Free Republic

Must Washington fix our broken southern border? You bet. Will the comprehensive immigration reform bill help? You bet it won’t. The number one flaw of the bill is it starts by giving amnesty to the unlawfully present population in the United States. As soon as the bill passes, those in the country contrary to U.S. immigration law are granted status to stay. Amnesty immediately creates an incentive for illegal border crossings and overstays. Thus, the bill’s strategy would drive up the cost of securing the border. To make matters worse, the draft law states that anyone who was present in...

Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill will, if passed, threaten national security and destroy the Republican Party’s ability to compete on a national level. Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” told radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday that passing a “blanket pardon” of illegal immigrants would be “an act of madness,” particularly in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Boston. “It’s been one week since something like 178 to 180 Americans — three of them murdered — but 178 injured, maimed and wounded by two individuals...

The hearings just began. Right now Arturo Rodriquez is whitewashing the history of Cesar Chavez, playing the race card and ignoring American citizens who are unemployed.

The Gang of Eight member said their package would help prevent attacks on the homeland. The Senate's immigration reform package would make the country safer from attacks on home soil, a leading author of the bill said this week. ... "Our bill, while certainly it gives a path to citizenship and legalizes people right away, we will know the identities of everybody. And that makes the country safer," Schumer said in an interview with Univision set to air Sunday. "So I think our bill would actually – it's too early to tie it to any specific incident – but overall,...

Senator Marco Rubio and his Gang of Eight, which should be renamed “Gangsters of Eight,” wants 12 million illegals granted amnesty, i.e. citizenship, because they’ve lived and worked in America for five years or more. Rubio knows many illegals have turned out to be violent criminals crowding U.S. prisons, but he is ignoring that as well as the fact that over the years many foreigners living in America have bombed America in an act of Islamic jihad like the two Boston bombers, granted citizenship right after 9/11, despite their background.

Both the process and the content of the current immigration bill violate America’s core principles and legacy of immigration, according to Heritage President Jim DeMint. “This whole process is not really American, to take a few people and go behind closed doors and then come out and suddenly have it on the floor of the Senate for debate,” said DeMint on “The Mike Huckabee Show” earlier this week. (Listen here) “Instead of incomprehensible, comprehensive bills that are thousands of pages, we need to take a step-by-step approach so people know what we’re doing, and with immigration, the obvious priority is...

John McCain & Lindsey Graham Want You to Know Boston Bombings Won’t Slow Immigration Reform By Becket Adams | Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Friday released a statement saying that despite the week's events with the Boston Marathon bombing, it won't deter or slow their efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Here's their statement, released before the capture of 19-year-old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: In the wake of this week's terrorist attack in Boston, some have already suggested that the circumstances of this terrible tragedy are justification for delaying or stopping entirely the effort for comprehensive immigration...

On Wednesday, author Ann Coulter blasted Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) for his support of the immigration reform bill which is being put forth by the “Gang of Eight” that he is a part of. Her headline was classic Coulter, “IF RUBIO’S AMNESTY IS SO GREAT, WHY IS HE LYING?”. In it, she proceeds to expose the obvious problems with the Florida Senator’s proposed immigration legislation. “When Republicans start lying like Democrats, you can guess they are pushing an idea that’s bad for America,” the conservative author wrote. “During his William Ginsburg-like tour of the Sunday talk shows last weekend, Sen....

Sen. John McCain came to the defense of President Barack Obama Thursday, saying he understands the anger and emotion the president displayed when he denounced those who voted against a universal background check amendment as part of a larger Senate gun-control measure. McCain told CNN he sympathized with Obama's description of the vote on Wednesday as a “shameful” day in Washington because lawmakers failed to pass the legislation that grew out of the tragic December massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Conn. “I understand how the president felt very strongly,” McCain said. “He was in Newtown. He...

The Senate’s Gang of Eight delivered an immigration overhaul bill this week that was far more generous to their constituencies than Democrats and Hispanic activists expected. The pre-bill marketing campaign — driven by leaks that seemed to come from Republican negotiators — focused on stringent new border-control measures and a long, difficult path to citizenship. The goal was to minimize conservative opposition by creating a first impression of the bill as a tough solution to the country’s illegal immigration problem. But when Democrats got a look at the 844-page measure, they discovered that their negotiators extracted more concessions than they...

The horrific events of this week should convince even you. No, we do not need to loosen our borders or our immigration policies. We need to tighten security and closely control who we allow to enter the country. Obama and the idiot Democrats are succeeding in their primary goal of bring capitalism to its knees. They WANT America to fail. They want capitalism to fail. Obama is a constitution-hating Marxist and his supporters wish to completely eliminate the constitutional limits on government and usher in their socialist utopia. And they wish to remove our borders and allow all their comrades...

The Gang of Eight’s “comprehensive” immigration-reform bill contains a number of superficially attractive security mandates: It would require the federal government to have 100 percent “situational awareness” of the border, to catch 90 percent of illegal border-crossers in high-traffic areas, to establish a tracking system to address the problem of those who enter the country illegally but overstay their visas, etc. So attractive are those goals that we have supported them in the past, on the many occasions upon which the government has promised to achieve them. Disappointingly, Washington keeps failing to deliver on its promises. The unspoken premise of...

U.S. security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a group of 25 Chechen terrorists illegally entered the United States from Mexico in July. The Chechen group is suspected of having links to Islamist terrorists seeking to separate the southern enclave of Chechnya from Russia, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports. Members of the group, said to be wearing backpacks, secretly traveled to northern Mexico and crossed into a mountainous part of Arizona that is difficult for U.S. border security agents to monitor, said officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. The intelligence report was supplied to the...

Chuck Schumer's Triumph RICH LOWRY 4/17 Everyone presumes Sen. Chuck Schumer, the media hungry Democrat from New York, wants to be the next Senate majority leader. If his performance in the Gang of Eight negotiations over immigration is any indication of his skills in such a role, Harry Reid should abdicate and turn over his leadership position to the New Yorker immediately. Schumer has been at the center of crafting a bill for a mass amnesty of undocumented immigrants that has high-profile, bipartisan support and a chance of becoming law. He had the shrewdness to realize what he needed to...

The Senate's bipartisan "Gang of Eight" oozed confidence on Thursday that they could deliver on their promise to pass the most significant immigration bill in a generation. Organizers gathered over 20 leaders from business, labor, religious and civil rights groups in order to display broad support for their plan. In an unlikely pairing, renowned anti-tax activist Grover Norquist stood alongside AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, the leader of the nation's largest labor coalition. Senators from both parties yukked it up with jokes throughout the hour-long affair. "We'll oppose only those amendments that are intended to prevent a comprehensive solution from passing,"...

Gang of Eight Bill Opens Door to Bigger Amnesty By Fred Bauer April 16, 2013 Over at Talking Points Memo, Benjy Sarlin has posted a legislative summary of the Gang of Eight immigration-reform proposal, which is due to be released by tomorrow. Assuming this summary draft is accurate, one thing is clear: This proposal truly lives up to the name of “comprehensive immigration reform.” It would be a far-ranging proposal, one that would substantially transform the immigration system of the United States. The major parts of the bill seem to include: a process for legalizing current illegal immigrants, a few...

A few years ago, I wrote a book, "Jesus Wept" an American Story. The story, in part, was about Cherokee Chief John Ross, a 1/8th Cherokee blood, white, blue eyed greedy tyrant. The more time goes on, the more he reminds me of Barak Obama. He was put in power by Major Ridge and some other realistic Cherokees, who thought the tribe, which functioned under a constitutional government, would fare better in Washington DC if represented by Ross who would be identified more with the white leaders. And for a time, that seemed to work. Until Ross got the taste...

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said today that the Senate immigration bill is even worse than feared, since it legalizes illegals' relatives and even those previously deported: "It's hard to believe, but the Senate immigration bill is worse than we thought. Despite assurances, the border is not secured before almost everyone in the country illegally is given amnesty. The bill guarantees there will be a rush across the border to take advantage of massive amnesty." Rep. Smith says the Senate immigration bill shreds current immigration laws: "And the Senate proposal offers amnesty to far more illegal immigrants than we thought. In...

If there were any doubts that the oft-used term ‘comprehensive immigration reform' is a stalking-horse for amnesty, a new Senate proposal should dispel them. The measure, touted as a way to fix our ‘broken' immigration system, will do the opposite. Not only will it demean U.S. citizenship and rule of law, it also likely will produce adverse economic effects. The main feature of the 844-page bill is that it would allow millions of illegal immigrants to apply for legal residency and eventual citizenship. Significantly, the bill bears a strong union influence. And labor officials aren't bashful about it. Ana Avendano,...

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