Posted on 01/02/2008 5:05:12 PM PST by Condor 63
DES MOINES, Iowa—Members of the Iowa Interfaith Immigration Coalition are urging presidential candidates of both parties to conduct the debate over immigration policy in a civil manner “that respects human dignity.”
In a Dec. 4 news conference, Connie Ryan Terrell, executive director of The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, led a group of speakers who gathered to “change the negative, public attitudes and rhetoric which demonize and dehumanize our immigrant friends and neighbors.”
Ms. Terrell said this “destructive attitude has permeated our nation,” making the discussion about immigration a more “complex and difficult debate.”
In a four-week period, more than 3,600 signatures from across the state of Iowa were gathered on a “Creating a Welcoming State” petition, the group said at the news conference.
The petition states, “We pledge ourselves as people of faith and goodwill to stand with our immigrant neighbors who have come to the United States from throughout the world. Recognizing the moral imperative to welcome the stranger in our midst, we commit ourselves to support laws that affirm their dignity, preserve their families, and acknowledge the value of their presence among us.”
(Excerpt) Read more at umportal.org ...
email tiaiowa@dwx.com
Lets give them new tone by stapling whizz whistles to each of their rectal sphincters, thats the new tone they need!
Are you sure that line isn’t from High Plains Drifter? I don’t recall a Preacher in Josey Wales but I do remember one from HPD. It’s a good line anyway.
On the other hand, getting their TAX EXCEMPT STATUS REVOKED or something like that WILL get their attention! And would be worth the time and effort.
I’d love to send them an email of your post. Do you mind?
I haven’t read the article yet, I can hardly wait....
I hope it suggests tar and feathers for certain bureaucrats. Several of them are running for president.
I can still dream.
The lefties are going to destroy this country!
Bit of a run on sentence, but was just a rant. Clean it up a bit and it’s ready to be sent out.
LOL I'll get the tar.
Only if they don't destroy themselves first....
Which is a real possibility.
For anyone interested, Mitt Romney event on C-Span on now.
Just NOT the ILLEGAL ones.
These guys are simply misguided ecumenicals who don’t understand the scriptural nuances about nations, cultural degradation, and plundering. I would venture to say that members of this ecumenical group haven’t lost children to drunk driving illegals or had a spouse raped, property stolen or family member beaten up by a gang. Probably none of them have ever waited in an emergency room full of illegals, or had to compete with illegals for jobs. But, I could be wrong. They could just be really stupid, unthinking people with big hearts. Whatever the case, I agree that the advocates of open borders and amnesty should tone down their hateful rhetoric.
Quote: Iowa—Members of the Iowa Interfaith Immigration Coalition are urging presidential candidates of both parties to conduct the debate over immigration policy in a civil manner “that respects human dignity.”
How about respecting the laws of the US instead and take their illegal bodies and go the hell home where they belong!
It's about ILLEGAL, UNLAWFUL immigration, it's not about immigration.
Picture a Mexican Flag, flown upside down, with a "no" (circle with off-set line/diameter) on it and the Spanish word for "illegal/unlawful" written under the circle/no.
Good rant today from Mike Cutler on this subject , especially to send to your democrat friends.
Hi Gang:
The caucus in Iowa is literally hours away. The article I have attached below appears in today’s addition of the Washington Post and I find the premise of the article to be disturbing for three reasons. First of all, there are a number of newspapers that often portray editorial opinions as being a news story. The article I have attached below, in my opinion, uses language that should appear in an editorial article rather than a news story. Terms such as “Punitive” and “Brutal” to describe efforts to deter illegal immigration paints a misleading picture. The article starts out by using the entirely accurate term that they have consistently eschewed (Illegal Alien) to indicate how horrible they believe this accurate term is. I have made this point at every opportunity; the term “Alien” is not a pejorative, it is a legal term that is as old as is our nation and is described simply as being defined as an person who is not a citizen or national of the United States. The open borders advocates know full well that if the term illegal alien was used instead of the deceptive and contradictory term “Illegal Immigrant” that it would be that much harder to obfuscate the issue, a tactic that they resort to because they know that the law, commonsense and the facts are not on their side. Finally, the article links secure borders to “Conservative” politics. As I have often stated, the issue of secure borders and an immigration system that possesses integrity is neither a Democratic nor a Republican issue. I have highlighted some of the deceptive language in the article below.
The immigration issue is weighing so heavily among the Republican candidates while the Democratic Party candidates for President are doing everything in their power to ignore the immigration issue as much as they can. I make no bones about my political affiliation, I am a registered Democrat and I am utterly unable to understand how the political party of my parents that was, when I was a kid, seen as the party that represented blue collar America and the American labor movement could turn its back on the hard working citizens of this country whose jobs are being threatened by illegal aliens.
Meanwhile the Republican candidates often attempt to provide the illusion that they want to deal with the issue of illegal immigration while, in reality, demonstrating that they lack the resolve and integrity to truly secure our nation’s borders and create an immigration bureaucracy that possesses real integrity. As I recently noted in a previous commentary, Mike Huckabee failed to complete the measures necessary to implement the Section 287(g) program in his state when he was governor. He has also misrepresented the issue of providing in-state tuition for illegal aliens. By referring to these aliens as being the “children of illegal aliens” as he has on a number of occasions and saying that he did not want to make the children of illegal aliens to suffer the wrongs committed by their parents, he neglected to point out that these “children” were, for the most part, not minors. He also failed to point out that they are, themselves illegal aliens.
Rudy Giuliani has said that he wants to provide illegal aliens with tamper-proof identity documents that would get these millions of illegal aliens out of the “shadows.” He claimed that his recommendation was consistent with the recommendations of the 911 Commission. In point of fact while it is important that any identity documents be as tamper-resistant as possible, the bigger issue is; what name should be imprinted on those documents? Remember, we are talking about illegal aliens who are “undocumented.” This means that these aliens who have violated our nation’s borders and immigration laws and may well have violated other laws such as assuming the identity of a hapless victim of identity theft are likely not who they claim they are. We cannot be certain of their names or even their nationalities. We certainly would have no way of determining when these aliens entered our country because they may have run our nation’s borders and therefore left no paper trail. Because there is no door our nation can shut, there is no way to prevent millions of additional aliens from rushing across our nation’s borders and then claiming to have been residing here illegally for the requisite period of time that would make them eligible for participation in the amnesty program that Giuliani apparently favors along with such Congressional luminaries as Senators Reid and McCain as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and God knows how many other high ranking members of both houses of Congress and from both political parties.
So while the Republican Party is at least willing to discuss illegal immigration, the Democratic Party is attempting to ignore the 800 pound gorilla of immigration. Several months ago I received a survey in the mail from the Democratic Party. Perhaps you received the same or a similar survey that asked me to check off the issues I considered to be most important to me. The environment, the economy and other such issues were listed. There was a final blank box you could fill in, but there was nothing that even related to the immigration crisis that confronts our nation today. I was greatly offended by this obvious “oversight.” Immigration, both legal and illegal have created a host of incredible challenges for our nation. Immigration hammers everything from the economy, the environment, education and health care to criminal justice and national security. There is no way of dealing with these important issues in a meaningful way if we are unable and unwilling to secure our borders and create an immigration system that possesses meaningful integrity.
I would like to take you on an abbreviated “tour” of recent history where the immigration crisis is concerned so that you will better understand how we have gotten to this situation our nation finds itself today.
During the Reagan Administration the Amnesty of 1986 also know as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was enacted. We were told that this program would finally create an immigration system that possessed integrity and would get roughly one million illegal aliens “out of the shadows.” The Amnesty also call for imposing sanctions on those employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens. The idea that my colleagues and I would be finally able to go after unscrupulous employers of illegal aliens pleased me greatly. As an INS special agent I had seen how illegal aliens had been terribly mistreated by their employers who would threaten these people with reporting them to the INS if they complained about working conditions or wages. I had heard many allegations about employers who coerced young women who worked for them into having sex with them. I witnessed how often these illegal aliens were denied their salaries which were, in the first place, way below prevailing wage levels if not below minimum wage standards altogether. My colleagues and I hoped that by creating laws and a mechanism by which unscrupulous employers could be fined and even prosecuted, the awful hiring practices of some of these miserable factory owners would stop.
We were naive! The INS never hired enough special agents to really enable the laws to be enforced in a meaningful way against the unscrupulous employers. Additionally, the way that the applications for amnesty were processed fraud levels went through the roof. There were no resources to truly determine who these illegal aliens were. We were also unable to determine when they actually entered the United States. The originally estimated 1.1 million illegal aliens we were told would emerge from the “shadows” grew to somewhere between 3.5 million and 4 million illegal aliens. The special provisions for claimed agricultural workers under the provision of Amnesty known as SAW (Special Agricultural Workers) created more fraud and was, in fact, used by a number of terrorists and criminals who easily gamed the system. Virtually nothing was done to provide the training and other resources to help our adjudicators and agents to identify counterfeit and / or altered identity documents and supporting documents used by aliens to commit fraud against our government. Document fraud became a cottage industry and remains so to this very day.
On September 1, 2006 I was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee field hearing in Iowa on the topic:
“Do the Reid-Kennedy Bill’s Amnesty Provisions Repeat The Mistakes of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?”
You can read the transcript of that hearing and even view a video of it at:
http://judiciary.house.gov/Oversight.aspx?ID=258
During the course of my prepared testimony I addressed the issue of just how the Amnesty of 1986 enabled Mahmud Abouhalima, a key participant in the 1993 terrorist attack carried out against the World Trade Center. To quote from the relevant portion of my testimony:
“A notable example of such a terrorist can be found in a review of the facts concerning Mahmud Abouhalima, a citizen of Egypt who entered the United States on a tourist visa, overstayed his authorized period of admission and then applied for amnesty under the agricultural worker provisions of IRCA. He succeeded in obtaining resident alien status through this process. During a 5 year period he drove a cab and had his license suspended numerous times for violations of law and ultimately demonstrated his appreciation for our nation’s generosity by participating in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that left 6 people dead, hundreds of people injured and an estimated one half billion dollars in damage inflicted, on that iconic, ill-fated complex. America had opened its doors to him so that he might participate in the “American Dream.” He turned that dream into our worst nightmare. The other terrorists who attacked our nation on subsequent attacks, including the attacks of September 11, 2001, similarly exploited our generosity, seeing in our nation’s kindness, weakness, gaming the immigration system to enter our country and then, hide in plain sight, among us.”
During the Clinton Administration a program known as “Citizenship USA” (CUSA) was created to purportedly clear up the backlog of applications for United States citizenship. High ranking officials within the INS were pressured into approving an avalanche of applications for some one million aliens. As it turned out, many thousands of applications for United Stats citizenship were approved even without the necessary background checks having been completed. You can read a DOJ report on this fiasco at:
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0007/execsum.pdf
The executive summary of this investigation can be found at:
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0007/exec.htm
Today we are constantly reminded that we are waging a war against terrorists who want to destroy our nation and kill our citizens. We have read about Nada Prouty, a woman who was born in Lebanon and came to the United States as a student who subsequently overstayed her authorized period of admission and then committed immigration benefit fraud to secure a green card and then United States citizenship that enabled her to get a job as an FBI special agent and then went to work for the CIA. She used here security clearance to unlawfully access government databases to determine the progress our government was making in investigating a terrorist organization, Hezbollah. Her brother-in-law and other family members are believed to be intimately involved with Hezbollah. Apparently Ms Prouty was a mole! If you have read my previous commentaries about this incredible case you already know the gory details and so, I will not bore you with them. The point is that by bestowing United States citizenship upon aliens we provide them with the keys to the kingdom. Yet the process by which immigration benefits are provided to millions of illegal aliens still lacks integrity.
Incredibly the leaders of the Democratic Party are doing everything in their power to ignore the entire issue of the borders that the current administration has refused to secure. The candidates of the Democratic Party oppose the construction of the border fence and have, for the most part been unwilling to talk about the national security implications of immigration.
It is not that the citizens of the United States who are registered Democrats don’t care about the immigration crisis, it is that their party has let them and, in fact, our nation, down! This is inexcusable!
As I stated at the beginning of this commentary and as I have stated in various venues, the issue of border security and the issue of the creation of an immigration system that has meaningful integrity is neither Republican nor Democrat issues. It is neither Conservative nor Liberal issues. These issues that impact so many aspects of our nation today including national security are American issues!
It has been said that the first step in problem solving is to identify the problem. The candidates who are attempting to ignore the immigration crisis confronting our nation today make it clear that they have no intentions of doing that which the great majority of Americans have demanded: that our borders be secured and our immigration bureaucracy be provided with the resources and leadership to attack massive immigration fraud that represents a major threat to our nation’s security.
We are at the beginning of a new and momentous year. As We the People decide on our New Year’s resolution I would urge you to consider making it your resolution to become involved in the political process. In order for politicians to listen to the citizens of this nation, they need to hear from the citizens. We the People should make it our business to have our voices heard often and regularly. Arguably our nation’s biggest adversary is the apathy exhibited by all too many American citizens! That is why I end just about every one of my commentaries by saying:
Democracy is not a spectator sport!
Lead, follow or get out of the way!
-michael cutler-
MCutler007@aol.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/01/AR2008010102333.html?hpid=topnews
For Republicans, Contest’s Hallmark Is Immigration
It is very easy to be a Christian about this.
Mexico has its own immigration laws that it enforces in regards to Guatemalans that cross into Mexico and Cuban rafters that occasionaly land in Yucatan. Those people are sent home.
The U.S. likewise has immigration laws.
A nation's laws are Caesar's rules and Christ advised us to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s".
"Human dignity" is not advanced by tolerating anarchy and abandoning the Rule of Law.
translation: they still want amnesty.
” In a Dec. 4 news conference, Connie Ryan Terrell, executive director of The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, led a group of speakers who gathered to “change the negative, public attitudes and rhetoric which demonize and dehumanize our immigrant friends and neighbors.”
Ms. Terrell said this “destructive attitude has permeated our nation,”
Ugh, she sounds like Huckabee.
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