Cain’s the one who made Cain’s statement calling for amnesty for millions of illegals, not me.
That’s from Herman Cain, not TitansAFC.
If the Cain folks want to pretend Newt is dead because of having the same idea on legal status for some illegals as Cain, then they’d better start putting away their Cain-for-President signs and find someone else.
Really? You keep saying this. When/where did Cain say he was for "amnesty for millions"? Proof? Or do you just make up crap?
Newt is precisely correct that the party claiming to be the party of/for families in America is not going to split up a family which has roots deeply planted in local communities. BUT, there has to be some cut off line of how long someone can have been here and how deeply woven into the local community. THERE is the problem with Newt’s clear declaration, IMHO. I don’t know if a clear cut off can be drawn, but that is the next step and will be the rope in a tug of deceits ... the leftists will want to hang Newt on any cut off and pubby agitprops will seek to argue Newt is in favor of amnesty. What Newt suggests is a form of amnestya nd there is no way to get around that. In the end, the Republicans will be separated from the Hispanic vote if the media can frame thsat party as the party which wants to split up familes. Sadly, too many posters at FR will now help the media by taking a stance which is a cold ‘deport them all’ strategy just because it is expedient to stick to the purity test the left always uses to trap conservatives.
Newt is for amnesty, Cain is for an electrified fence.
those are the facts.
TitansAFC is taking a statement out of context from a Cain commentary and trying to make a point against him. Here is Cain’s commentary on immigration from 2007:
He wrote two opeds back to back on this issue. Here is the first:
Political Class Tells Working Class: Here’s Your Immigration Bill
June 18, 2007
By Herman Cain
President Bush’s latest attempt to salvage the Immigration Bill has made it crystal clear that there is indeed a political class of those we elect, who blatantly ignore the wishes of the electorate. Despite the overwhelming outcry against the bill in its present form, the president and many members of Congress seem determined to pass a collection of glued-together agendas, which are far from being a comprehensive solution.
The Senate responded to the outcry by voting to not end debate, which prompted Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, to pull the bill from the floor for the time being. That time being until the president can twist enough Republican arms to change their positions to vote with the Democrats. The president’s attempt to do so in spite of the public feedback has alienated and disappointed many people who have supported him through thick and thin, especially the thick disagreements about the war in Iraq.
When the president and Congress seem to defy the public’s outcry, people are doubly frustrated and feel that it’s the political class against the working class, namely, those of us who work to pay taxes, which fund government, out-of-control spending and ill-constructed public policy.
The more we say no amnesty, the more they say it is not amnesty. The more we say border security first, the more they say we are working on it. The more we say no shortcut to citizenship, the more they say the Z-visa is not a short-cut. And the more we object to this version of the bill, the more they say we have to do something even if it is not perfect.
There is a big difference between not perfect and not acceptable.
It is not acceptable to not enforce current laws. It is not acceptable to not properly secure the borders first. It is not acceptable to catch and release illegal criminals because local, state and federal authorities are not working together. It is not acceptable, with the technology available today, to not have a temporary worker identification system that employers can rely on against fraud.
It is not acceptable to allow millions and millions of illegal immigrants to add additional strain to our already strained health care and Social Security systems. And it is not acceptable to pass a bill that will be an incentive for others to sneak into this country and wait for the next amnesty bill that’s not amnesty.
Our only practical response against the continuing abuse by the political class on the working class is to vote them out of office. But that takes time and we must be patient and persistent. The good news is that, within the political class, there are more partisan disagreements than agreements on other issues. This causes potential legislation to move very slowly through the process, while we try to elect candidates who will not disregard us once they are elected.
In the mean time, the working class has to continue to scream loud and long to at least mitigate some of the negative and unintended consequences of ill-constructed legislation. The public wants an immigration bill, but not one that appears to make a bad situation worse.
Maybe we did not scream loud enough in 2003 about the Prescription Drug Bill, which is now going to cost us over three times the original 10-year cost estimate of $300 billion. And even though the costs of Social Security and Medicare are growing exponentially, reducing benefits and raising taxes on the working class are the only band-aids that seem to gain traction in Congress.
Maybe we are currently not screaming loud enough about completely repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax. When it was passed in 1969 it was intended to punish less than 200 of the very rich for finding all the loopholes in the tax code. Today, unless Congress does something, over 20 million working-class families will have to pay additional taxes just for following the rules.
There is a long list of laws, regulations and programs that could have been better constructed. History has shown that Congress is very slow to correct mistakes and laws that have produced serious unintended consequences.
The working class obviously sees some serious imperfections in the proposed Immigration Bill that the political class chooses to ignore.
And once again, those imperfections would be at our expense.
_________
Immigration Bill: Lots of Bad Ideas, and No Fence
June 11, 2007
By Herman Cain
The Comprehensive Immigration Bill debated in the Senate last week was dead on arrival because of too many competing agendas. Liberals wanted to keep illegal families together, conservatives passionately rejected amnesty, some businesses wanted more low-skill workers, other businesses wanted more skilled workers with a new temporary workers program for legal immigrants – and most regular folks kept screaming, “Where’s the fence?”
Comprehensive has become congressional code for: Let’s put a lot of agendas and stuff in the legislation and maybe the public will not notice the details. This time it backfired miserably, because people did notice the details and all groups dug in their heels for their key agenda item and their respective regular folks screamed loud and in great numbers.
Not since the outcry against the failed Hillary Care plan for universal health care in 1994 has there been such a broad revolt by the public. People have disagreed with proposed legislation before. It happens all the time. Usually Congress is able to smooth over the public objections during debate, pass the legislation and then hold a press conference and tell the public how great it is, and how hard they had to work to get good compromised legislation.
A well-known example was the passage of the Prescription Drug Bill in 2003. Democrats loved it because it expanded social spending. Republicans loved it because they thought it would buy votes from senior citizens, which it did not. And once again, the taxpayers had to pay for good compromise legislation that will cost over $900 billon instead of the original estimate of about $300 billion over 10 years.
The Immigration Bill was supposed to be another episode of good compromise legislation, even though Congress has no idea what it will cost. It is just bad legislation with different agendas glued together, while not emphasizing enough of the public’s number one priority – the fence! Not just wire, wood and concrete, but all the technologies we have available to stop the rampant inflow of illegal aliens into this country.
We have the technology to identify one mad cow and a chicken with the flu when they threaten our food supply. We can track one potentially contagious tuberculosis patient half way around the world when he threatens the health of thousands of people. And we can capture a crystal clear picture of a driver, his tag number and who is in the car with him going through an intersection a fraction of a second after a traffic light turns red.
But yet, Congress is reluctant to use that technology to shut down our borders, which threaten our national and economic security.
Just as the proposed bill was going down in flames, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the ever-liberal Ted Kennedy were asking for President Bush’s help in trying to persuade Republicans to support this bill to nowhere. Now that’s interesting. Where were they and the Republicans when the president was leading the charge with a good solution (personal retirement accounts) to the oncoming crash of the Social Security system? Nowhere!
The Immigration Bill could have succeeded if the political class in Congress and the president had listened to the public and addressed the four distinct problems. Namely, secure the borders convincingly, expand the temporary worker program for skilled legal immigrants, establish a reliable legal immigrant identification program and then propose a reasonable program for the 12 million (and counting) illegal persons who broke our laws to get here, but not amnesty.
The one positive out of this legislative disaster is that people should now see that if enough of them scream loud enough and often enough, they can influence their senators and representatives on ill-constructed legislation. We should not have to scream, but, unfortunately, that’s what our information-overloaded, frenzied media, overwhelmed and leaderless legislative process has come to.
Congress has allowed this problem to fester and grow for over 20 years, and for once in a few times the voters have refused to accept a bad solution to an even worse situation. Maybe next time they will listen to the voters before they try to pass glued together legislation.
Maybe next time, Congress will start with the fence!