Posted on 12/20/2004 12:21:42 PM PST by nanak
After the White House news conference this morning, Bill Kristol on Fox News praised President Bush's remarks about "immigration reform" as "eloquent." Beg to differ. The president's open-borders statements were empty, garish platitudes strung together sloppily like cheap Christmas lights:
Illegal aliens "do the job Americans won't do." President Bush used that dog-tired phrase about a half-dozen times during today's press conference as he defended his impending illegal alien amnesty plan. Mark Krikorian effectively puts this mindless rhetoric to rest here.
"Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." Uh huh. Well, terrorists and gang members and drunken murderers and cop-killers don't stop there either. And based on past and recent experience, granting amnesty to 13 million law-breakers will only result in more illegal immigration, not less.
We need immigration reform that "recognizes reality." Rank-and-file immigration enforcement officials give a real reality check on the amnesty debacle here, here, and here.
As immigration enforcement veteran/former U.S. prosecutor Peter Nunez put it:
[W]e need to stop the talk of a coming amnesty, or of a guest worker program, both of which, by themselves, serve to encourage additional illegal immigration. What kind of message are we sending when we dangle that possibility before people desperate enough to put their lives at risk? Doesnt this kind of talk also indicate that we really dont care much about law breaking, that we dont really care that much about the rule of law, that these immigration laws exist only as a token objection to the violation of our sovereignty? Now, that is eloquent.
-disgusted bump-
Enforcement requires juries that won't engage in jury nullification.
Guess what - they TRIED to enforce the law about hiring illegal immigrants. The juries acquitted, often in as little as fifteen (15) minutes.
No conviction - no penalties. That's how our system works. Or do you think that is something to be tossed aside?
I suggest we just take over Mexico, or threaten to. Their southern border is more controllable. If they want to move here, fine! We'll get beachfront property down there and fish all day long.
By what means will you hold an illegal before they disappear into the community if you figure out from your yard sale that you have an illegal?
What about the reality of who pays for their free health care or the expensive education for their kids? Their employers obviously only want to bring them in because they're cheap -- a good way to avoid the hassles of minimum wage, employer provided benefits like health insurance, taxes, Workman's Comp, OSHA compliance and all the rest.
You're quite right, there will be big problems with kids and non-working spouses ... and that's IF we can force worker Jose to apply for a blue card. But, GWBs guest worker suggestion is currently the only credible one on the table. It, at least, makes an effort to identify these invisibles who suck the American social safety net dry.
Sinkspur is right that this is NOT the front page issue we might like it to be. Until Americans care in bigger numbers AND politicians who openly confront illegals start winning elections, this is a nonstarter. I'm surprised Bush is brave enough to even acknowledge it, seeing as he simply can't win here. Every other politician except Tancredo simply ignores it. They certainly do here in California.
Again: from a PR/policy standpoint if the public doesn't perceive a problem, there is effectly no problem.
Yes, the Bush plan would apparently deport non-working illegals it uncovers, but families being sent back so dad can work here legally is (emotionally) substantly different than whole families being sent back in handcuffs. AND, we've uncovered these people and taken their photos and begun to quantify the problem.
Nightmare? Yes. But it beats doing nothing (keeping the current status quo) and sustaining a huge secret population here that has no ID, no car insurance ( they always run from accidents and drive crappy autos for a reason), no way to track them, no listed home or employment, a community that harbors criminal gangsters because they serve as lookouts for LEOs, the current mess.
The right hates the Bush plan because it's not tough. The left and Old Media hates it because it's too strict and insists that illegals sign up for identification and possible deportation.
Me, I believe these immigrants need to be put in the system, just like you and I are, with a number and an ID and an address. It's step one, and without step 1 we can have only two lousy outcomes: mass blanket amnesty or mass deportations. Both look bleak and one sinks the conservative movement for a generation.
I know the media, I work with it and use it as a tool. Like it or not It would turn mass deportations into the "Vietnam" it tried so hard to create recently. The angry hippie/intellectual/malcontent nation would take their puppets and hand made signs to the streets calling for Bush's impeachment and their lapdog Oldmedia would televise it nonstop.
They would finally get their "gestapo" GOP film footage they crave. And the right will have stepped in the obvious trap.
Has any government official talked about this problem as you are doing?
I'm sitting there watching these guys (including Bush) who are too smart to be fooled by this themselves, talking about shoveling money around in different directions... as if the problem has something to do with money, and can be fixed by diddling with money. It's eyewash. "Money" is a symbol; what counts is the goods and services that are available to buy, and those are produced by those who work. There will not be enough workers to make enough stuff to satisfy themselves, and their children, and this larger-than-ever-before cohort of retirees who might live to be 100 each with today's medical technology. Not just in the U.S., but in virtually the entire "first world." Some ugly choices will be necessary in that environment. Really ugly. Nobody is talking about that, with the exception of a few pro-life types and some European professors. It's not today's problem... yet. But reasonable people can see it coming, and it just seems to me that if we can head it off, we should.
Not at all. I think they all know the immigrants have to be let in to solve the demographic problem, and they also know it's politically untenable to do so. So they say this and do that. Basically, they're looking the other way while roughly the right number of people scurry across the border. Every once in a while they stage a show-raid on a garment manufacturing joint to assure everyone that Your Gubment Is Working For You, but I think it's all crap. Illegal Immigration is the policy. And I'm not sure that's bad. People who oppose this need to put themselves through the "thought experiment" of imagining themselves, in 2025, driving their parents to the Ethical Suicide Parlor, where Mom and Dad are going to 'get out of the way.' There are so many such people, and they are consuming such a large fraction of GDP, that it's beggaring the nation's children. Everywhere you turn, there are billboards subtly urging the elderly to step aside. Is that a world we want? It's either babies, immigrants, or that. And our women are too busy to have babies. So here we are. |
bttt!
But no mention of who pays their free health care and education costs? The taxpayers are being overwhelmed --- and there is no limit in sight at all to massive immigration from Mexico and Central America. How many more do you propose we import and try to keep paying for?
The employers will pass any cost on to the economy and if you think you can just shutdown a major corpration without an effect on everyone, think again.
Meanwhile, thousands of smaller companies will continue to fly under the radar. You cannot hire enough enforcement agents to get done what you suggest.
Fingerprinting is only going to help you figure out who you have on the bus back to the border quicker the second and third time - after that you will recognize them by site.
Hospitals will indeed have to open their own law enforcement centers and holding pens and processing locations and transportation and the cost of Health Care will Skyrocket well beyond anything you have seen yet. DHS will have to expand the INS by tens of thousands in order to handle the huge numbers that will be shipped back to their homeland WHEN the homeland has agreed to arrangements to receive them back again. AND, you will see these people again. When some of them have committed crimes against US citizens that warrant jail/prison time, we will be holding them there as well.
Technology at the borders will only tell you where they have crossed, not how to round them up, where to process them, where to hold them, how to get them back to their originating country and how to keep them out.
If you think that any of these measures will cause more than a handful of illegals to leave the country, you are seriously deluding yourself. They have suffered nothing in any of your plans that would compare to what they have grown up with and in.
As for Draconian, I had a clearance while I spent my 20 years in the military and I personally enjoy draconian. I think you should have to work very hard to be a citizen or be allowed to vote in this country. I think we need a year of martial law and anyone on death row or life in prison should be summarily shot. I think drug dealers and and armed felons should be shot on site and I think politically correct tolerance programs should be shutdown. The ACLU and UN should be disposed of and supposed medical disorders actually hiding perversions should be done away with as well.
BUT, I'm pretty sure what I think should happen won't be possible until we get nuked because of our stupidity. Be sure none of your ideas will make it very far in this ACLU run country either.
The Mexican government has no intention of having 25 million of it's citizens return home ---- not only that --- they've got plans for us to take many many many more.
Check our nations crime stats. You'll find that the observation of few illegals in your church is not a representative sample.
the immigration must be managed very carefully, so as to not destroy existing American labor markets.
It is probably true that this affects those at the "unskilled labor" end of the deal disproportionally... but that's politics. If we displace Ph.D.'s, there will be hell to pay (as there is over H1-B's). Our poor tend to vote Democratic, so they are powerless. I think we can over-worry about the "becoming Americans" stuff. When I was a kid, there were still German and Polish neighborhoods in Chicago where English was not spoken.
It's not about "retirement." It's about avoiding more damned Culture Of Death. We already abort an obscene number of babies; are we next to euthanize the old? What is that going to do to our souls? What will we become when life is so cheap? When even more human beings are killed for "convenience sake"? I don't want that as my legacy. |
You still gotta give the accused due process.
We can't jail or deport our way out of the illegal immigration issue. We have to insert a guest worker program into the mix, or else the support will not be there for deportation and jail.
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