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Border compromise no hit with state GOP officials (AZ GOP Chrmn Pullen Gets Mail)
East Valley Tribune and Associated Press ^
| May 22, 2007
| Paul Giblin, Tribune
Posted on 05/22/2007 7:01:39 PM PDT by bd476
Border compromise no hit with state GOP officials
Paul Giblin, Tribune
May 22, 2007
The Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform package is flopping badly with leaders of the Arizona Republican Party, said state party chairman Randy Pullen on Monday.
Party officials have received “hundreds” of letters, e-mails and telephone calls from Republicans since Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, DMass., and others introduced the compromise measure in Washington on Thursday, Pullen said.
To illustrate the point at a press conference, Pullen displayed a letter with a drawing of a fist and finger making an obscene gesture.
To ensure that the message was understood, the letter’s author used a blue highlighter to color in the extended digit, and jotted the message, “Here is my middle finger.”
“This basically is the outlook that many of our party faithful are feeling right now about the Republican Party,” Pullen said.
At least some members of the party appear to be taking their cues from the state party chairman himself.
During the weekend, he posted a statement on his blog that starts: “On behalf of the more than 1 million registered Arizona Republicans who care very deeply about this state and have tremendous love for our great nation, I am very disappointed in this new legislation.”
The state party also emailed the 1½-page statement to 86,000 people in its database.
Despite the unrest within the party, Pullen and members of his staff have been working to soothe party members who are upset about the immigration bill and Arizona’s senators, he said.
“I’ve got to tell you, when you have people coming in every day, tearing up their registration cards and throwing them on the floor or changing their registrations from Republican to independent, it’s a little bit disconcerting,” he said.
A better program would have provided increased border security without packaging it with immigration reform, he said.
Furthermore, a better program would have extended consideration to the length of time illegal immigrants have lived in the United States when determining eligibility for granting legal status, Pullen said.
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., defended Kyl, one of the chief architects of the immigration reform package, as a conservative Republican.
“This is a conservative bill. What people haven’t appreciated fully yet — and I think they will when they step back and actually see the language — is that Kyl won some big concessions on this for some areas of real concern,” Flake told the Tribune.
Among those provisions:
• A temporary worker program that limits the amount of time foreign workers may spend in the United States.
• The “touch-back” provision that requires heads of households to return to their native countries to apply for citizenship.
• An end of “chain migration,” an immigration platform that awards citizenship status based largely on ties to family members who already are U.S. citizens. The new bill calls for the selection process for future immigrants to be based on a points system that rewards employment criteria, education and knowledge of English.
“The notion that this is amnesty when the fastest anybody could get citizenship is 13 or 14 years is just crazy,” Flake said.
“This is a conservative bill. I don’t think it’s conservative at all to just ignore the problem and pretend to solve it by doing something at the border.”
Meanwhile, the bill received generally favorable reviews from the Valley Interfaith Project.
The bill is an important first step, vice president Dick White said. He called on Kyl and Mc-Cain to guide the bill through Congress until it’s signed into law by President Bush.
In no state would passage of this bill have more impact than in Arizona, White said. Our border would become more secure, 500,000 undocumented immigrants would have a path to citizenship, high school students would benefit from the inclusion of the Dream Act, and our agriculture industry would have the workers they need, he said.
TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: Arizona
KEYWORDS: aliens; amnesty; immigrantlist; immigration; randypullen
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
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1
posted on
05/22/2007 7:01:41 PM PDT
by
bd476
To: bd476
I’d like to see an end to the “anchor babies” situation - but I do realize that it’s beyond the scope of this bill.
2
posted on
05/22/2007 7:05:42 PM PDT
by
MplsSteve
To: bd476
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., defended Kyl, one of the chief architects of the immigration reform package, as a conservative Republican. This is a conservative bill. What people havent appreciated fully yet and I think they will when they step back and actually see the language is that Kyl won some big concessions on this for some areas of real concern, Flake told the Tribune.
This country is doomed.
3
posted on
05/22/2007 7:07:47 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Any politician who supports amnesty is deader politically than Teddy Kennedy's liver...)
To: bd476
I know my state Republican leader got an email from me. He responded pleasantly. I suspect he took the time to reply because I'm one of maybe 14 Republicans in the state of Washington.Writing him was actually abnormal for me. I'm betting that if I bothered to write the Republican leadership, all across the country they got slammed with phone calls, emails and letters.
To: bd476
Ive got to tell you, when you have people coming in every day, tearing up their registration cards and throwing them on the floor or changing their registrations from Republican to independent, its a little bit disconcerting, he said. Heh...
5
posted on
05/22/2007 7:09:29 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Any politician who supports amnesty is deader politically than Teddy Kennedy's liver...)
To: bd476
6
posted on
05/22/2007 7:11:04 PM PDT
by
Wolverine
(A Concerned Citizen)
To: MplsSteve
It’s not really beyond the scope of this bill. What we have is a failure to legislate on the matter. That left the courts free to screw everything up.
7
posted on
05/22/2007 7:11:26 PM PDT
by
muawiyah
To: bd476
Furthermore, a better program would have extended consideration to the length of time illegal immigrants have lived in the United States when determining eligibility for granting legal status, Pullen said. So the longer someone has broken the law by staying here illegally, the more favorable their treatment would be.
Do these nimrods ever stop to think through this idiocy?
8
posted on
05/22/2007 7:12:09 PM PDT
by
dirtboy
(A store clerk has done more to fight the WOT than Rudy.)
To: bd476
This is a conservative bill.”
Unbelievable....
9
posted on
05/22/2007 7:12:13 PM PDT
by
teldon30
(disgruntled 2nd class)
To: dirtboy
We need to keep calling, faxing and emailing. We can’t let them sneak this through.
Arizona Politics and Policy from Randy Pullen and the staff at the Arizona Republican Party
May 20, 2007
On behalf of the more than one million registered Arizona Republicans who care very deeply about this state and have a tremendous love for our great nation, I am very disappointed in this new legislation about to be introduced in the U.S. Senate next week. The bill would allow all 12 million plus illegal aliens to remain in this country indefinitely and provides them, as well as their immediate families, a path to citizenship. This is amnesty, as they will be working and living in the United States, while those who have applied legally for Visas are still awaiting entry.
Furthermore, the bill does not require certification that our borders are secure. Instead, enforcement “triggers” such as building 370 miles of fence along a 2,000-mile border and increasing our Border Agents from 14,000 to 18,000 are to be certified. There are no requirements that theses triggers be shown to be effective before the granting of sweeping amnesty. If Senator Kennedy and his Democratic friends were serious about securing the border, they would have agreed to real standards for border security in the bill.
Over the past several days, the Arizona Republican Party has had hundreds of calls from activists, voters of all partisan persuasion, precinct committeemen and women, and even chairs of legislative districts and county committees questioning the judgment of our elected officials in Washington, D.C.
We here in Arizona are living each day on the front lines of the immigration debate because it’s our children who are subjected to the drugs first coming across the border and appearing in our schools. It’s our hospitals here in Arizona that treat the millions who have crossed the desert to get here illegally and our Arizona taxpayers who foot the bill. It’s our Arizona communities that have become the battlegrounds for the thousands of gang members who traffic in people, drugs, weapons and stolen vehicles.
To Congress we say: this proposed law with 790 pages of new bureaucracy and window-dressing will not solve the immigration problem. This legislation is an over complicated answer to problems it’ll never adequately address and will do more to encourage illegal immigration than to discourage it. Instead, prove your commitment to securing our borders by finishing the fence, adding border security technology, letting Border Patrol do their jobs and authorizing more National Guard to assist the Border Patrol.
Posted by Randy
Pullen for the Party
11
posted on
05/22/2007 7:16:22 PM PDT
by
bd476
To: EternalVigilance
Pretty cool the way Arizona's voting Republicans drove home the message, eh?
12
posted on
05/22/2007 7:18:07 PM PDT
by
bd476
To: bd476
A temporary worker program that limits the amount of time foreign workers may spend in the United States.This is the biggest laugher of the bill. Who's going to track these people? They deport them now and they can't find them to send them back. How are they going to track a few million more?
The touch-back provision that requires heads of households to return to their native countries to apply for citizenship.
Ha, another laugher. More people we have to track that will never be found.
An end of chain migration, an immigration platform that awards citizenship status based largely on ties to family members who already are U.S. citizens. The new bill calls for the selection process for future immigrants to be based on a points system that rewards employment criteria, education and knowledge of English.
Pelosi and other liberals are already pledging to take out the chain migration part of the bill and many of our gutless leaders will probably go for it.
The notion that this is amnesty when the fastest anybody could get citizenship is 13 or 14 years is just crazy, Flake said.
Empty promises. Just like all this was going to get fixed in the 1986 bill. It only got worse. They'll say whatever it takes to get it passed and then won't enforce half of it.
This is a conservative bill. I dont think its conservative at all to just ignore the problem and pretend to solve it by doing something at the border.
Nonsense. Nobody wants to ignore it. We want the border closed FIRST and then address the illegals already here. They don't want the fence first because they really don't want to solve the problem.
I'm about as disgusted as I've ever been with the Republican leadership and that's saying something after living through the spineless leadership of Trent Jellyfish Lott, Bill Frist, et al. There's going to be a tsunami at the ballot box if they don't wake up.
To: bd476
Yep. For days, we’ve been urging folks to continue the pressure on elected officials, while at the same time ramping up the pressure on party officials at every level.
Seems to be working! ;-)
14
posted on
05/22/2007 7:21:54 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Any politician who supports amnesty is deader politically than Teddy Kennedy's liver...)
To: Psycho_Bunny
Good that you wrote the letter, Bunny. I've made some phone calls and will write snail mail when I get my printer working again. Meanwhile, faxing and e-mailing is good.
Psycho_Bunny wrote: "I suspect he took the time to reply because I'm one of maybe 14 Republicans in the state of Washington."
Congratulations on being able to survive in a sea of libs. :-)
15
posted on
05/22/2007 7:24:44 PM PDT
by
bd476
To: bd476
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., defended Kyl, This is one flake that has an correct last name. Fits him perfect, "Once a flake always a flake "
16
posted on
05/22/2007 7:31:34 PM PDT
by
org.whodat
(What's the difference between a Democrat and a republican????)
To: EternalVigilance; bd476
This is a conservative bill. What people havent appreciated fully yet and I think they will when they step back and actually see the language is that Kyl won some big concessions on this for some areas of real concern, Flake told the Tribune. Really? I doubt that a truly conservative bill would include language like the following:
ALIENS ASSOCIATED WITH CRIMINAL GANGS - Unless the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Attorney General waives the application of this subparagraph, any alien who a consular officer, the Attorney General, or the Secretary of Homeland Security knows or has reason to believe has participated in a criminal gang (as defined in section 101(a)(52)), knowing or having reason to know that such participation promoted, furthered, aided, or supported the illegal activity of the criminal gang, is inadmissible.
ALIENS ASSOCIATED WITH CRIMINAL GANGS- Any alien, in or admitted to the United States, who at any time has participated in a criminal gang (as defined in section 101(a)(52)), knowing or having reason to know that such participation will promote, further, aid, or support the illegal activity of the criminal gang is deportable. The Secretary of Homeland Security or the Attorney General may in his discretion waive this subparagraph.
There are 63 other instances of the occurrences of the word "waive" in the copy of the bill I took these from.
A law can require 15 years of very rigorous hoop-jumping but how many will actually jump through those hoops if Congress gives the Secretary of the agency that administers the law the ability to exempt people from having to jump through one or more of them. Or to declare people who are, by definition, ineligible to be eligible.
17
posted on
05/22/2007 7:35:20 PM PDT
by
Bigun
(IRS sucks @getridof it.com)
To: Bigun
The closer you get your nose to this piece of excrement, the more it becomes apparent that, yes, it is excrement.
18
posted on
05/22/2007 7:38:02 PM PDT
by
EternalVigilance
(Any politician who supports amnesty is deader politically than Teddy Kennedy's liver...)
To: bd476
CALL! CALL! CALL! CALL! AND KEEP CALLING TILL THE LINES FRY!
WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! TILL YOU RUN OUT OF INK IN YOUR PEN!
Bombard the Democrats as well, especially the ones that ran on an anti immigration plank and the ones in marginal districts who could be vulnerable. keep pounding on them.
STOP AMNESTY NOW!! WE CAN DO IT!!
The best way to stop Shamnesty
19
posted on
05/22/2007 7:40:10 PM PDT
by
Cacique
(quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))
To: MplsSteve; EternalVigilance; Psycho_Bunny; Wolverine; dirtboy; teldon30; Reagan is King; ...
Coming Soon to Your State:
"...We here in Arizona are living each day on the front lines of the immigration debate because it’s our children who are subjected to the drugs first coming across the border and appearing in our schools.
It's our hospitals here in Arizona that treat the millions who have crossed the desert to get here illegally and our Arizona taxpayers who foot the bill.
It's our Arizona communities that have become the battlegrounds for the thousands of gang members who traffic in people, drugs, weapons and stolen vehicles..."
More from Arizona's State GOP Chairman Randy Pullen posted here: The Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2007
20
posted on
05/22/2007 7:42:08 PM PDT
by
bd476
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