Posted on 02/11/2005 9:58:16 AM PST by GOPGuide
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 - The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to approve a bill tightening immigration laws in the name of border security. The main provisions of the bill, which passed 261 to 161, block states from issuing standard drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants and make it easier for judges to expel asylum seekers.
Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin and sponsor of the bill, said that the measures were necessary to fulfill recommendations of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Noting that several of the men involved in those attacks were illegal immigrants who had American drivers' licenses, which they used as identification when boarding planes, Mr. Sensenbrenner said the bill "aims to prevent another 9/11-type attack by disrupting terrorist travel."
- [SNIP] -
But Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said, "The president's guest worker program is not going anywhere, period." Mr. Lott added: "He needs to go ahead and accept it. We are not going to do anything that looks like, smells like or in anyway resembles amnesty, period."
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(e.g,. Some career politicians want reelected in 2006.)
BTW: Does this mean the FROBL will still try and convince the world we have no illegal immigration invasion?
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But Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said, "The president's guest worker program is not going anywhere, period."
Mr. Lott added: "He needs to go ahead and accept it.
We are not going to do anything that looks like, smells like or in anyway resembles amnesty, period."
I disagree. He was a total wimp as Senate maj. leader.
Great news if it's true. Wonder if any legislation on the flip side will ever make it through? Like closing the border, and starting to throw out herds of illegals, cracking down on employers, no more anchor babies, etc.
***That WILL make the President and Senor Fox very unhappy.***
Don't be so sure. It looks to me as though Dubya is playing chess again while the libs play checkers. In order to be re-elected, he had to do some pandering to the immigrants who want all their relatives to be allowed in. But, since the House has originated the new bill, Dubya is not involved, but the borders are safer. If the vote in the Senate is high enough in favor of the bill, the President will have to sign it.
I'm not entirely convinced G.W. doesn't believe in his proposal, even though I'm in disagreement with him. But anything that makes it through the Senate will have the president's approval since he is fond of working behind the scenes to avoid veto. I'm sure he's had some say in the House measure.
Actually I know many Hispanics and have always been against this assumption open borders is a winning issue with Hispanic. It is only a winning issue with those committed to the Dems, and they didn't vote for the President. Those that did vote for him did so because of family/Faith/Values/WOT/Republicans. I think there has been a serious miscalculation of the Hispanic community. This is a divided issue among them.
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Safer?
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The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
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Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.
The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.
Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.
But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.
It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.
I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”
Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:
• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.
• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.
Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.
Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.
The ordinarily tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in 1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in other words, the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status until after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they arrest someone for immigration violations. They may not notify immigration authorities about an illegal alien picked up for minor violations. Only if they have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or for multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that creates a safe haven for illegal criminals.
L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration felony.
Though such a policy puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is absurd to demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.
The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.
The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.
But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.
But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”
Even in the Socialist state of Maryland a bill is getting wide support(from both sides of the aisle), for "English is the Official Language of Maryland".The "Times they are a changin".
: )
"Great news if it's true. Wonder if any legislation on the flip side will ever make it through? Like closing the border, and starting to throw out herds of illegals, cracking down on employers, no more anchor babies, etc."
We can at least hope!! Things seem to be changing and people are getting to where they've had enough! About time the politicians started listening to the will of the people!
Way to go Trent! And thanks for persevering Tom Tancredo. Even Hillary has to pay lip service to the anti illegal immigrant tide. And the Brits said no more illegal immigrants the other day. Only legal immigrants with skills and English speaking ability.
I'm damn tired of the US being the designated flop house for the impoverished masses of the world. The white racist elites of Mexico and Central America have been dumping their unwanted brown skinned people here for decades. Our racism is a pittance compared to the rampant racist caste system of those cesspits to our south
bttt
ABSOLUTELY!
I hope you're serious. I would especially like to see what happens when local police start busting employers.
What provision in the bill makes the border safer?
Thanks for the clarification. If it passes does that means the NM legislature believes that illegal immigrants are good for their state?
The white Spanish elites of Mexico/Central America laugh themselves to sleep every night at how they get Uncle Sucker to take the peons they want to get rid of. And that those peons then send money back home that keep these nations afloat, keep the little brown ones from revolting.
***Those Spanish elites have other European blood in them such as German, Italian
If passed and signed the answer is not is it good for NM but the rest of the nation as well.
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