“There is not enough courage in all of Washington D.C. to come close to doing what you want.”
Then is it not up to us to ELECT those with the courage to do it?
Do you live on another planet? No new laws are necessary. There are plenty of laws on the books concerning illegal immigration. What's missing has been and is a president and executive branch that follows and enforces the laws concerning illegal immigration. We've had the opposite of that since 1986 when the Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty was passed. We got the amnesty and are still waiting on the strict enforcement.
We even had a law that required 700 miles of double-fencing along parts of the border, but Bush used one ruse after another to avoid implementing that law.
And the American people want the laws enforced, but it's difficult to weed out all the politicians and bureaucrats who spent the past 25 years pandering and making sure the laws were not enforced.
If that doesn't happen, this country is finished. We have an opportunity to do just that in 2012.
Do a poll, look at any poll and see where illegal immigration falls on the list of priorities of the electorate. Guaranteed it will be 4th or 5th on the list. After the economy, after jobs, after education--and depending on international events--after national defense.<
Immigration, legal and illegal, has had and will continue to have a major and far-reaching impact across a broad spectrum of existential challenges that confront this nation, e.g., national security, the economy/global competitiveness, jobs, health care, taxes, energy independence, education, entitlement reform, law enforcement, social welfare programs, physical infrastructure, the environment, civil liberties, and a continued sense of national identity/shared sense of endeavor. Immigration is the defining issue of our time with enormous implications for the future of this nation and the preservation of our patrimony. Yet, seldom will you hear immigration mentioned by our political and intellectual elites in connection with solutions to these challenges.
The U.S. adds one international migrant (net) every 36 seconds. Immigrants account for one in 8 U.S. residents, the highest level in more than 80 years. In 1970 it was one in 21; in 1980 it was one in 16; and in 1990 it was one in 13. In a decade, it will be one in 7, the highest level in our history. And by 2050, one in 5 residents of the U.S. will be foreign-born.
Currently, 1.6 million legal and illegal immigrants settle in the country each year; 350,000 immigrants leave each year, resulting in net immigration of 1.25 million. Since 1970, the U.S. population has increased from 203 million to 310 million, i.e., over 100 million. In the next 40 years, the population will increase by 130 million. Three-quarters of the increase in our population since 1970 and the projected increase will be the result of immigration. The U.S., the world’s third most populous nation, has the highest annual rate of population growth of any major developed country in the world, i.e., 0.963% (2011 estimate), principally due to immigration.
Jobs and Wages – The latest data show 22.1 million immigrants holding jobs in the U.S. with an estimated 8 million being illegal aliens. By increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent. Among natives without a high school education, who roughly correspond to the poorest tenth of the workforce, the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent. The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status.
The Bureau of Labor statistics for September 2011 show a national unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, including 16 percent for blacks and 11.3 percent for Hispanics. 22 million Americans are seeking full-time employment. Despite the economic downturn, the U.S. continues to bring in 125,000 new, legal foreign workers a month. This includes new permanent residents (Green Cards) and long-term temporary visas and others who are authorized to take a job. This makes no sense.
Education – Immigration accounts for virtually all of the national increase in public school enrollment over the last two decades. In 2007, there were 10.8 million school-age children from immigrant families in the U.S. Although immigrants account for 13 percent of the population, they comprise 21 percent of the school age population. With 300,000 to 400,000 anchor babies being born each year, we are bankrupting our schools with the additional costs of ESOL, subsidized meals, etc. and hurting the quality of education. CA is a good example of what happens to the quality and costs of education when you are overrun with immigrants, legal and illegal.
National security The two main threats to our national security posed by immigration relate to terrorism and drugs. First, tens of thousands of persons from countries that support international terrorism have come across our southern border undetected since 9/11. Testifying before Congress in March 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that his agency busted a smuggling ring organized by the terrorist group Hezbollah that had operatives cross the Mexican border to carry out possible terrorist attacks inside the U.S. “This was an occasion in which Hezbollah operatives were assisting others with some association with Hezbollah in coming to the United States,” Mueller told a House Appropriations subcommittee during a hearing on the FBI's budget.
Hezbollah was responsible for the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 243 U.S. troops. A total of 20 foreign-born terrorists were involved in 9/11, 19 of whom took part in the attack that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths. The terrorists had entered the country on tourist or student visas. Four of them, however, had overstayed their visas and become illegal aliens and the others should not have been granted visas for various immigration control reasons.
Second, Michael Hayden, the outgoing head of the CIA stated in January 2009 that the threat of a narco state in Mexico is one of the gravest dangers to American security, on a par with a nuclear-armed Iran. An assessment by the United States Joint Forces Command, published in February 2009, concluded that the two countries most at risk of becoming failed states were Pakistan and Mexico. The descent of Mexico into a failed narco state, marked by increased violence and brutality, which has already spilled over into the U.S., has enormous implications for immigration, legal and illegal.
With over 13 million Mexican-born residents in the U.S. plus their U.S.-born relatives, there are strong familial ties to Mexico, which would attract Mexicans fleeing a disintegrating state seeking asylum and safety in the U.S. And the pressure on our porous, unsecured southern border would increase dramatically. Currently, the Border Patrol apprehends more than half a million people annually trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico and hundreds of thousands more illegal aliens are successful in gaining entry. There is no way the U.S. could stop a tidal wave of Mexicans seeking asylum in this country and it would be even more difficult to remove them.
There has been a confluence of interests between drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism. The systems for moving terrorists illegally across the border have become increasingly sophisticated, with Mexican drug kingpins now playing a major facilitating role using the same routes and methods to bring in illegal aliens and drugs. In view of the carnage that the 19 terrorists created on 9/11, the virtual certainty that our government has allowed substantial numbers of terrorists and their supporters to enter our country illegally is an outrage.
We've been making the same arguments and fighting the same battle for 4 decades, and the problem is worse today than it ever has been. You think you are going to reverse that? I have seen absolutely no evidence of that. Maybe it will happen, but I doubt it. The American people don't have the stomach for it.
If we don't reverse it, we are finished as a nation. 87 percent of the 1.2 million legal immigrants entering annually are minorities as defined by the U.S. Government and almost all of the illegal aliens are minorities. By 2019 half of the children 18 and under in the U.S. will be classified as minorities and by 2039, half of the residents of this country will be minorities. Generally, immigrants and minorities vote predominantly for the Democrat Party. Hence, Democrats view immigration as a never-ending source of voters that will make them the permanent majority party.
Since the 1965 Immigration Act, our pro-population growth immigration policies have fueled major demographic changes in a very short period of time. In 1970, non-Hispanic whites comprised 89 percent of the population; today they are 66 percent; and by 2039, they will be 50 percent. The Democrats, under the banner of multiculturalism and diversity, have forged a political coalition that depends on individuals coalescing around racial and ethnic identities rather than the issues. The continuing and increasing flow of minority immigrants, mostly poor and uneducated, provide a natural constituency for the Democrats, which see them as their principal source of political power. The Democrats are well on their way to becoming the permanent majority party. Demography is destiny.