Tancredo doubts he can block amnesty-extension bill

Friday, March 08, 2002 - WASHINGTON - Rep. Tom Tancredo takes credit for thwarting the Bush administration's last effort to offer partial amnesty to thousands of illegal residents, but Thursday the outspoken immigration foe said he may have been outmaneuvered by the White House.

President Bush has struck a deal with the House leadership to place legislation that offers an extension of amnesty on its consent calendar before Bush heads to Mexico for a state visit next week, the Colorado Republican said.

That action should ensure quick House passage of legislation that Bush has repeatedly sought from Congress. It would allow an undocumented person to receive legal standing, such as a valid green card, by filing a declaration with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

It presumably also would require the person to have been in the United States by a certain date and have filed a declaration with the INS from an appropriate sponsor, such as a relative or employer, and pay a $1,000 penalty.

"The terms are still up in the air," said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration, a group that has been allied with Tancredo. "We've heard to the effect that the president wants something to bring down to Mexico."

The initial Bush proposal, designed exclusively for Mexicans, once was high on the president's legislative wish list, but it was delayed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. However, as the president noted Wednesday in a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he now is pushing for the extension of the amnesty program known by the section of immigration law that covers it, Section 245I.

The president hailed it as a way to reunite family, separated by the border. "If you believe in family values, if you understand the worth of family and the importance of family, let's get 245I out of the United States Congress and give me a chance to sign it," Bush told the chamber members.

Tancredo, the head of a congressional caucus on immigration issues and proponent of halting virtually all immigration, said he had blocked a previous attempt by Bush to push an extension of the amnesty program through the House. But this time, he said House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., had agreed to place the issue on the suspension, or consent, calendar, making it difficult to defeat the proposal.

The Senate might be more favorable to the bill than the House, expanding the numbers of individuals who can apply, Tancredo said.

After 10 Years, Illegal-Alien Amnesty Costs $78 Billion

WASHINGTON (May 5, 1997) ‹ Ten years ago today, the amnesty for illegal aliens passed by Congress in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) began. More than 2.7 million illegal aliens received legal status as a result of the amnesty.

The Center for Immigration Studies released a report today estimating the total cost of the amnesty to federal, state and local governments. The report, entitled "Measuring the Fallout: The Cost of the IRCA Amnesty After 10 Years," pegs the total cost at $78.7 billion over the past 10 years. Other findings of the report, authored by Center Chairman David Simcox, are:

The total direct fiscal cost of the amnesty was $24.1 billion, representing $102.1 billion in government services offset by $78 billion in taxes paid over the past ten years.
Various indirect costs ‹ including services for American workers displaced by the amnesty recipients and education and other services provided to the children of amnesty recipients ‹ totaled $54.6 billion over the past decade.
The total fiscal cost of $78.7 billion represents a government subsidy of $29,148 for each illegal alien who received amnesty.

Con Game - The GOP is being taken for a ride.

The GOP is being tricked into supporting another amnesty for illegal aliens, and post-American libertarians like Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal are accomplices in the con game.

Gigot's August 17 column says that "A Bush amnesty is precisely the kind of large political event" that could shake Hispanic voters loose from the Democratic party. Given that blacks were the only major group to vote more heavily Democratic than Hispanics last year, it is hard to believe that serious people could believe such a thing, but there appear to be some who do, at least in the White House. (For an analysis of GOP prospects among Hispanic voters, see "Impossible Dream or Distant Reality?: Republican Efforts to Attract Latino Voters.")

Now, there are plenty of reasons unrelated to politics to oppose the president's amnesty/guestworker plan: It rewards lawbreakers and sends the message overseas that we are not serious about enforcing our laws; it is guaranteed to encourage new, parallel streams of illegal immigration; it will create additional demands for government services, since illegals are not eligible for welfare, whereas fully one-third of legal Mexican immigrant households use at least one major welfare program; it will create millions of new candidates for dual citizenship, eating away the very basis of our polity; and last but not least, there is simply no way the INS could administer such a large program without permitting massive fraud.

These drawbacks to amnesty should alarm all Americans. But what about Gigot's assertion that it would be a good deal politically for the GOP?

If that's true, why are the Democrats promoting amnesty too? Gigot tries to make the case that, in this one instance, amnesty is good even though the Left embraces it. But elections are a zero-sum game — in our two-party system, if the Democrats win, the Republicans lose. And both parties believe that amnesty would serve their political interests. Only one can be right.

Here is what Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, said of Bush's amnesty proposal: "On the left, it was electrifying." He should know; the forum is the leading lobby for high immigration, cofounded by the National Lawyers Guild, a former Soviet front group which still sits on forum's board. What does Gigot know that Sharry doesn't?

And recall that immediately after the White House floated the amnesty trial balloon in July, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle one-upped the president by demanding amnesty for all illegals, not just Mexicans, thus presenting the Democrats as the defenders of all those immigrants who aren't from Mexico (nearly three-quarters of the total). When the president was thus forced to concede that "We'll consider all folks here," the Democrats upped the ante again with a new list of demands: Amnesty for any illegal from any nation who has worked at least 90 days in the United States during the past year and a half; an end to any limits on the legal immigration of immigrants' family members; and the right for guestworkers to bring their families with them. There is nothing the president can propose that the Democrats can't top. Or, as Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said, the Democratic demands "take the White House's immigration plans one step further in the right direction."

In one sense, this jockeying over amnesty simply confirms the stupid party/evil party stereotype. For years, Republicans have been confusing two aspects of this broad issue — immigration policy vs. immigrant policy. Immigration policy is whom we admit, how many, and how we enforce the law. Immigrant policy concerns how we treat those we've admitted to live among us. In the mid-1990s, Republicans responded to public concerns over the harmful impacts of bad immigration policy by enacting changes in immigrant policy instead. So, rather than embrace the modest cuts in legal immigration suggested by Barbara Jordan's bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform, the Congress, led by then-Sen. Spencer Abraham, targeted legal immigrants already here for sweeping welfare bans and vindictive deportation rules.

But there's more than just stupidity at work here. The greed of short-sighted elements in the business community, abetted by libertarian idealogues who reject the legitimacy of national borders (recall the Journal's frequent call for a constitutional amendment, "There shall be open borders"), has driven much of the amnesty discussion. A lobbying alliance called the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, including construction, hotel, restaurant, landscaping, and other trade associations, has been instrumental in pushing Republicans to support the amnesty/guestworker plan in order to secure cheaper, more servile workers. Even Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, that exemplar of Americana, is a member, apparently because it's tired of having to entice American grandmothers to wait its tables.

So it's no surprise that, as Gigot notes, "Business, labor, Catholic bishops and even the media like the idea." We are seeing a replay of the odd-bedfellows coalition that thwarted immigration reform in 1996: Leftists and their ethnic pressure-group allies joining with rope-selling businessmen and libertarians. Business will get short-term benefit of a pliable workforce, while the Left will benefit in the long term through the importation of a vast new poverty class on whose behalf it can excoriate American society.

But the Republican party, not to mention the American people, are bound to lose

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