Posted on 11/26/2011 1:01:37 PM PST by presidio9
GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich defended his immigration stance Friday, claiming that he was "not for amnesty."
“I am not for amnesty for anyone. I am not for a path to citizenship for anybody who got here illegally,” Gingrich said at a town hall event in Naples, Florida according to media reports.
“But I am for a path to legality for those people whose ties run so deeply in America that it would truly be a tragedy to try and rip their family apart," said the former House Speaker.
Gingrich has been under fire from some anti-illegal immigration groups since last Tuesday's GOP debate where he spoke out against deporting many illegal immigrant families.
During Friday’s town hall, Gingrich said that if elected he would make securing the border a priority and would support efforts to make English the country's official language.
He said he would also establish a guest-worker program to allow migrants to work in the U.S. But under such a program, businesses which hired undocumented workers would be hit with fines.
"I would have very, very stiff economic penalties for anyone who hires somebody who is not legally inside the system," Gingrich vowed.
At last Tuesday’s GOP debate, Gingrich said that he supported efforts to allow tax-paying illegal immigrants without criminal records to remain in the country or gain citizenship.
“If you've come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home, period,” Gingrich had said. “If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.”
"I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families which have been here a quarter-century," he added. "I'm prepared to take the heat for saying let's be humane in enforcing the law."
Gingrich has faced criticism for his comments from other Republicans. Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Minn.) said in an interview that Gingrich had the “most liberal position on illegal immigration of any of the candidates in the race.”
Influential Iowa congressman Rep. Steve King (R) described Gingrich’s proposals as a “form of amnesty”
“I wouldn’t agree with him on that policy,” King added, suggesting that Gingrich had hurt his chances of winning his endorsement prior to the Iowa caucuses.
The furor over Gingrich’s immigration stance comes as new national polls place him ahead of Romney in the GOP field.
I just want an honest conversation on the matter.
Newt's plan does not mention a new agencym, as we already have an agency in place. If anything, you solution requires more manpower because it relys entirely on enforcement that is not happening now. I'm willing to call it a wash, because I'd like to see a bit more detail for both options. If this is your best argument against Newt, it is a weak one.
With regards to Private contractors, there is no need for a large bureaucrasy or a whole lot of new rules/laws. Simple force the General contractor/or business to run an E-Verify Online check for anyone that performs work for them. The only additional level of Federal bureaucrasy would be for spot-check verifications performed at random against employers. Couple the random spot-checks with automatic jail time for employers who break this law and you have affective deterrent.
I don't think you understand what I mean by "private contractors." These people have no real employer. Take a cleaning lady, for example. She may have up to ten different private homes she visits each week. She gets paid cash. None of the people she works for considers her an employee. They are not going to report her. And this is fairly typical of a very large percentage of illegal employment in this country. Your solution relys on self-reporting from these sorts of employers (not going to happen) or you're going to have to create some sort of HUGE big brother agency to spy on people. This list of these sorts of occupations is endless: handyman, caddie, gypsy cab driver, prostitute, baby sitter, delivery boy, etc. -you remember, "the jobs Americans won't do." The only solution here is to get rid of ALL entitlements, so legal Americans have no choice but to take those jobs. Good luck with that.
How you get to E-Verify lowering wages is beyond me. I believe the opposite would occur, since employers that are currently cheating by hiring the cheap illegal alien will actually be forced by market forces to pay a living wage.
Then I guess you don't understand wage economics very well (in which case, you're in over your head here). I'll take another shot at explaining my point to you: Corporations that are subject to a system like EVerify take a chance hiring illegals. They do so if the price compensates them for the risk. If the system becomes more stringent, but they can still take on SOME illegal labor with clever bookkeeping, they will continue to do so. But only if the price is right. The net result will be more illegals looking for less jobs, and companies only willing to take the risk at a lower cost to them. Got it? The flip side of Everify is that it is intended to create more low-end jobs for legal employees, but the reality is that these people are subject to a minimum wage, and the added cost will end up putting some companies out of business. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.
Your statement that millions would find a way to stay also is non-logical. If E-Verify is applied universally, for both employment and social services, there will be no way they can stay, because without jobs and social services, they'd have no food and the freebies would be removed.
Again, there is no way to apply EVerify "universally." It can definitely be made to work for corporations, and some smally businesses. Somewhere in the neighborhood of half the illegals in this country will probably be unaffected.
By all means spend the next six weeks attacking Romney’s opposition without offering alternatives if you must. When we end up with Romney as the candidate, take comfort in the fact that you destroyed all the “RINOs.”
Part of me wonders how many of these idiots are actually canny Mittbots doing everything they can to help their guy.
“So if Newt believes that America must be a nation of laws, he must be for enforcing the laws for the following illegal actions, correct?”
Obviously to implement his plan, Newt would have to get it through congress and make it law, at which point what he would be implementing and enforcing would be the nation’s laws, thus making his statement that “America must be a nation of laws” coherent.
Laws are not cast in concrete, they change all the time. Homosexuality used to be illegal, then it became legal and protected. The IRS is constantly bending its rules forgiving people that haven’t filed, by negotiating with them. Similarly cities forgive big chunks of traffic fines to collect some instead of nothing, and there are many other examples.
The real lawbreakers in the illegal immigration mess are our own authorities who failed (in many cases intentionally) to enforce the laws that were passed, and all the mayors and council members who created sanctuary cities. If we’re going to hold people responsible and arresting them, I would start with them. After all the real blame for our illegals problem is ours not the immigrants. Who among us wouldn’t do what the illegals did under the same circumstances?
Being a purist, although intellectually satisfying, may not always be the best practical solution.
I actually find Newts solution quite reasonable. I like the fact that whoever gets to stay would never be able to become an american citizen and vote or have the ability to bring over relatives. I think that’s a good compromise.
The only thing that’s very fuzzy is how to determine who gets to stay - having arbitrary cutoff dates like 25 years is very problematic. How do you morally justify kicking somebody out that’s been here 24 and a half years. This is the part of his plan that can be easily gamed and demagogued. This is the achille’s heel - although everyone generally understand what he’s trying to get at, getting consensus at codifying it is going to be next to impossible.
But I wouldn’t want to do any of this until we have full control of the border. We cannot be fooled again, the way Reagan was with his amnesty, when none of the enforcement laws were implemented.
“But spamming threads with nothing but attacks and no solutions is not productive”
Pointing out how Newt is fibbing on illegals isn’t an attack and as far as solutions go, not voting for scum is mine.
I already posted my solution in a reply to you. You’re a day late and a dollar short.
That’s very true. It’s not like the days where a letter was the #1 form of communication and a reasonable-length phone call would cost $10. (Which is the equivalent of about $25 today.) When I was in Taiwan on a business trip last year, my wife could call me at the hotel for 7 cents/minute, which is pretty comparable to a domestic call on a Trac-phone. Lots of cell phone companies have international plans that are a lot cheaper than domestic long distance charges in the 1970s and 80s.
Exactly, line #1 and line #2 of your post (which were stated by Newt) directly contradict each other. It’s schizo. It’s like saying that they sky is deep blue and then saying two sentences later that the sky is definitely a deep red.
There is no way for Newt to explain this away, all he can do is muddy the water, hope that most people haven’t seen this over the Thanksgiving weekend, and that it goes away by Monday morning.
Please excuse me for not noticing it. You are not alone on this thread. If you are not schooled in the art of cut and paste, just let me know what the post number was, and I'll explain to you why your reply was unsufficient. Again. You certainly have not referred to any specific candidate's plan. I would remember, because no one has on this thread. For that matter, I am not aware of any other Republican candidate who actually HAS such a comprehensive plan.
This is me politely calling you a liar.
Please excuse me for not noticing it. You are not alone on this thread. If you are not schooled in the art of cut and paste, just let me know what the post number was, and I'll explain to you why your reply was unsufficient. Again. You certainly have not referred to any specific candidate's plan. I would remember, because no one has on this thread. For that matter, I am not aware of any other Republican candidate who actually HAS such a comprehensive plan.
This is me politely calling you a liar.
Again, with Mitt Romney doing most of the right things to win the nomination, the most productive use of your time is to contrast your favored candidate's position. Unless you're actually pulling for Romney that is.
And speaking of "no evidence," you really should have taken at least one economics and one statistics class in school:
studies have already proven that the added labor costs of not hiring illegals, especially for farm labor, has almost neglible affect on the prices paid by consumers.
If you had, you would know that "studies" can be made to say anything you want them to, such as "global warming is real. Or it isn't. They rarely "prove" anything. Suggesting that they do, is textbook junk science (see the point about "global warming"). In this case, you're going to have to give me an example of such a study. I graduated from college 20 years ago, but I seem to remember that companies only exist to make a profit. And profit margins are as thin in agriculture as in any where else. Raise labor costs, and you have to make up the difference elsewhere. Translation: Your "studies" are talking out of their asses.
And speaking of "no evidence," you really should have taken at least one economics and one statistics class in school:
studies have already proven that the added labor costs of not hiring illegals, especially for farm labor, has almost neglible affect on the prices paid by consumers.
If you had, you would know that "studies" can be made to say anything you want them to, such as "global warming is real. Or it isn't. They rarely "prove" anything. Suggesting that they do, is textbook junk science (see the point about "global warming"). In this case, you're going to have to give me an example of such a study. I graduated from college 20 years ago, but I seem to remember that companies only exist to make a profit. And profit margins are as thin in agriculture as in any where else. Raise labor costs, and you have to make up the difference elsewhere. Translation: Your "studies" are talking out of their asses.
And speaking of "no evidence," you really should have taken at least one economics and one statistics class in school:
studies have already proven that the added labor costs of not hiring illegals, especially for farm labor, has almost neglible affect on the prices paid by consumers.
If you had, you would know that "studies" can be made to say anything you want them to, such as "global warming is real. Or it isn't. They rarely "prove" anything. Suggesting that they do, is textbook junk science (see the point about "global warming"). In this case, you're going to have to give me an example of such a study. I graduated from college 20 years ago, but I seem to remember that companies only exist to make a profit. And profit margins are as thin in agriculture as in any where else. Raise labor costs, and you have to make up the difference elsewhere. Translation: Your "studies" are talking out of their asses.
You DO realize that relying with scare tactics without bothering to learn the truth or offer an alternative is a classic liberal tactic, don't you (see: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Spending in general, etc.)? Thus far, all you've given me is what YOU would do, but I have some bad news for you: You're polling around zero percent. You need to name a candidate who's offering your solution or else it is irrelevant.
Who are you? Don Rickles?
It’s #32. I understand your problem, you’ve already told a ton of people that they’re “spammers” and you’re buried in the replies kicking your ass around the block.
This is me politely calling you a RINO slug.
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