Really? Where have you seen statistics comparing illegal alien crossings in 2004 to 1994?
Posted on 12/31/2004 5:43:33 AM PST by white trash redneck
No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration. There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders. Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.
President Bush won reelection because he won 10 million more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. Who were these people? According to Ruy Teixeira--a shrewd Democratic analyst of voting trends--Bush scored his largest proportional gains among white voters who didn't complete college, especially women. These voters rallied to the president for two principal reasons: because they respected him as a man who lived by their treasured values of work, family, honesty, and faith; and because they trusted him to keep the country safe.
Yet Bush is already signaling that he intends to revive the amnesty/guestworker immigration plan he introduced a year ago--and hastily dropped after it ignited a firestorm of opposition. This plan dangerously divides the Republican party and affronts crucial segments of the Republican vote.
The plan is not usually described as an "amnesty" because it does not immediately legalize illegal workers in this country. Instead, it offers illegals a three-year temporary work permit. But this temporary permit would be indefinitely renewable and would allow illegals a route to permanent residency, so it is reasonably predictable that almost all of those illegals who obtain the permit will end up settling permanently in the United States. The plan also recreates the guestworker program of the 1950s--allowing employers who cannot find labor at the wages they wish to pay to advertise for workers outside the country. Those workers would likewise begin with a theoretically temporary status; but they too would probably end up settling permanently.
This is a remarkably relaxed approach to a serious border-security and labor-market problem. Employers who use illegal labor have systematically distorted the American labor market by reducing wages and evading taxes in violation of the rules that others follow. The president's plans ratify this gaming of the system and encourage more of it. It invites entry by an ever-expanding number of low-skilled workers, threatening the livelihoods of low-skilled Americans--the very same ones who turned out for the president in November.
National Review has historically favored greater restrictions on legal as well as illegal immigration. But you don't have to travel all the way down the NR highway to be troubled by the prospect of huge increases in immigration, with the greatest increases likely to occur among the least skilled.
The president's permissive approach has emboldened senators and mayors (such as New York's Michael Bloomberg) to oppose almost all enforcement actions against illegals. In September 2003, for example, Bloomberg signed an executive order forbidding New York police to share information on immigration offenses with the Immigration Service, except when the illegal broke some other law or was suspected of terrorist activity. And only last month, a House-Senate conference stripped from the intelligence-overhaul bill almost all the border-security measures recommended by the 9/11 commission.
The president's coalition is already fracturing from the tension between his approach to immigration and that favored by voters across the country. Sixty-seven House Republicans--almost one-third of the caucus--voted against the final version of the intelligence overhaul. And I can testify firsthand to the unpopularity of the amnesty/guestworker idea: I was on the conservative talk-radio circuit promoting a book when the president's plan was first proposed last January. Everywhere I went, the phones lit up with calls from outraged listeners who wanted to talk about little else. Every host I asked agreed: They had not seen such a sudden, spontaneous, and unanimous explosion of wrath from their callers in years.
Five years ago, Candidate George W. Bush founded his approach to immigration issues on a powerful and important insight: The illegal-immigration problem cannot be solved by the United States alone. Two-thirds of the estimated 9 million illegals in the U.S. are from Mexico. Mexico is also the largest source of legal immigration to the United States. What caused this vast migration? Between 1940 and 1970, the population of Mexico more than doubled, from 20 million to 54 million. In those years, there was almost no migration to the United States from Mexico at all. Since 1970, however, some 65 million more Mexicans have been born--and about 20 million of them have migrated northward, with most of that migration occurring after 1980.
Obviously, the 30 years from 1940 to 1970 are different in many ways from the 30 years after 1970s. But here's one factor that surely contributed to the Mexican exodus: In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the Mexican economy grew at an average rate of almost 7 percent a year. Thanks to the oil boom, the Mexican economy continued to grow rapidly through the troubled 1970s. But since 1980, Mexico has averaged barely 2 percent growth. The average Mexican was actually poorer in 1998 than he had been in 1981. You'd move too if that happened to you.
Recognizing the connection between Mexican prosperity and American border security, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations all worked hard to promote Mexican growth. The Reagan and Clinton administrations bailed out Mexican banks in 1982 and 1995; the first Bush administration negotiated, and Clinton passed, NAFTA. George W. Bush came to office in 2001 envisioning another round of market opening with the newly elected government of his friend Vicente Fox, this time focusing on Mexico's protected, obsolete, economically wasteful, and environmentally backward energy industry.
Bush's hopes have been bitterly disappointed. The Fox government has actually done less to restore Mexican growth than the PRI governments of the 1990s. And so Bush has been pushed away from his grand vision and has instead accepted Fox's demand that the two countries concentrate on one issue: raising the status of Mexican illegals in the United States. But this won't work. Just as the U.S. cannot solve the problem by unilateral policing, so it also cannot solve it through unilateral concession. Bush had it right the first time.
Some of the president's approach to immigration remains right and wise. He is right to show a welcoming face to Hispanics legally resident in the United States. He is right to try to smooth the way to citizenship for legal permanent residents. He is right--more controversially--to give all who have contributed to Social Security, whatever their legal status, access to benefits from the Social Security account.
But he is wrong, terribly wrong, to subordinate border security to his desire for an amnesty deal--and still more wrong to make amnesty the centerpiece of his immigration strategy.
Right now, of course, the president does not have to worry much about political competition on the immigration issue. But Republicans shouldn't count on their opponents' ignoring such an opportunity election after election. "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants," Hillary Clinton told a New York radio station in November. And later: "People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work." Okay, so maybe Hillary will never pick up many votes in Red State America. But there are Democratic politicians who could.
Republicans need a new and better approach--one that holds their constituency together and puts security first.
First, Republicans should develop and practice a new way of speaking about immigration, one that makes clear that enforcement of the immigration laws is not anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican: It is anti-bad employer. Illegal immigration is like any other illegal business practice: a way for unscrupulous people to exploit others to gain an advantage over their law-abiding competitors.
Second, Republicans can no longer deny the truth underscored by the 9/11 commission: Immigration policy is part of homeland-security policy. Non-enforcement of the immigration laws is non-protection of Americans against those who would do them harm.
Third, Republicans have to begin taking enforcement seriously. It's ridiculous and demoralizing to toss aside cabinet nominees like Linda Chavez over alleged immigration violations while winking at massive law-breaking by private industry--or to regard immigration violations as so trivial that they can be used as a face-saving excuse for the dismissal of a nominee damaged by other allegations.
Fourth, skills shortages in the high-technology and health-care industries are genuine problems that have to be addressed--but they should not be used as an excuse to void immigration enforcement. Republicans can say yes to using immigration law to attract global talent, while saying no to companies that systematically violate immigration law to gain an advantage over their more scrupulous rivals.
Fifth, Mexico should not be allowed to sever the migration issue from trade and investment issues. Mexican political stability is a vital national-security issue of the United States--and just for that reason, Americans should not allow Mexican governments to use migration as a way to shirk the work of economic and social reform.
Finally--and most important--Republicans need to recognize that they have a political vulnerability and must take action to protect themselves. An election victory as big as 2004 can look inevitable in retrospect. But it wasn't, not at all. The Democrats could have won--and could still win in 2006 and 2008--by taking better advantage of Republican mistakes and making fewer of their own. And no mistake offers them a greater opportunity than the one-sidedness of the Bush immigration policy. The GOP is a party dedicated to national security, conservative social values, and free-market economics. The president's policy on immigration risks making it look instead like an employers' lobby group. That's the weak point at which the edge of the wedge could enter--and some smart Democratic politician is sharpening it right now.
Wow. Now I more fully understand why the Bush proposal really fueled the increase in the illegal flow. The reward for having secured an illegal job in the US when "the future" hits, and one can't get a guest worker card anymore, simply by being employed illegally, is simply HUGE.
The plan is not as he presented it. It doesn't make sense that guest workers would have to leave to renew when illegals don't have to leave to apply, and a clear reading of the language from the White House site doesn't support the contention.
Consider that if there are 10 million illegal aliens and say half were to become guest workers. What happens to the other five million? We're already told that we can't find them, and the guest worker program would change nothing in that regard. If the Bush plan went through how would you enforce the law against the five million illegals who just saw half their number legalized?
The odds are that those other illegals would stay put while waiting for an amnesty of their own. Why would they leave?
Now consider foreign nationals in their home countries who are watching all of this... half the illegals get amnesty, and half go on as they were. If a foreign national can't get accepted into the guest worker program from their home country, what disincentive would they have from becoming the next batch of illegal aliens? Everything about the Bush plan would reward and condone illegal aliens.
Really? Where have you seen statistics comparing illegal alien crossings in 2004 to 1994?
You are incorrect. Furthermore, if the only way that you can argue is by making such outrageous mischaracterizations, then you must not be in the right.
If you can't make your point by telling the truth, then you aren't making an argument so much as a propaganda piece.
I have seen articles that the illegal flow rate has gone up 80% since Bush proposed his plan. Whether that is true or not I guess is open to debate. Do you think it untrue?
In any event, Frum must be a bit careful as a Canadian citizen and not favor too much exclusion before he is sworn in as a citizen. Frum cares most for foreign policy and economic policy. I care far more for social issues. The Mexicans are my friends on that. You are not going to change my mind until Roe vs. Wade is a humiliating national memory complete with American Holocaust museums, if ever.
We need not irrationally fear Hillary if we are ready to go right down her throat with her history, and her life and wedge issues of our own. We need only determine, recognize and have objective regard for her strengths and smash them and do the same for her weaknesses but expand them. When the public laughs at her, she will become apoplectic with rage and will weaken accordingly. Handing her the Hispanic vote and particularly the Mexican vote is not a very smart plan as the Planned Barrenhood Republicans of Pete Wilson should have learned by now.
As Patton might have said, use her guts to grease the treads of our tanks.
I don't have links to any of your posts. I don't expect to have them either.
You're wrong about this ... my grandfather immigrated to the U.S. in 1902 through Ellis Island - there were laws, rules, procedures, and policy in place, including a health exam and quarantine.
The 1920's immigration rule modifications dealt with the numbers allowed in, and established the nationality quotas that remained in place until the Ted Kennedy revisions in 1965.
I think that I would probably let an illegal move in my house before I went THAT far!
An 80% increase since this proposal was made in 2003 sounds like the sort of nonsensical hyperbole that gets spouted by clueless drunks at grimy bars.
All of that can be discovered without legalizing any illegal aliens through David Dreier's HR 5111, which would make the current workplace verification program mandatory.
You people oppose President Bush's plan. You oppose registering illegals and their employers. You want the status quo. You don't want anything to change. You don't really want the illegal immigration problem to be solved. It must just be a convenient hammer for you to bash away at Bush on by claiming that our borders are out of control...because you are opposing the very registration that would help bring back control of our borders.
LOL! Anything else?
HR 5111 is the status quo? HR 3534 (Tancredo's border enforcement and guest worker program) is the status quo?
Not only is the Bush plan not the only option on the table, it's the most prominent option that is a proven failure. Legalizing illegal aliens rewards them for breaking the law. Rewarding illegal aliens encourages future illegal aliens.
I think Fatalis and I are looking to see some actual language, ie words, in the president's proposal or statements, that lead one to the reasonable conclusion, that one must depart to renew. Frankly if the right to renew is automatic, it would be ludicrous to require that they take a holiday back in their coutry of origin, in order to get the paper work processed.
Laws, laws will save us!!!!
Well, if you have some links to contrary estimates from reliable sources, that would be great. The 80% figure had a big impact on my thinking. If the number is bogus, and there has been no change in the flow, I would find that reassuring.
The White House:
They already hold those jobs illegally. Only illegals could take those illegal jobs. Law-abiding applicants never had an opportunity to get those jobs.
The enemy/opponent sets the rules of engagement.
These are her "rules" straight out of her mentor's hand book, "Rules for Radicals":
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. One of the criteria for picking the target is the target’s vulnerability ... the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract."
Tag! She's it.
"We could also profit from unsealing her sealed senior thesis at Wellesley, written when she was directly involved with Alinsky efforts...."
Apparently Barbara Olson got ahold of it. She wrote:
"A few weeks ago... I came into possession of Hillary's suppressed thesis."
Barbara Olson is the author of "Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton."
That's fantasyland talk. Illegals and their employers aren't going to submit to a mandatory workplace verification program anymore than they comply with the existing voluntary one.
On the other hand, plea bargains have worked for decades. You give a little; you take a little.
With the right incentive, illegals *will* register. The carrot will win what the stick will not. Mandatory workplace registrations won't work. Voluntary registrations will work. Choose one.
Rubbish. Many an American has taken many a construction job.
That's funny, because I could swear I remember him being president for eight years.
You don't need a popular majority to be elected. That's why it's notable that Bush '04 was the first candidate to get that majority since his dad back in '88. Clinton never got a popular-vote majority, but that was completely irrelevant. He did win far more electoral votes than Bush did, either time: 370 in '92, and 379 in '96.
Which illustrates the problems the Republicans face on the electoral map. The reason Clinton won the electoral vote by such huge margins both times, was because of those solid blue states with big electoral counts. Since Democratic presidential candidates already have those big, solid blue states and their guaranteed 183 electoral votes -- and though their counts were slightly different then, Clinton won every single one of those states, both times -- they start out in an excellent position to grab a huge electoral win, assuming they're strong enough candidates (John Kerry was a horrible candidate, and look how close he came!), by nailing down the big Democrat-leaning states and only a handful of swing states. In the absence of a strong Republican candidate -- as was the case in '92 and '96 -- the Democrat leaners are almost guaranteed to fall into line, and swing states like Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Colorado -- four states, with a combined 66 EVs -- stand an excellent chance of tipping.
The result: Huge electoral margins for the Democrats, of the size Bill Clinton got, twice. And in '92, all he needed was a weak challenger, and a strong third-party candidate to draw from that weak challenger. Right now, the GOP does not have an obvious candidate for '08, and the immigration issue could potentially split the party.
Hillary is well aware of all of this. If she benefits from the same set of circumstances that Bill did, she's in.
-Dan
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No, it has nothing to do with the thread. I just thought I'd mention dead puppies.
Dead puppies.
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