Replies

Bush is doing a great deal to stop illegal immigration

You are right. I continuously catch little snippets (mostly on Fox news) about new programs being enacted to catch illegals crossing the border. One of the programs involved air surveillance and paratroopers being dropped into the most remote areas. Yet we never hear about this in the mainstream media and it's barely a tag line on Fox news.

Yet while more is being done to stop more illegals from crossing over, little is being done to catch and deport those already here. I think we can agree that Bush is soft on the illegals already here, mostly because he believes the myth that they are mostly hardworking people taking the jobs that Americans won't do.

I had a stack of 14 fund-raising letters from the GOP and I mailed them all back with a letter stating that I would not contribute any more money until Bush and the Republican party abandoned Bush's work-visa program. Rather than create new laws, I encouraged them to enforce the laws already on the books. Current laws demand that all illegals be deported and that anyone employing them be heavily fined.

Why make new laws that would require an even greater bureaucracy to enforce than the simpler laws that are currently not enforced?

" little is being done to catch and deport those already here. "

===

NOT SO. Read this:

Bush budget adds hundreds of immigration enforcement jobs
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0204/020304p1.htm

The budget would add staff to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and removals branch, which expels illegal aliens from the United States. The unit extradited 142,008 aliens in fiscal 2003, but faces a daunting backlog of immigration cases. Roughly 400,000 aliens have fled after receiving a final order of deportation from an immigration judge.

The Bush budget would fund 30 new fugitive operations teams, which are dedicated solely to apprehending and deporting alien absconders. ICE currently has 18 such teams. It also would provide 269 new immigration enforcement agents for the institutional removal program, where criminal aliens in federal and state prisons are released into ICE custody. Because of staffing shortfalls, ICE now taps its criminal investigators to help staff this program.