States can not/ will not deport millions of people who, for the most part, came to this country because they were fleeing from lives of poverty & desparation.
The poverty line isn't very high --- and it means the sponsor must be at 120% of the poverty line, the immigrant's worth might be 0 and the combined incomes are looked at when qualifying the immigrant for means tested programs ---ie welfare. The strategy most use --- don't have the wealthier family members do the sponsoring --- find the one with the lowest income, let them do the sponsoring, the immigrant gets all kinds of welfare. They also can use more than one family member to -- a combination of two or more --- they can be at 60% each --- combined they make 120% and the immigrant will easily qualify for all the many welfare programs.
Even with land for homesteading, an abundance of newly created factory jobs, a lot of land still in agriculture, cheap health care and schools --- there were big problems with those immigrants.
Labor unions got their big start with the immigrants, there was violence and bloodshed in the street. People aren't learning their history anymore and don't even know about the riots of the late 1800s.
Are you comparing what the Nazis did to millions of innocent Jews to the problem of dealing with millions of illegal alien lawbreakers in the United States? If you are, you have quite a vivid and wild imagination. By the way, Jew is not a race, and not all Jews are of the same race.
Has anybody ever heard of buses, passenger trains, and airplanes?
Hey Pat is called pandering with a Rove-ing eye. Pat you always told the truth for America's best interest. I'm glad you are not running again. You don't understand how to pander and why you only got .5% of the vote. Those lobbies are the 3rd rail of politics. They own Washington and the media [well add the corporate internationalists too]. Why do you think you always get smeared? You'll never learn. Thank God.
Somebody else will pay those costs!
Certainly, but in the perspective I was hoping to place my comment in - low labor costs supressing technological innovation - I chose to ignore those.
Plus, those externalities are already in place with no real mechanism to quantify or real solutions to deal with.
A system where the 8 - 14 million workers are accounted for, made at least in some part responsible for social costs, is better than what we have now.
At a minimum we could move beyond guess work and into hard numbers.
Everyone wants to attack Bush for his proposal, and yet I have not seen a proposal from the dissenting side explaining how the above will be done.
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