Certain opponents of President Bush's illegal-immigration initiatives seem as furious and combative as Orcs in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and I have to say some of their points are as excellent as their rhetoric is frightening. Posted on 01/16/2004 8:52:06 AM PST by Happy2BMe
Jay Ambrose: The Bush plan on immigration
Those opposed to President Bush's illegal immigration initiatives need to share their answer with us.
By JAY AMBROSE, ambrosej@shns.com
January 15, 2004
Certain opponents of President Bush's illegal-immigration initiatives seem as furious and combative as Orcs in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and I have to say some of their points are as excellent as their rhetoric is frightening.
Yes, the Bush plan for granting illegals with jobs a three-year extension of their stay can be understood as a subterfuge for amnesty. The plan is indeed unfair to those who have played by the rules, waiting patiently for their turn to enter the country legally, and can be categorized as a reward for law-breaking. What is more, the president wants to go an extra step and make it relatively easy for them to obtain green cards granting permanent residency.
According to the opponents, the president thereby fosters an influx of illegals threatening American jobs, driving down wages and creating a burden on the demand of some of them for social services. Here is the first place these opponents go wrong. The president's plan does not foster these troubles. It provides a possible way to get a handle on them. And here is the second way the opponents go wrong. They have no workable alternative. Abide by their principles and everything just keeps getting worse.
If you jettison Bush's ideas or something in many respects similar, you still have to deal with the fact that there are at least 8 million illegals in the country, maybe as many as 14 million. Just locating them and rounding them up would require huge expenditures and an army of federal agents many times larger than anything now existing. The task would still border on the impossible, and if you think there would not be tragic, ugly episodes making many American sick at heart, you are wrong.
What you would be doing, repeatedly and on a large scale, is yanking people out of neighborhoods where they have lived for years, often tearing families apart. You could also get stricter on letting them take advantage of welfare and educational programs, but I am not sure they thereby scoot or that efforts of that kind would actually achieve their ends without other changes first.
Even if you were far more effective than now in sending the illegal immigrants south — most are Mexicans — you could well be seeing new ones enter in the thousands every year along the 2,000 miles of border we share with Mexico. The notion that you can somehow secure that immense stretch from the ingenuity of people hungry for the work and money to be found in the rich United States is an absurdity to my mind. I suppose you could do it if you were willing to build a version of the Great Wall of China and transfer just about every soldier not now in Iraq to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Something like that is what it would take, I suspect.
You could also aim to go after employers, but enforcement would be a real issue, once again requiring an army of agents. If you didn't supply this army — and if you are not willing to clog the courts mercilessly — forget it.
Suppose, though, that you did something like Bush is proposing, including his incentives enticing current illegals to return home and making legal immigration easier for those who had found jobs on a special registry. You can get more control over everything — over the border; over the illegals who do not have jobs, aren't contributing and are claiming benefits intended for citizens; over the employers who aren't playing by even the revised rules — and you can do it without a vastly enlarged bureaucracy. You won't erase the problem, but you might ameliorate it and you give yourself a chance to focus on assimilating those illegals who will remain in the country, helping them to adapt to our most crucial civic values.
I don't buy every item in the Bush plan. I cannot claim any certainty that it would be as effective as I think if implemented. But it is many steps short of the genuinely outrageous general amnesty that some on the left advocate, and it would have far more chance of success than some get-mean approach that would likely so disgust the country that we would call it off in mid-course. It is also better than proceeding as we are now, a system in which the United States and illegal immigrants are both exploited.
President Bush's proposal is already doomed to failure, and for the very reason this author critcizes us opponents to the plan -- impossible enforcement.
What employer is going to hire a "documented" illegal and pay him at least minimum wage plus benefits while a stream of undocumented illegals, willing to work for even less, continues to flood the labor market?
The President's proposal won't do one damned thing except spark a whole new wave of illegals to come into this country to take jobs away from the moron aliens who price themselves out of the market by registering.
Agreed. The sooner we start, the sooner we slow the flow of illegals. This kind of argument can be used to avoid just about any difficult task.
"Certain opponents of President Bush's illegal-immigration initiatives seem as furious and combative as Orcs in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and I have to say some of their points are as excellent as their rhetoric is frightening."
The notion that you can somehow secure that immense stretch from the ingenuity of people hungry for the work and money to be found in the rich United States is an absurdity to my mind.
I would suggest then that Mr. Ambrose's mind is small and weak.
His mind or is it that he just doesn't get out much?
REALITY CHECK, Mr Ambrose.
Exactly right. All we're doing is adding a bunch of people who will be entitled to not only all government handouts, but forced labor entitlements. Workers comp, min wage etc.
The only "benefit" (if you want to call it that) to illegal immigration is the cheap labor. This makes that go away just adds millions to our "working poor".
There are elitists in the Republican Party?
Impossible.
The above sentence alone tells me that the author hasn't a clue as to what he's talking about. Cut off ALL taxpayer funded services and benefits to illegal aliens while at the same time crack down real hard on companies that hire illegal aliens. Without a job or welfare, the illegal aliens can then choose to either stay here and starve or voluntarily return to their countries of origin.
This argument is getting tiresome.
ACTIVATE HYPERBOLE:
I suppose you could make the argument that since we can't land a fully loaded Escalade (with all the bling-bling) on Mars and have the astronauts do donuts around the Viking probe...it's not really worth undertaking a mission to the red planet.
Exactly what good is a border that enables over $32 BILLION (much of it earned by illegal immigrants from lawless American employers) to flow out of our national economy to Mexico each year.
What's wrong with this picture?
According to the opponents, the president thereby fosters an influx of illegals threatening American jobs, driving down wages and creating a burden on the demand of some of them for social services. Here is the first place these opponents go wrong. The president's plan does not foster these troubles. It provides a possible way to get a handle on them. And here is the second way the opponents go wrong. They have no workable alternative. Abide by their principles and everything just keeps getting worse. If you jettison Bush's ideas or something in many respects similar, you still have to deal with the fact that there are at least 8 million illegals in the country, maybe as many as 14 million. Just locating them and rounding them up would require huge expenditures and an army of federal agents many times larger than anything now existing.
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That's got "JOBS" written all over it.
Somebody needs to call Karl Rove right now. Anybody around here needing the security of a good government job with all the benefits? Better act now - if you don't want it, it's going to somebody that does.
I think we've found a new definition for the word "Elitist." Notice their is no difference between their approach to solving this national crisis and they both have the same battle cry:
I saw an acronym for K.A.R.L. in connection with immigration reform around here very recently.
Anybody remember what it was?
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