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Jay Ambrose: The Bush plan on immigration - Those Furious Orcs Are Talking
Naples Daily News ^

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

picture 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.


TOPICS: Extended News
KEYWORDS: aliens; bush; bushimmigration; illegalimmigration; immigration; plan
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To: Happy2BMe
No. I have been referring to him as Karlville Rove as he is Bush's evil genius, the equalent ( almost) of James Carlville. The difference is Carlville was at least true to a political ideology, even if a failed one. Rove seems to feel anything goes as long as it MIGHT inicrease Bush's numbers in 2004.
21 posted on 01/16/2004 11:40:51 AM PST by ZULU (Remember the Alamo!!!!!)
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To: Happy2BMe
First, who the heck is Jay Ambrose?

Second, all he's got are strawman arguments.

From http://www.townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/bs20040114.shtml we learn this shocking statistic:

"From 1992 to 2002, the number of companies fined for hiring illegals dropped from 1,063 to just 13."

Also see "Correcting the Record About President Bush's Immigration Proposal" http://www.fairus.org/Media/Media.cfm?ID=2344&c=34
22 posted on 01/16/2004 12:16:19 PM PST by lonewacko_dot_com (http://lonewacko.com/blog)
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To: Happy2BMe
Enforcement? Simple. Make all employers who hire illegals subject to ten year prison sentences. If enough of them hear . . . "Bubba thinks you're cute, fella" . . . all prospective employees will have to pass FBI, CIA, and MI6 background checks before they'll be allowed to pick up an employment application or jump in the back of a pickup.
23 posted on 01/16/2004 12:29:49 PM PST by geedee (All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.)
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To: Happy2BMe
Those orcs are going to stay home or vote 3rd party on election day!! And I hope it sends a message to Washington -- AMERICANS WANT THE BORDER CONTROLLED! Enough of this tyranny.
24 posted on 01/16/2004 12:46:51 PM PST by exmarine ( sic semper tyrannis)
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Comment #25 Removed by Moderator

To: Sabertooth
Is this guy Ambrose as utterly ignorant of the subject he's writing on as he sounds, or does his body not contain a single honest bone?
26 posted on 01/16/2004 1:19:26 PM PST by mrustow
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To: Happy2BMe
I don't buy every item in the Bush plan

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.

27 posted on 01/16/2004 1:28:57 PM PST by swampfox98
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To: Happy2BMe
Right or wrong, Bush is a leader and a decent man.

And a big improvement.

28 posted on 01/16/2004 1:31:43 PM PST by Tribune7 (Vote Toomey April 27)
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To: Happy2BMe
"They have no workable alternative."

-----

Workable alternative #1:

(1) An individual or corporation that hires an illegal immigrant - whether they realize he's an illegal immigrant or not - is fined. Severely. Say $250,000 to $1 million per worker.

(2) Any educational institution (elementary school on up through universities) that lets an illegal enroll is hit with the same fine.

(3) Any hospital who treats an illegal is hit with the same fine.

Problem solved - they'll deport themselves.
29 posted on 01/16/2004 1:33:33 PM PST by applemac_g4
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To: Sabertooth
As of tomorrow any Employer who hires Illegal aliens will be Jailed and fined 25,000 dollars for each offense.
When I open an acct in a bank I must have a valid Social Security # and the bank clerk can check out the the permit # on a similar syatem in seconds.
Any persons wanting to work in America must apply through the Govt. where they are checked thoroughly and given a permit # with an expifration date which the employer must review and report back of regular forms to the Govt.
The employer must get all employees through the govt. and is responsible to maintain records on any worker.
All workers so hired would be fingerprinted and photo ID'd
in order to be tracked.

In the 1980's any employer who hired a non citizen
would be fined 10,444 dollars for each offense.
Illegal aliens allowed to roam through the country to seek out jobs on their own without any form of monitoring is just insane and is the reason for the current mess we are in.
There are as many ways to solve this problem as there are ILLEGALS in our country.


30 posted on 01/16/2004 2:17:01 PM PST by chatham
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To: lonewacko_dot_com
Thanks for the great links!
31 posted on 01/16/2004 2:54:53 PM PST by mrustow
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To: Tribune7
Right or wrong, Bush is a leader and a decent man.

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.

32 posted on 01/16/2004 3:04:54 PM PST by mrustow
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To: mrustow
It sounds like you're saying, "George Bush, right or wrong."

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.

33 posted on 01/16/2004 3:43:59 PM PST by Tribune7 (Vote Toomey April 27)
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To: chatham
That's what they need to do --- go after the illegal employers just like they go after tax evaders. Just like tax evaders ---- they won't catch all of them but they will make it less attractive a crime to commit.
34 posted on 01/16/2004 4:31:47 PM PST by FITZ
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To: applemac_g4
"they'll deport themselves."

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 . .

35 posted on 01/16/2004 4:57:57 PM PST by Happy2BMe (Liberty does not tolerate lawlessness and a borderless nation will not prevail.)
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To: Sabertooth
"...pro-Amnesty Republicans..." You mean like that great bleeding heart Leftie, Ronald Reagan. What President Bush attempted to do (weak on the border control side as it was) was to match illegals (and "legals", to include US citizens) with jobs. Once all the jobs were filled, the theory went, the surplus illegal population wouldn't have much choice but to go home. Yeah, the President's proposal ("political" though it may have been, that's what politicians do: politics) is dead. So now we're left with Option 1) "do nothing", 2) the Democrat approach (amnesty for all, a "fast track" to US citizenship, and "voting rights" for the amnestied non-citizen), and 3)the Tom Tancredo on steroids approach advocated by so many at FR: fine and jail employers (no matter how much economic dislocation to a recovering economy this might cause); increase the Border Patrol to the size of US Army and suspend the Constitution so we can ferret out all illegals; and mine and fence the Canadian and Mexican borders. The only problem is that Option 1 isn't working, and 2) and 3) are also D.O.A.
36 posted on 01/16/2004 7:41:06 PM PST by pawdoggie
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To: Happy2BMe
Rush Limbaugh on the Immigration propsal by W 1-16-04:

"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!

37 posted on 01/16/2004 8:33:27 PM PST by Kay Soze (“The Bush immigration plan is heavily dependent on enforcement agencies we don't have”- WFBuckley)
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To: Kay Soze
"Well, boys, looks like meat is back on the menu!"
38 posted on 01/16/2004 8:47:53 PM PST by lentulusgracchus
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To: pawdoggie
"...pro-Amnesty Republicans..." You mean like that great bleeding heart Leftie, Ronald Reagan.

President Reagan tried an Amnesty. I supported it, because it was a one time thing, and there was a promise of better enforcement afterward.

Reagan's successors, including the current President Bush, all have failed to make good on that promise.

I, however, have learned my lesson, and will not trust another Amnesty for Illegals or a politician who promises to do something about them down the road.


39 posted on 01/16/2004 10:11:10 PM PST by Sabertooth (Pakistani Illegal Aliens Deport Themselves - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1058591/posts)
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To: Sabertooth
I don't think it's appeasement at all. It doesn't give anybody citizenship, it recognizes a difference between people who are here illegally and those who aren't, and it requires them to pay. Throw in some measures that satisfy the adminstrations admittedly vauge promises of tougher enforcement and I don't think many illegals are going to feel very appeased.
40 posted on 01/16/2004 10:13:36 PM PST by MattAMiller
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