Replies

Senator Saxbe Chamblis of Georgia standard E-Mail response to constiuents on his support of illegal Immigration:

Thank you for contacting me to share your thoughts about immigration reform. I appreciate knowing your thoughts on this important and emotional issue.

Our current immigration system is broken and needs reform. Any reform Congress enacts must meet our national security needs and our economic interests; it must also manage the number of people we admit into the U.S. to ensure American workers and families are not negatively impacted by our immigration system.

Moreover, all individuals living in the United States must respect and obey our nation’s laws. There are times when old and current laws must be reviewed, revised and ultimately strengthened. The time is now to appropriately reform our immigration laws.

The recently announced bipartisan agreement on immigration reform is a step in the right direction toward reaching a final and comprehensive immigration bill. This legislation is a significant improvement over last year’s bill, which I opposed, but this is not a perfect bill. For me to support any final bill, it must contain the following principles that are important to Georgians:

Guaranteed border security first .

No amnesty and no new path to citizenship

Temporary means temporary - guest workers must go home at the end of their authorized temporary work period

End chain migration - replace family-based immigration system with a merit-based system.

Eliminate the job magnet for illegal immigrants by implementing a simple, secure employment verification system.

English should be the official language of the United States and everyone should speak it.

Our nation’s immigration problem has been in the making for many years and there is no easy fix. I have chosen to be proactive and engaged during the negotiations because my involvement is the right thing for Georgia and the right thing for America ‘s future. As the debate progresses, I will continue the fight to ensure that our nation is secure and our economy continues to thrive.

If you would like to receive timely email alerts regarding the latest congressional actions and my weekly e-newsletter, please sign up via my web site at: www.chambliss.senate.gov . Please do not hesitate to be in touch if I may ever be of assistance to you.

Ask Chambliss if he really believes all that stuff in his letter, why he raised such a stink in 1998 to STOP workplace enforcement.

[snip]Inspections of Vidalia onion fields of Georgia in May 1998 brought a rebuke from then Rep. and now Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), who accused immigration officials of using “bullying tactics” to root out illegal workers. Today, Chambliss is a leader of the get-tough-on-illegal-immigration faction of the Republican party, and argues that the US needs to step up both border and interior enforcement.

http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1111_0_4_0

snip] Instead of being applauded for enforcing the law, the INS came under attack from Georgia’s congressional delegation. Georgia’s two senators and three of its House members, led by then-Sen. Paul Coverdell (R) and Rep. Jack Kingston (R), complained in a letter to Washington that the INS did not understand the needs of America’s farmers. The raids stopped.

Sen. Paul Coverdell condemned the INS for its “military-style” raid “against honest farmers,” calling it “an indiscriminate and inappropriate use of extreme enforcement tactics.”
He then insisted the INS not raid Georgia agricultural fields and crafted a ‘temporary work’ program for the state of Georgia with the INS that allowed undocumented workers to stay ‘legally’ in the U.S. The same has happened in other states like Oregon, and Washington at the insistence of their elected representatives.

Before that incident, the INS had been arresting and deporting almost 1,500 illegal immigrants a month. By 2003 workplace arrests of illegal immigrants for the entire year totaled 445. In 2004, just three businesses nationwide were fined for employing illegal immigrants. In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies.

The Macon Telegraph described the episode, “ Farmers and immigration officials came to terms on migrant labor issues Friday morning, ending the siege on Georgia’s sweet onion fields. But a storm of criticism from the state’s congressional delegation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s action is brewing on the horizon. Eight members of Congress signed an angry letter Friday afternoon to three of the Clinton administration’s top cabinet officers, blasting the INS for its timing”

Said Doris Meissner, INS commissioner from 1993 to 2000: “Those things affect an agency’s morale. You go out of your way to make it work, then it comes to nothing. Very demoralizing.”

Republican Rep. Jack Kingston has since stated “Employers in roofing and poultry and other areas will say, `Immigrants will work longer and harder,’ “ he said. Still, he has moved from being one of the 1998 defenders of the onion growers — “For us, it was just constituent work,” he said — to becoming an outspoken proponent of get-tough immigrant proposals.
Now, he said he believes businesses should be required to verify an employee’s legal status. He also is in favor of harsher penalties for employers who violate immigration laws.

He doesn’t, however, think such sanctions will be part of any new bill.

“The business lobby,” he said, “is too strong.”

Lobbyist and White house guru, Grover Norquist, a force behind the verification weakening, said: “The idea was that our job is to enforce the present rules that don’t work — rather than change the rules.”

Or in Norquist’s case, just do away with any border/immigration enforcement.

By 2000, according to INS figures, the estimated number of illegal immigrants had risen to 7 million, from 3.5 million in 1990.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1836717/posts