Bush Doesn't Get It on Immigration

Human Events ^ | Febuary.1, 2006 | Congressman Tom Tancredo

[danmar]

What part of the SOTU speech where the President said "no amnesty" do you not understand?

That statement does not amount to a hill of beans; all the Mexicans have to do is to drop an anchor baby and everything is hanky-dory.

To negate the XIVth amendment is a stretch, and GWB is not going to get it.
I say, seal the borders, kick butt and take numbers for the "guest worker programs"!

[TheLion]

I don't think we have too many "brainwashed little minds" on Freerepublic.

[zigzag]

"All the gains minorities have made in the last century will apply to whites if they ever become a minority."

Whites will certainly become a minority if current trends continue. I have become part of the white minority at my workplace in Montgomery County, MD., and I can tell you unequivocally that I do not enjoy "protected class" status, far from it. Your views on immigration are very naive, at best.

[rmlew]

A bunch of the people that glommed onto this thread are neo nazis...not all.
1. I am a son and grandson of Holocaust survivors.
2. No one calls for genocide or even mass murder. Asking invaders to leave is normal behavior.

If you are a bigot, you are on my sh*t list. Comprende?
Si, jefe.

Where did our founding fathers come from..dip.
Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Benjamin Franklins writting on German immigrants in Pennsylvania, the authors of the Alien and Sedition act, the writtings of Washington and Hamilton on immigration.

Just for the fun of it, here is Jefferson:

"[Is] rapid population [growth] by as great importations of foreigners as possible... founded in good policy?... …But are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected from a multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners? It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent.
Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.
To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass... If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.VIII, 1782. ME 2:118

Hamilton explicitly agreed with his political nemesis:

The opinion advanced in [Jefferson’s] Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?…

In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens, on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other. ~
[From Hamilton, “The Examination,” nos. 7-9 (1802), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-), 25:491-501.]

I could keep going, but you get the point.

[rmlew]

We should cheer the destruction of our national character, culture, and historical nature in the hope that minorities will end discriminatory affirmative action programs and such when whites are a minority?

Men are a minority at schools around the country. They are still subject to being second-class students.
White Americans are continuously attacked in our PC text books. Why would this change?
If anything it will get worse.

[rmlew]

Where does the American Indian stand in this equation
A motley collection of neolithic societies, exist as forign populations. Reread the Constitution and look at reservactions.
If anything, they are a warning as a group of peoples who failed to control immigration.

Black (African)Americans
They were slaves, not founders of our polity and nation. They are now Americans, but distinctly outside of the norm. The closer they move to the mores of Anglo-America the better we all are.

Or my husband's Spanish ancestors who were never residents of Mexico, but were Spaniard citizens before New Mexico became a part of this great union.
There is a difference between Americanized Spanish settlers who have been part of the US since its inception and the non-European populations of Mexico now invading.

[rmlew]

Nazi Germany tried to swallow up all Aryan peoples and enslave Slavic peoples. They were never German nationalists.

The Japanese have a relatively homogenous poipulation. The problem there was hostile imperialism, not a rational desire to keep ones land and culture.

[untrained skeptic]

The executive branch is in general limited to enforcing the laws passed by the legislature. But the administration has done somethings within their pwoer. The took the procedure of Expedited Deportation which was only used at ports under Clinton and expanded it's use to within 100 miles of the Mexican border. What it does is greatly speed up the deportation process when illegal aliens are caught within 14 days of entering the country and within 100 miles of the border. Without expediting the process it takes weeks or months. We don't have the space in prisons to hold these people for that long, so they were given a hearing date and release. Ninety percent didn't show up for their hearings. With expidited deportation, the process only takes a couple days and we can hold many more people when we only have to hold them for a short time. It's worked well near the Mexican border, so now the administration is expanding it to cover within 100 miles of the Canadian border as well. However, working well is relative. Doubling the pitiful number of deportations compared is still a pitiful amount compared to the number of illegal aliens. We need more jail space, and we need mroe federal judges. What else has the Bush administration done? Bush has appointed a lot of judges that the pro-illegal imigration lobby absolutely hates. Environmentalists had held up the completion of a 14 mile border fence near the Pacific ocean. It had 3.5 miles to go on the Pacific side and 1.5 miles to go on the eastrn side. The border fence had been approved by congress in 1996, but it was being effectively stalled indefinately due to our insane environmental laws. Last year Congress gave the department of homeland security the authority to grant an environmental waiver in such issues of homeland security. Chertoff wasted little time in granting the waiver once he had the authority, and the fence is being completed. Bush has been lukewarm in his support of border enforcement. , and now that I've gone back and read his first plans for a guest worker program, I do agree that they did offer amnesty to illegal aliens who were already in the US and already had a job. We simply cannot afford to do that. I believe that a visa program that matches willing workers with available jobs can be beneficial to the US.

However for any guest worker program to work, the jobs have to be able to support thsoe people. The guest workers cannot be allowed to have their incomes subsidized by entitlement programs. They need to be able to pay for their own health care as well. If the can't pay their own way, they shouldn't be allowed to enter the country. If they lose the ability to pay their own way, they must be deported.

Any guest worker program MUST not give any preference to those who broke the law to come here. I don't believe that we should allow anyone currently in the country illegally to apply to such a program.

Deport the illegal aliens. A reasonable concession would be to allow those who do not fight deportation and do not have a criminal record other than being in the country illegally to apply for the guest worker program from their home country after they have left the US.

Bush hasn't been aggressive as I would like on border security, but he is using his authority to make it better, and he is appointing people that are getting the border patrol to do better with what they have.

However, the border patrol, the courts, and our prison system have nowhere near the capabilities to handle the problem, and it's still getting worse not better.

[F16Fighter]

Thanks for clarifying your position and making many salient points...For instance:

"Any guest worker program MUST not give any preference to those who broke the law to come here. I don't believe that we should allow anyone currently in the country illegally to apply to such a program."

Unfortunately, Dubya has made it painfully obvious he's got an agenda regarding the illegal Mexican invasion that supercedes America's best interests. Some believe it's an internationalist/NWO thing.

After 9/11 the border should have been tighter than a drum.

[untrained skeptic]

Thanks for clarifying your position and making many salient points...For instance:

Yes I didn't do a good job of stating my position at first.

I've gotten very sick of the political atmosphere we live in where the extremists on the right and left mischaracterize and demonize anyone that doesn't do things exactly the way they want them to do them.

If you left Bush handle illegal immigration by himself, with complete authority, I agree that it would be a bad thing. Bush like anyone else is imperfect, but he's come a long way from that candidate that couldn't even express what he was saying without stumbling over the words all the time.

Compassion is very clearly a driving force for him. However, his compassion has become more tempered with the more conservative ideal of holding people responsible for their actions.

He's not out there pushing a plan to toss every illegal immigrant our of the country, but he is enforcing the laws within his abilities, and he does seem to be trying to stem the tide.

To be completely hones I don't think he has it in him to address this problem. We have upwards of 20 million illegal aliens in the country, maybe more.

Deporting them means splitting up families. Sending people into a country that they left because they had little hope there. It means putting an end to the dreams of a lot of human beings that want nothing more than a better life.

I beleive those people need to go back to their own countries and make a difference there and change those countries. We can take on some of them that want to come here. We do need hard working people that are willing to make a possitive contribution to our country. However, when we allow uncontrolled illegal immigration we not only get some good people, we get a a lot of people that are not able to support themselves and drag us down.

Our immigration system cannot be allowed to be come welfare for the world. It must be used to primarily benefit the US, while still providing benefits to those who come here through it.

We must enforce our laws. We cannot just keep granting amnesty out of compassion, bucause it continues to encourage those who undermine our laws.

With the number of illegal immigrants in the US there are a lot of cities with large concentrations of illegal immigrants. Try picturing what it will look like when the border patrol comes to round them up, especially the families. This isn't just going to be a few people here and there. We're talking big chuncks of neighborhoods.

It's an image that will make a lot of truely conservative, closed borers people falter and wonder if amnesty isn't so bad.

We've allowed illegal immigration to be come so bad that it's a true threat to our country, and fixing it will unquestionably get ugly in ways this country has not seen in a very long time.

I believe that we must fix this problem, and I beleive that amnesty cannot be the answer. But the stone throwers need to realize exactly what they are asking and not be surprised that no one is calling up the military to sweep through our country and deport all the illegal aliens.

We first need to secure the border and cut off the flow. Expedited deportations help, but we need more courts, more jails, and more well equipped border patrol agents.

Then we need to address the millions of illegal aliens already here, and we also need to have a legal immigration program to provide needed workers, because we're looking at losing a considerable amount of our population if we fix this problem, and we do need to consider the effect of that on our economy.

[untrained skeptic]

Do a google search on Expedited Deportation.

[untrained skeptic]

What Bush said: Now, I'm against amnesty, and the reason I am is I believe if you grant amnesty to people that are here, it will cause another wave of people to want to come. (Applause.) But I am for recognizing reality and saying that if you're doing a job, if you're an employer and you're looking for somebody to do a job an American won't do, then here is a card for a temporary worker. That's a humane way to treat the issue. I can't stand a system that has caused people to get stuffed in the back of 18-wheelers and they're driving across the desert. We have -- because of our policy, we have caused there to be a whole smuggling industry, and a forgery industry. If you're out there working and somebody shows up and you can't find somebody to find work, and they show up and you say, show me your card -- you don't know whether it's real or not real. There are people forging cards in order to help these people find work.

Your interpretation:

Note the first sentence of the last paragraph. He says he is against amnesty. Now note the second paragraph of the last paragraph. He proposes giving illegals a temporary worker card. He says he is against amnesty and then in the very next sentence he proposes it. To say his plan is NOT amnesty is bull.

If people come across the border illegally, they are illegal aliens. If they come across the border as part of a guest worker program, they are LEGAL aliens.

If you take someone who is illegally in the country, give them a temporarey worker card and call them legal, that is amnesty. If you don't allow people here illegally to apply for the guest worker program and only open it to people here legally or people applying from their home countries, then it's not amnesty.

Bush's original plan did provide amnesty for illegal aliens who had jobs here.

Kyl and Cornyn's plan is much better and almost there. Here's a good article on it.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/em982.cfm

It's problem is that it would still allow some illegal aliens to apply as a guest worker, leave the country and then come back in under the program. It therefore still encourages illegal immigration to an extent and still provides amnesty to some.

People learn and refine their opinions on things.

When I first getting interested in illegal immigration, I was convinced that the issue couldn't be addressed without a plan that granted amnesty to some. As I learned more about the problem through reading and discussing it, my opinion changed.

I still thing that addressing illegal immigration without a plan that allows limited amnesty for people who would qualify to enter legally under the plan is going to be extremely difficult to implement. However, I now feel that we cannot afford a plan that grants such amnesty. We cannot afford to once again show people that undermining our immigration laws works.

The horrific sight of rounding up and deporting over 5% of the people in the US is going to be difficult to handle regardless of if we allow those with jobs who are self sufficient to stay. However, we cannot simply absorb all the illegal immigrants into our society. There are simply way too many that are not making a possitive contribution.

A temporary guest worker program also doesn't solve the problem of needing to deport people. It can be a path to citizenship for a few, but for the most it's a temporary work visa that will end, and we will be back at the same point we are now or worse.

I've surrendered my delusions that a guest worker program will do much to solve illegal immigration. It merely provides legal workers that will likely be needed only after real enforcement takes place. I believe such a program is necessary to protect our economy, but it doesn't need to be large enough to handle nearly the number of illegal immigrants we have in the country now.

[jackbenimble]

It's problem is that it would still allow some illegal aliens to apply as a guest worker, leave the country and then come back in under the program. It therefore still encourages illegal immigration to an extent and still provides amnesty to some.

It also allows the illegals that are here currently to stay for five years before they even attempt to make things right as far as getting guestworker status. It doesn't really give them legal status of any sort during that period but it suspends law enforcement efforts against them during that period which amounts to the same thing. There is hardly any difference between the five years in Kyle/Cornyn and the six years in the Bush plan. It really is just an effort to kick the can down the road for several years while giving the illusion that something has been done when in fact nothing has been done.

And Cornyn/Kyl in the meantime allows in an UNLIMITED number of guests every year and throws EVERY American job open to competition and downwards wage pressure. We are not just talking about low-end unskilled jobs. There are lots of well educated people in India and Asia who would love to come displace an American at half the hourly wage.

And along with everybody else, you have failed to explain how we will make the guests leave when their visas expire. Until you explain how that will happen, you are not talking about guests but rather permanent immigrants.

[untrained skeptic]

And along with everybody else, you have failed to explain how we will make the guests leave when their visas expire. Until you explain how that will happen, you are not talking about guests but rather permanent immigrants.

Excellent point. I'll have to take some time to read the proposal again.

[jackbenimble]

Excellent point. I'll have to take some time to read the proposal again.

I'm glad you like it! When you figure it out, maybe you can explain it to me. I'd also like to know why if it will work 6 years from now to get 11 million illegals to leave when they revert from guests to illegals, why we couldn't just start doing it today.

My guess is that there is no intent that these guests will ever be made to leave and even if there is an intent our juevoless politicians won't be able to muster the political will to get it done. That is why I call it a shamnesty. There will just be an endless string of visa extensions and eventually, after maybe a dozen or so years we will find ourselves with an enormous group of second class citizens. It will be clear they live here permanently and are never leaving but they will be treated inferior to others because they will be denied things like Social Security (and they will eventually get old). It will be very tough politically to deny them these benefits when they have paid into the system and contributed to our economy. It will also be very tough to continue to deny them the vote. Taxation without representation in anathema to the American way.

I'd prefer to leave them illegal and let the anger of the American public continue to rise until eventually we start throwing some politicians out of office. At that point, I think we will get a real solution that does not involve amnesty.

And it does not need to involve mass roundups. That is a strawdog argument from the OBL that we have a black and white choice between amnesty and gestapo style roundups. It is a false choice. I have outlined a better plan in my post #277. Let the illegals self-deport.

[untrained skeptic]

I'm glad you like it! When you figure it out, maybe you can explain it to me. I'd also like to know why if it will work 6 years from now to get 11 million illegals to leave when they revert from guests to illegals, why we couldn't just start doing it today.

Well, the guest worker program isn't supposed to be the part the makes people leave. It merely provides for legal immigration.

While it's been said by some that it allows an unlimited number of illegal immigrants, I think that rather misleading. It allows immigrants only for existing jobs, and requires that the employer first try and find an American worker.

There are employers who will likely try and not make reasonable attempts to hire Americans. But there are ways to make that more difficult.

However in reality, it's the other parts of the bill that need to provide a means to get those who shouldn't have come here or have overstayed their welcome to leave.

While the guest worker part gets the most attention, it's only part of their proposal. Their bill also provides for a lot more judges, more border patrol agents, more prison space, more work site investigators, more trial attorneys.

It provides $5 billion for investing in technology and checkpoints for border security.

Here's one that could work out well or backfire.

Requires aliens to have a minimum level of health coverage, which can be provided by the participating country, the alien or the employer

It could keep people coming here under the guest worker program from being a burden on our Gantry due to unexpected haelthcare needs. However, it could also be used to ask why if guest workers are guaranteed health care, why aren't American workers as well?

The bill does have provisions to work towards stemming the tide of illegal aliens coming into the country.

It has provisions to make it easier to catch those who are employing illegal aliens.

It gives us space to detain people who are caught so that they can be held until their deportation hearings, expands our ability to handle more hearings, and makes it easier to deport people.

The question remains as to if it is enough to make those who are in our country illegally leave.

More workplace enforcement combined with the choice of legal workers will reduce employers willingness to hire illegal workers. Will it be enough. I don't know.

However, I'm not seeing many realistic plans out there. The problem of upwards of 20 million illegal residents in our country isn't going to be simple to address.

If the 500 new DHS attorneys handle 10 million illegal immigrants. Lets say they can handle on average 5 cases a day, which may not be realistic. It would take them 11 years to go through 10 million cases.

Maybe the majority won't fight deportation. Maybe we can stem the flow of people coming in. Maybe more of those can be handled in groups allowing them to be handled faster.

I have to admit that the Kyl/Cornyn plan looks a bit anemic to handle the problem. Show me a better plan and I'll be happy to take a look. However, it needs to be implementable. It needs to have a chance of making things better. It can't just be a bunch of rhetoric.

[jackbenimble]

However in reality, it's the other parts of the bill that need to provide a means to get those who shouldn't have come here or have overstayed their welcome to leave.

I don't know how old you are. Do you remember the Reagan Amnesty in 1986? Those of us who do have heard about these "other parts of the bill" before. They are meaningless. We were supposed to get a one time amnesty coupled with tough border enforcement and tough enforcement of employment laws. But nobody followed through on the enforcement obligations. President Bush has certainly shown himself absolutely unwilling to enforce current law against employers. Why would I believe a word he says about enforcing a future law? He has no credibility. He took an oath and broke it.

The only realistic plan that has a chance of actually working is one that puts enforcement first. The one that just passed in the House is not great but it is better than anything being considered in the Senate. The Hunter Bill in the House was a lot better.

Mo guest worker plan has a chance of working until we prove that we have adequate enforcement capability to enforce our border and our laws in the interior. Without enforcement we will just have illegals coming in and undercutting the guests. And of course the guests will never leave. Our laws will be an even worse mockery then they are now.

All of this is said far better here.

[untrained skeptic]

I don't know how old you are. Do you remember the Reagan Amnesty in 1986? Those of us who do have heard about these "other parts of the bill" before. They are meaningless. We were supposed to get a one time amnesty coupled with tough border enforcement and tough enforcement of employment laws.

That was general amnesty for anyone in the country. That's not the same as even Bush's original plan to grant amnesty to those who are already here and gainfully employed, which he appears to be backing away from somewhat.

It's definitely not the same as a program that allows new people to come into the country to work at existing jobs.

A blanket amnesty would be a horrible thing for our country.

Bush's original plan would be less horrible, but still horrible.

However, a guest worker program that allows legal immigration, but does not give any preference to those already here, and does not allow people who are already here to apply unless they are here illegally, does not grant amnesty and does not encourage illegal immigration.

Right now we have a lot of illegal immigrants working in the US, and they are the among the easiest to locate, apprehend and deport.

Deporting them is a good thing, but it will also mean a labor shortage. A somewhat tight labor market can be good for workers. However, it can also suddenly make it hard to get things done in a lot of industries. It drives up inflation. It harms even the companies in those markets that never used illegal labor.

There are a lot of illegal immigrants working as contractors in the construction industry. Take a look to the areas where hurricane damage has created a shortage of construction workers though growth in the industry there.

Construction costs have skyrocketed. I know a number of people who live in the midwest that have temporally relocated to the gulf coast to work in construction there because the wages are high enough to justify them leaving home, getting an apartment, and sending money back home to their families.

The people who's houses were destroyed are finding that their insurance coverage which was sufficient to rebuild their homes before isn't enough to cover the costs now because labor and material costs have increased so much.

We need to deport illegal workers, but we also have to realize what that is going to do to businesses and consumers.

I agree that we can't afford another amnesty. I however, don't believe that we do not need a guest worker plan to address legal immigration needs. It is possible to address one without the other, and we need to keep pressure on our legislators to make sure they do it. However, blind opposition to any form of guest worker or visa program is foolish.

President Bush has certainly shown himself absolutely unwilling to enforce current law against employers.

That's strange, there was an immigration raid going after the cleaning contractor at the Walmart less than a mile from my home.

In that case there was actually evidence that the management at Walmart knew their contractor was using illegal immigrants.

However, there definitely are problems in the government regarding illegal immigration. The IRS gets hundreds of thousands of W-2 forms with invalid SSNs or with SSNs who do not belong to the person who filled out the W-2, yet they don't inform the employers.

Sometimes there's a raid and they pick a sacrificial lamb to scare other immigrants, but they don't inform the employers that the people they have working for them are not legally employable.

When the do a raid, it tosses a bunch of illegal immigrants into our catch and release system. Unless they voluntarily leave, their cases will take weeks or months to handle. Our jails are full. They get released and 90% don't show up for their hearings and just move to another part of the country to find a new job illegally.

I agree that the IRS needs to inform employers and tell them that they cannot have that person working for them, and that the employer must fire them. However, enforcement is up to the government, and the government is in a situation where they cannot enforce the law because the jails and the courts are overburdened.

Expedited deportation helps speed up the process. Before the Bush administration changed the policy it was only used at ports. Now it's being used within 100 miles of the Mexican border and being expanded to within 100 miles of the Canadian border, yet it still only applies to those who entered the country within the previous 2 weeks.

It's hard to hold employers accountable when the government isn't telling them people are illegal, and our equal employment laws make it difficult for the employer to check without risking getting sued.

Those who want to undermine our immigration laws have become very good at doing so.

They attack employers through equal opportunity laws.

They fight every effort of the border patrol claiming civil rights violations, or that the immigrants aren't getting the a proper chance to apply for asylum. They work to stop patrols, fences and other types of enforcement using environmental laws.

Eight years of the Clinton administration has given them lot of tools, even though Clinton at the same time significantly increased the size of the border patrol and told the unions how much he was doing to protect their jobs from illegal laborers.

The only realistic plan that has a chance of actually working is one that puts enforcement first. The one that just passed in the House is not great but it is better than anything being considered in the Senate. The Hunter Bill in the House was a lot better.

I'll have to take a closer look at the bills.

Mo guest worker plan has a chance of working until we prove that we have adequate enforcement capability to enforce our border and our laws in the interior. Without enforcement we will just have illegals coming in and undercutting the guests.

I agree, but that's a very different thing from demonizing any type of guest worker program. If we have a guest worker program that is not amnesty, it doesn't hurt us even if enforcement isn't successful other than it being a waste.

If it's not amnesty it also doesn't hide the problem.

And of course the guests will never leave.

If they are being undercut by illegals taking the jobs, then the guest workers won't be coming in since they are required to be matched with a job.

There is a risk of employers wanting legal workers and applying for a guest worker, and then when that worker's visa expires, or if that worker quits or is fired, they don't leave the country. That's a risk with any visa program, and it does happen to some extent with any visa program.

Any guest worker program needs to include stiff penalties for people who overstay their visas. Real jail time. Not being allowed to reapply to visa programs in the future.

Right now our current law treats such things as misdemeanors even if they are enforced.

[jackbenimble]

It looks like the most likely Guest worker Bill to come out of the Senate will be Arlen Spinctor's. It combines the worst features of McCain/Kennedy and Cornyn/Kyl. We are discussing it here. There is a good analysis of Spinctor's Bill there too. Here is another interesting thread that is discussing the problems with making temporary people leave. The good news about Spinctor's bill is that it solves the problem of making the guest leave ....

.....by requiring nobody to leave.

See you on the other threads.

[stephenjohnbanker]

"I stopped believing in the Easter Bunny and Superman long, long ago. In the real world, amnesty by any other name ("guest worker") is still as ugly. And yes, stephenjohnbanker is right. "

Well, we always will have the
Great Pumpkin" : )