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.
I don't buy any item in Bush's plan. Do you remember incrimintalism?" This is when politicians slowly introduce bits and pieces of legislation they know if given to the populace in its entirety would bring on war. This is the game Bush is playing with America.
What is wrong with closing the borders NOW? No, Bush will never allow that because his main goal is the same as President Fox, and that is to put an end America as we now know it. Mexico will own America within 5 years. We Americans won't even have money left to buy a newspaper.
And tell me again smart sir, what is wrong with enforcing the law and deporting the illegals? Sure it is going to hurt some, but when a killer is jailed isn't his family hurt? So should we stop jailing killers?
This is our country. Bush has no right to give it away.
And a big improvement.
And a big improvement.
It sounds like you're saying, "George Bush, right or wrong." It is one thing to say, "My country right or wrong," since the alternative is to commit treason, or to renounce one's citizenship. (By implication, one is admitting that one's country is wrong.) But George Bush is not America. And as for whether he's an improvement over Bill Clinton, that once obvious truth is becoming more ambiguous by the day. But your statement is irrelevant anyway. It implies, "Bill Clinton was so bad, that Bush gets carte blanche." George Bush does not get a free ride. A free people does not give carte blanche to any leader.
No, that's not what I'm saying. It's important to criticize Bush, and most of those upset about his immigration proposal are pretty decent people, although my view is that the proposal is a lot better than the status quo.
What I'm saying is that whether you agree with this policy or not, or choose to vote for Bush or not, you have to admit he has character unlike our last leader.
He is not ducking this issue even though it would probably be of political benefit for him to do so.
All ten million of them?
Granted, the solution to the crisis is closer to employer regulation than it is to trying to regulate the legitimacy of ten million stealth shadows.
Should Congress overnight find a conscience and the Senate wake up tomorrow with ethics, we might have a chance.
Until then . .
"Let's look at the politics of it - and in saying this to you, I don't want any inferences that I am agreeing with it."
Another leftist-know-nothing-whack-job weighs in!
"...pro-Amnesty Republicans..." You mean like that great bleeding heart Leftie, Ronald Reagan.
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