Posted on 02/05/2004 3:32:34 PM PST by VU4G10
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President Bush’s proposed immigration reform package is a shocking betrayal of our nation’s sovereignty, culture and economy. It must not be allowed to pass. |
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Bill Clinton uttered countless deceptive words during his eight-year occupancy of the White House, but perhaps none captured the essence of his slippery dishonesty better than these: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” In defending his proposed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, George W. Bush is striving to set a new record for brazen presidential dishonesty.
“This plan is not amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path of citizenship,” insisted Mr. Bush at a January 12 press conference in Monterrey, Mexico, as he stood alongside Mexican President Vicente Fox. “I oppose amnesty because it encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration.”
As has often been said, crime unpunished is crime rewarded. In his January 7 White House address calling for a “new temporary worker program,” the president outlined a plan that would reward those who violated our immigration laws by jumping the queue and taking up residence here illegally:
The president proposed “legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment here”;
That temporary legal status, the president said, “will last three years and will be renewable”;
Mr. Bush claimed that “our current limits on legal immigration are too low.” He added that his administration will work with Congress to “increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to citizenship” for illegal aliens currently residing here, as well as others arriving every day in anticipation of being legalized once the proposal goes into effect.
It’s vitally important to recognize that the Bush plan would not be limited to the current illegal alien population, which is commonly estimated to be 6-12 million (but may be 20 million or more). As the president’s own words demonstrate, it would also extend to “those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program.”
Supposedly, those coming from foreign countries would need a job offer in advance of their arrival. But the president’s invitation had an immediate, and quite predictable, effect. “The U.S. Border Patrol marks January 7 as the day illegal crossing numbers surge,” reported a January 10 Arizona Star dispatch from the Mexican border town of Hermosillo. “We’re starting to see an increase already,” commented Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame. It’s reasonable to expect that a similar “amnesty rush” is underway elsewhere as millions — or tens of millions — of others race to take advantage of the Bush plan.
Ah, but that plan isn’t an amnesty, insists the president, clinging to his official fiction with Clintonian tenacity. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) has no use for such evasions. “Millions of people who broke the law by entering, staying, and working in our country will not be punished, but rather rewarded with a visa,” comments Rep. Paul. “This is amnesty, plain and simple. Lawbreakers are given legal status, while those seeking to immigrate legally face years of paperwork and long waits for a visa.”
More disturbing still is the fact that the Bush plan represents merely the first installment. The Mexican regime has already broadcast demands for further concessions. Mexican President Fox offered honeyed words of support for the Bush plan during his January 12 joint press conference with Bush. But prior to Bush’s trip to Monterrey, Fox had told the Mexican press that the Bush plan “es más pequeñito de lo que buscamos” (“it’s much smaller than what we’re looking for”). And Mexico’s El Universal had reported, “The secretary of Foreign Relations, Luis Ernesto Derbez, affirmed that [Fox] cannot be satisfied with George W. Bush’s proposal to grant temporary employment to immigrants.... [T]he goal is a total and complete program that protects those [Mexicans] in the United States and those who aspire to go there.” (Emphasis added.)
The Mexican regime will be satisfied with nothing less than the abolition of our southern border, and our absorption of as many people as that government sees fit to send north. Eventually, the process begun by the Bush plan would “solve” the illegal immigration problem by simply removing our borders altogether — and by effectively destroying the concept of U.S. citizenship as well.
Supposedly, the newly legalized “temporary workers” would return to their home countries after the permits expire.
“My proposal expects that most temporary workers will eventually return permanently to their home countries when the period of work that I will be negotiating with Congress has expired,” explained the president in Monterrey. Toward that end, he continued, “I’ll work with [Mexican] President Fox and other leaders on a plan to give temporary workers credit in their home countries’ retirement systems for the time they work in the United States.”
The administration’s proposal would also “reduce the cost of sending money home to families and local communities,” continued the president. Such remittances from Mexican workers in America are that nation’s second-largest source of foreign income. Additionally, as the president pointed out, through the Inter-American Development Bank “we” — meaning American taxpayers — “are expanding access to credit for small business entrepreneurs” in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
All of this taxpayer-funded largesse is necessary, insists the president, in order to “reduce the pressures that create illegal immigration” by expanding economic opportunity south of our border. But the amnesty itself creates a powerful incentive for newly legalized immigrants to establish themselves here and begin the process of chain immigration, through which untold millions of new immigrants would be brought in. This is what happened with the most recent immigration amnesty in 1986.
In anticipation of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservative” rhetoric, former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the chief sponsor of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), insisted that the earlier amnesty was “a humane approach to immigration reform.” Simpson also admitted at the time, “I don’t know what the impact will be.” Eighteen years later, we now know the impact: 6-12 million, and possibly 20 million or more, illegal aliens. If amnesty is granted to that population, and it begins the process of chain immigration of relatives from abroad, and it is supplemented by millions of others who come here based on job offers extended through Bush’s temporary worker program, we might as well disband the border patrol and discontinue the fiction of having immigration controls at all.
President Bush’s concern for the economic plight of illegal aliens in our midst is as puzzling as his indifference to the economic circumstances of American workers.
“Over the past 10 years, more than 2 million low-skilled American workers have been displaced from their jobs,” writes CNN financial analyst Lou Dobbs. “And each 10 percent increase in the immigrant workforce decreases U.S. wages by 3.5 percent.” Mr. Bush and his political allies blithely assure the public that illegal immigrants are doing jobs nobody wants. However, points out Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, “what they really mean is that they are doing jobs that they as middle- and upper-class people don’t want.”
“Massive immigration is vastly more popular among the elites than among the public,” Steve Sailer, president of the Human Biodiversity Institute, told THE NEW AMERICAN. “Lawyers, politicians, and business executives won’t find their pay driven down much by increased competition. On the other hand, if I was, say, a carpenter, I’d be horrified by what the President of the United States is planning to do to me and my family. What’s the global average wage made by carpenters? I’d be surprised if it were more than 33 percent of the average American carpenter’s wage, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it were only 10 percent as much.”
“It’s all a matter of supply and demand,” explains Sailer. “As they teach you during the first week of Econ 101, when the supply of labor goes up its price [wage] goes down.... The only restriction the Bush people are talking about is that the job offers to foreigners must meet the minimum wage. That’s $5.15 per hour, or $10,712 for a full-time worker.”
Sailer describes the Bush plan as “a globalist libertarian’s fantasy. It’s essentially identical to the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s long campaign for a constitutional amendment reading ‘There shall be open borders.’” This would mean not only a deluge of low-skilled, low-paid labor from Mexico, but from across the globe. According to Dobbs, “for all the world the president’s [immigration proposal] … sounds like a national job fair for those businesses and farms that don’t want to pay a living wage and for those foreigners who correctly think U.S. border security is a joke and are willing to break our laws to live here.”
The immediate beneficiaries would be illegal workers from Mexico, and a Mexican government that uses illegal immigration to the U.S. as (in the words of former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda) a “safety valve.” But there are literally billions of people willing to work for even less than Mexicans are. “In this age of cheap jet travel, poor Mexican immigrant job hunters might find themselves undercut by even poorer temporary workers from, say, Bangladesh who may be willing to work for even less,” Sailer predicts. “According to UN figures, there are several billion people poorer than the average Mexican.”
With hi-tech and manufacturing jobs fleeing the country, and millions of low-skill workers flooding in, what will America look like just a few years from now if Bush’s amnesty proposal is enacted?
The January 8 New York Times editorially praised the Bush amnesty as a prelude to a larger effort to reform our immigration system: “For simply reopening what has always been a torturous debate in this country, the president deserves applause. He has recognized that the nation’s immigration system is, as he put it, ‘broken.’” But the unspoken purpose of the process the Bush plan would inaugurate is to demolish, rather than repair, what remains of our immigration system.
The invited audience for President Bush’s January 7 White House announcement included representatives from various “citizen groups,” such as the Hispanic Alliance for Progress, the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans, the Latino Coalition, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. The address itself served as an overture for a hastily called “Summit of the Americas” in Monterrey, Mexico, the following week. These two facts underscore the real purpose of the amnesty proposal: It is a significant step toward the amalgamation of the U.S. with Mexico — as well as Canada, and eventually every other country in this hemisphere — into a regional political bloc.
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox signed a document called the “Guanajuato Proposal,” pledging that their governments would “strive to consolidate a North American economic community whose benefits reach the lesser-developed areas of the region and extend to the most vulnerable social groups in our countries.”
Within a few months of that declaration, the Mexican government had composed a five-point program to hasten “consolidation” with the U.S.:
Legalization of “undocumented” workers (that is, illegal aliens from Mexico);
An expanded permanent visas program;
An enhanced guest workers visas program;
Border control cooperation;
Economic development in immigrant-sending regions of Mexico.
This list of demands, according to then-Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, were essentially non-negotiable: He insisted that the U.S. had to accept “the whole enchilada, or nothing.” The Bush administration has dutifully worked to meet that nation’s demands — without exacting anything from Mexico in return.
During Fox’s 2001 visit to the U.S., the groundwork was laid for the so-called “Partnership for Prosperity” (PfP) — an initiative designed to use American tax dollars to build Mexico’s manufacturing sector. According to the U.S. State Department, PfP’s action plan calls for U.S. assistance — meaning taxpayer subsidies — to Mexico to boost investment in housing and commercial infrastructure to boost Mexican productivity. This has the unavoidable effect of drawing manufacturing jobs south of the border — even as low-wage jobs are increasingly snapped up by illegal immigrants (pardon me — future temporary workers) surging northward.
The Bush administration’s indecent eagerness to eradicate our southern border and consolidate our nation with Mexico was noted by Newsweek political analyst Howard Fineman. “Whatever else George W. Bush does, or doesn’t do, he has earned a place in history as the first American president to place Hispanic voters at the center of politics, and the first to view the land between Canada and Guatemala as one,” noted Fineman. “It makes sense, if you think about it: Texas, long ago and far away, was part of Mexico. Now a Texan is trying to reassemble the Old Country, and then some.”
“The ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union,” opined an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial on September 7, 2001. “Unlike the varied landscapes and cultures of European Union members, the United States, Canada and Mexico already share a great deal in common, and language is not as great a barrier. President Bush, for example, is quite comfortable with the blended Mexican-Anglo culture forged in the border states of Texas, California and Arizona.”
President Bush has only offered oblique hints of the agenda that Fineman correctly described. Mexican President Fox has been more candid.
During a May 16, 2002 speech in Madrid, Fox boasted: “In the last few months we have managed to achieve an improvement in the situation of many Mexicans in [the United States], regardless of their migratory status, through schemes that have permitted them access to health and education systems, identity documents, as well as the full respect for their human rights.” Here Fox referred to the incremental legalization illegal Mexican immigrants achieved when various state and local governments began to accept matricula consular cards as official ID. Those cards are issued by Mexican consulates without regard to the recipient’s legal status. Easily counterfeited, the matricula cards give illegal aliens access to employment, health benefits, banking services and — in some states — driver’s licenses.
In the Madrid speech, Fox explained that demolishing the distinction between legal and illegal Mexican immigrants is necessary in order to advance the merger of the U.S. and Mexico: “Eventually our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes [such as] the future prosperity of North America, and the movement of capital, goods, services, and persons.” Such movement of persons would no longer be “immigration” or “emigration” — terms referring to the crossing of international borders — but merely “migration” within one vast political entity. In other words: goodbye to U.S. citizenship.
Significantly, in his remarks at the January 12 press conference in Monterrey, Fox pointedly, and repeatedly, used the term “migration” to refer to the Bush plan, referring variously to “that migration topic,” “the migration matters,” “this migration proposal,” the “migration flow,” and so on. Tellingly, he also referred to “the leaders of the countries of America” — rather than to national leaders of separate and independent nations.
Amnesty for illegal aliens, a central piece in the agenda for hemispheric consolidation, would almost certainly have been announced long ago were it not for 9-11 — an event that demonstrated, in a tragic and lethal fashion, the mortal danger resulting from the failure to secure our borders.
However, merger-minded elites in both the U.S. and Mexico regrouped and continued their campaign for amnesty. Last fall, a coalition of radical groups — including the Communist Party — organized the “Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.” In that campaign, busloads of illegal aliens were brought to Washington to lobby on behalf of amnesty.
Vicente Fox did his part by visiting three southwestern states — Texas, Arizona and New Mexico — to lobby state legislatures to support the amnesty drive. “We share nation and language,” Fox told the New Mexico legislature. “In addition to our geographical vicinity, we are united by inseparable bonds, history, values and interests.... We must join together.... You need Mexico and Mexicans, and we need you.”
Acting as the supposed leader of “Mexicans living abroad” (a group that, according to the Mexican government, includes Americans of Mexican ancestry born in this country), Fox demanded that lawmakers in this country “facilitate access to health care and education services for all those who share our border.... Without this, it is impossible to think about the path to greater integration and shared prosperity.”
Open borders, amnesty for illegals, subsidies for Mexico’s economy, exporting manufacturing capacity south of the border, expanded welfare benefits for foreigners who entered our nation illegally — these are all part of the same seamless design. As Fox himself put it, that design is the “integration” of the U.S. and Mexico into a hemisphere-wide political unit.
Many observers believe that the Bush amnesty plan is part of a political strategy aimed at courting the Hispanic vote — which would be a shockingly cynical and opportunistic venture. But the truth is even worse: President Bush is consciously betraying our nation by undermining our borders, our sovereignty, and the integrity of our laws. And he is doing this as part of a campaign that will — if successful — result in an end to our national independence and our constitutional order.
Every American worthy of the name must not accept this incredible betrayal — and must not allow it to be consummated.
Oh yeah not a peep about Kerry's proposal which is amnesty. Why the silence on Kerry? Oh that's right the Birchers don't think that the democrats are the real political adversaries, nebermind.
What specifically did you disagree with?
I know you didn't ask me, but I disagree with the hyperbole, innuendo, and the silence in the article about the demos political positions on immigration.
Because conservatives expect Kerry to sell out U.S sovereignty, and award law-breaking illegals with Amnsesty.
The GOP's own Dubya? Now that's a surprise. Unless YOU expected Dubya to do so from the get-go?
The GOP's own Dubya? Now that's a surprise. Unless YOU expected Dubya to do so from the get-go?
Sorry I am not going to take your Bircher hyperbole bait. Bush with his giving the UN the finger in regards to Iraq has shown that he cares deeply about US sovereignty. He is trying to fix a problem that has been ignored for years and it is not a simple problem to solve with a neighbor the US shares a 2,000 mile border with.
You can go on with your simplistic rants and idolization of the Birchers. I will disagree with them.
I am irrelevant. So are my neighbors. Apparently that is what Dubya and most of the rest of the weasels in Washington have decided. We live in what the Border Patrol calls the Naco Corridor.
Here’s a quote from this article:
Naco Station agents took 28,967 into custody for the first four months of the current federal fiscal year, which is a 114 percent increase over the 13,525 apprehended for the same period in the previous budget year.
The apprehension rate is not up because the Naco Station received any reinforcements in personnel or equipment. Apprehensions are up because the number of people jumping the border fence has skyrocketed ever since elected and appointed leaders started mumbling about the scamnesty that ain't an amnesty.
That number -- 28,967 -- doesn't look that frightening, does it? Well, the Border Patrol agents here estimate they only catch one in five. Right now a lot of them think that estimate is optimistic. So, if 28,967 were caught, then 115,868 got away. If that continues, the number of gotaways here in the Naco Corridor alone will hit 347,604 by the end of this fiscal year.
The Naco Corridor only includes 20 miles of the Mexican border. That’s only 1.1% of the border.
Next, you might want to peruse this article. It lays out the details of Dubya's proposed budget for FY 2005 for ICE and BCP. Note that this is mainly for the period after his re-election. There is no mention of any additional funding for controlling our leaky border or for enforcement action against the scumbags who illegally employ illegal aliens, thus enticing them to come here. This is an evil omen.
The nightly invasion through my home will apparently continue unabated regardless of whose fanny is warming the chair in the Oval Office. My neighbors and I will continue to see our property vandalized or stolen, our houses invaded, vehicles stolen, friends and relatives attacked, our surroundings trashed -- but what the hell, it is for the Good of the Party so we shouldn't complain, should we?
As I said, Dubya and the weasels in Washington have decided that the 60,000 Americans who live in the Naco Corridor are irrelevant. We are simply a statistical pimple on the southwest ass end of America. It’s a very small matter if we suffer as long as everyone else gets cheap lettuce and cheap lawn care.
I will vote in November, as will most of my neighbors; there are some local and state candidates who have earned our vote. However, my conscience will not bother me a bit if I leave the top portion blank or write in another candidate. After all, I am irrelevant. My vote may as well be irrelevant, too.
BTW have you proven yet that Bush critics are closet Dem supporters?
Of course not. You just rely on innuendo and hyperbole.
I know you didn't ask me, but I disagree with the hyperbole, innuendo, and the silence in the article about the demos political positions on immigration.
This is specific? LOL!
Ah, so what shall we be named then, "The American Union"..or perhaps "The Mexican Union"? Maybe pesos will be our new monitary system.
Perhaps they'll make a contest and some good "union" citizen will win a prize to name it.
I cannot believe that there are those here that will defend any of this "it's not an amnesty" crappola. I'll take a bullet for George Bush because he's a lot more important to the endurance of this republic than I'll ever be. But like one of my kids, I'll tell him when he's wrong...and he's wrong on this one.
There is always someone ready to "defend the indefenceable".
Congress needs to bury this amnesty plan.
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