Posted on 04/06/2006 2:48:40 PM PDT by Altair333
WASHINGTON, April 6 — After days of painstaking negotiations, Senate leaders today hammered out a broad, bipartisan compromise that would put the vast majority of the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.
The plan would also create a temporary worker program that would allow 325,000 foreigners to fill jobs in the United States each year. The Senate was expected to vote on the measure late today or early Friday and, if passed, it would mark the most sweeping immigration accord in two decades.
Under the agreement, illegal immigrants who have lived here for five years or more — about seven million people — would eventually be granted citizenship if they remained employed, paid fines and back taxes and learned English. Illegal immigrants who have lived here from two to five years — about three million people — would have to leave the country briefly and return as temporary workers. They would also be eligible for citizenship over time, but they would have to wait several years longer for it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We'll see...but you are making horse sense, I'll concede.
Exactly. Alberta ain't just cowboys and wheat anymore.
I do not have a good feeling 'bout any of this....I see a disaster on the horizon.
Well, with endorsements from CAIR and La Raza and the Communist Party, how can it miss? Any Senator who votes for this affront to our intelligence needs to be kicked out of office.
Hey, oil jobs are good over there. 100K US per year to dig for oil.
This bill is not about jobs it's about Mexicans coming here by the multi millions and taking over our country. For some sick reason, Bush has fought for this take over since the day he was elected.
Right. And for a long time to come. We'll be living off of that eventually, and maybe sooner if Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, etc. get out of control.
President Reagan's amnesty and the immigrant riots in France prove my point.
We might live off the oil in Wyoming. They have tar sands too.
I don't share your confidence. We are in uncharted waters here. The present level of immigration is significantly higher than the average historical level of immigration. At the peak of the Great Wave of immigration in 1910, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. was less than half of what it is today, though the percentage of the population was slightly higher. The annual arrival of 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants, coupled with 750,000 annual births to immigrant women, is the determinate factor— or three-fourths— of all U.S. population growth.
The foreign-born population of the United States is currently 33.1 million, equal to 11.5 percent of the U.S. population. Based on official census figures, there were 18 states in the US in 1990 where Mexican born residents were the largest number of foreign born residents. In 2000 the number of states where that is true is 30. In North Carolina, the number of Mexican born residents increased from 8,751 in 1990 to 179,236 in 2000.
California has 8.8 million foreign born residents (2000) out of a total population of approximately 34 million (in 2000), i.e., about 1 out of 4 Californians are foreign born. Of that 8.8 million, 3.9 million were born in Mexico. In 1990 there were 6.4 million foreign-born with 2.4 million born in Mexico. These are staggering numbers. The Republic has never experienced such a flow of immigrants, much of it uncontrolled. It is growing exponentially.
What we need is Republican politicians who are a little more sensitive to the desires of their conservative constituents. Since they intend to follow through on this immigration bill, we need to show them that conservatives are not to be trifled with.
It has nothing to do with party. The vast majority of Americans want real immigration reform and a crackdown on illegal immigration. The elites of both parties want to avoid making any hard decisions and kick the can down the road for future generations. The Reps want to appease business interests and are frightened to death to antagonize the country's largest and fastest growing minority, i.e., Hispanics. Normally the Dems would be fighting against illegal immigration because of its impact on union workers and those at the lower end of the economic scale. However, they see it as a winner politically if they can monopolize the Hispanic vote in much the same way they locked up the black vote. Blacks and Hispanics make up 30% of the Dem base now.
Again, we need to not just vote Democrat, but *call* our Republican reps to tell them why we did so. That will help focus their minds the next time around.
Pure sophistry. You seem to believe that it will be easy to regain the reins of power once it has been handed back over to the Dems. If the Dems win, they will paint themselves as the champions of the Hispanics. They will be handing out all kinds of favors and rewards. They will also reinforce their power thru a variety of ways, including setting the political agenda. The MSM will aid and abet them.
Re the New Deal: We are still dealing with that legacy. Those chickens are still coming home to roost, i.e., SS. And we must still deal with the progeny of the New Deal in Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and welfare. This country is headed for an economic train wreck if we don't get the entitlement programs under control and reformed. They are unsustainable.
No. But it would be a sort of bandaid. Of course we need to do more.
This, I hope, has a little more consequence if the nitwits will read what they are stepping in. I don't think they will resolve it in committee, the house may not come up with a bill they can pass.
Sheer idiocy.
I think it would be desirable, in combination with the enforcement provisions of the House bill, to regularize the guest-worker status of current illegals by offering a period of say three months during which anyone in the US could come forward, be checked for crimes, ties to terrorism, and the like, and if clean granted guest-worker status w/o making them leave. During the same three month period, employers who saw to it that all their employees were already legal, or were regularized under the provisions of the guest-worker program could be granted amnesty. But to put any illegals on a track to citizenship is an outrage. Fixing a broken law by cancelling its enforcement retroactively actually strenghtens the rule of law. Rewarding illegal behavior weakens and brings into contempt the rule of law.
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