Posted on 01/26/2004 9:43:26 AM PST by Map Kernow
Do we want an immigration agency that works, or not?
A recent Cato Institute forum revealed the true attitude of many in the White House about immigration-law enforcement.
The forum (watch the Real Video filehere) featured, among others, Margaret Spellings, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and point person for the president's immigration proposal. Everyone gave the speech he was expected to, but it was during the Q&A that things got interesting. One of the other panelists, my director of research, Steven Camarota, briefly mentioned the alternative to the president's amnesty plan: using consistent, across-the-board enforcement of the immigration law to cause attrition of the illegal population over time. The White House response?
Ms. Spellings laughed.
Then she suggested, "You need to come visit Austin, Texas."
At the risk of being churlish, I'd suggest that Ms. Spellings ought to come visit Washington, D.C. A brief detour through the realm of fact shows that immigration is a much, much bigger deal in Washington than in Austin. The Austin area's population is only 13.5 percent foreign born, compared to 20 percent in the Washington area, according to 2002 data from the Census Bureau. Also, the total number of immigrants in the Washington area is more than one million, over five times greater than in Austin.
Be that as it may, Spellings's dismissal of the very idea of immigration-law enforcement confirms the worst fears of observers inside and outside the immigration agencies: that the new laws envisioned by the president's proposal wouldn't be enforced any more vigorously than the old ones, leading to yet more illegal immigration and a need for further amnesties down the road.
This lack of political commitment to the work of a particular government agency is nothing new. When Republicans are in power, agencies they would like to get rid of but can't, like the Labor Department, tend to be denied resources and political support in order to inhibit their ability to function. Likewise, Democratic administrations, whether or not they actually "loathe the military," still accord it low priority, leading to erosion in pay and readiness. Hobbling the military is, of course, a much bigger deal than hobbling the Labor Department, but the impulse is the same.
What's unique about the immigration bureaucracy is that no one in the political elite wants it to work properly, so it remains underfunded and unappreciated, regardless of the party in power.
The frustration among the denizens of the immigration bureaucracy over this lack of commitment has come to a boiling point as a result of the president's plan. The National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents agents, recently wrote to its members that:
. . . his proposal is a slap in the face to anyone who has ever tried to enforce the immigration laws of the U.S. It implies that the country really wasn't serious about it in the first place, in spite of what you were told about "the big picture." And, in the meantime, while you're out there trying to do your jobs — which the country isn't too serious about — you'll have to deal with the expected increase in attempted EWI's [Entrants Without Inspection, i.e., border jumpers] who are trying to get here to take advantage of the proposed amnesty — oops, earned legality.
Rep. Jim Kolbe (R., Ariz.), whose own illegal-alien amnesty bill (H.R. 2899) was the starting point for the White House proposal, got a taste of this frustration last week at a town meeting in Sierra Vista, where he was greeted by a jeering crowd and "a mock-up of a U.S. Border Patrol agent with a knife through his back, with the words 'Kolbe Amnesty' on the blade." (See a photo of the Border Patrol "agent" here.)
Actually, the Border Patrol enjoys more political support among Republicans than other parts of the immigration bureaucracy, if only because of its paramilitary image and culture. (Despite this fact, it has the highest employee turnover rate in the federal government.) Other immigration staff feel at least as abandoned by their superiors. One veteran employee in Washington says the main subject of water-cooler talk among former INS people at the Department of Homeland Security is how to find another job before the president's plan causes the agency to implode.
In lieu of bipartisan consensus, we need at least one of the major parties to be in favor of enforcing the law, if we're ever to have a capable immigration agency. The Democrats are not going to pick up the burden: Despite lots of good Democratic reasons to support tough immigration controls, the party leadership has given up on American workers.
So it's up to Republicans to adopt the immigration service and provide the political support necessary for any enforcement agency to do its work. If not, no immigration plan — whether it's the president's or anyone else's — is going to work.
You're kidding right?
Merely a rhetorical question.
Just as we're always rhetorically exhorted to vote to re-elect Bush any way, because the alternative is "just so much worse."
But this article proves that, as far as immigration law enforcement is concerned, the alternatives are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. If the callous disregard of both national parties of the impact of out-of-control illegal immigration on the average citizen is important enough to you, you won't vote for either one.
Seriously, though, a lot of the advocacy groups that promote this amnesty plan are "racist haters." "La Raza," for example. Any of you linguistically challenged (except for your copy of "Chambermaid Spanish") Bush hacks know what "raza" means in Spanish? "Razzmatazz," maybe?
OK, because then so are Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, John Leo, John Derbyshire, John O'Sullivan, Lou Dobbs, and many others. I'll take their company any day of the week, any month of the year, over the pathetic troop of Bush hacks and "GOP ueber alles" types here.
Woohoo!! I'm bad...I'm nationwide...
That was the protest I organized and the BP Agent effigy w/knife that I made. It rides in my car now and is my new "Border Patrol Buddytm". It freaks the illegal out. It showed up at the Tom Tancredo dinner two nights later and was filmed by Univision, Telemundo, and KBS (the largest broadcast network in Korea). It showed up at a community meeting hosted by CHD and was filmed by a documentary crew there.
I don't know exactly what a "grassroots conservative" is. But one thing is sure, any serious effort to enforce the current immigration laws would never work. It would result in serious damage to the economy, and would be justly condemed as a racist human rights tragedy as millions of people are uprooted from their homes and sent across the border with no prospect of work or a place to live.
Can anyone say "huge concentration camp" south of the border? We're talking the population of greater Los Angeles (which by the way, would be economicly destroyed, and 30% of it's housing unoccupied)
The only way to "get serious" about enforcing immigration law is to first change it to allow the people already here to operate within the system. Anything else is doomed to failure and is just a joke.
I have no idea if Bush would enforce any new immigration law, but for sure, the law we have now never will be. By anyone.
It doesn't sound like you care.
Take your rhetoric about "racism" and stick it in a cheese tamale. The immigration law was written, passed and put on the books by democratically elected representatives of the United States to be enforced, not to be ignored, slighted or caricatured by ignorant hacks as "racist." That's a vile, disgusting calumny against the American people.
A government that won't enforce its own laws, that goes against the will of an overwhelming majority of its own citizens, that refuses to ensure the integrity of the national territory in order to preserve a corrupt bargain with a moneyed few, that attempts to suppress protests of its betrayal with the vile rhetoric of political correctness, is headed for big time trouble. There is nothing more American than the principle that governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when a government becomes destructive of the rights and consent of its citizenry, it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish it. There'll be a lot more trouble from failure to enforce the immigration law than from enforcement. Croyez moi.
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