Free Republic

I attended the Texas Republican Convention held in Ft. Worth, Texas from June 5-7 2014 as a delegate and the big takeaway was that the Tea Party has effectively taken over the Republican Party in Texas. But before I describe why I believe that the Tea Party has taken over, let me give you some background information and a little history of the Republican Party in Texas. After the Democrats won control of the Texas legislature in 1872 from the post-Civil War Reconstruction Republicans, Democrats dominated Texas politics for more than a century, while Republicans remained largely marginalized. It was...

IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN community, discussion, debate and uneasiness continue over how much the tide of new immigration impacts job opportunities. T. Willard Fair, president of the Greater Miami Urban League, criticized Senate Democrats for supporting the immigration bill while ignoring the concerns of African-Americans shut out of restaurant and other low-paying jobs because of immigrant labor. For that he was labeled a tool of right-wing anti-immigrant conservatives. The Congressional Black Caucus, which is on record as supporting access to citizenship, job training and fair wages for immigrants, is now finally getting around to forming a task force to address some...

OCEANSIDE — Gilberto Valiente Romero cringes at the memory of his 2003 journey. The long trip to the Arizona border from his village in the Mexican state of Puebla. The hike across miles of desert. Then the bruising finale, as he was captured on the U.S. side and sent back. But since 2004, the father of three has made the seasonal trek without fear of arrest, under the auspices of Oceanside vine-ripe tomato giant Harry Singh & Sons. Each year in June, Valiente travels at company expense to the northern Mexican city of Hermosillo and is put up at a...

As President Bush and his allies in the Senate push forward for amnesty for the 11-12 million illegal aliens already in the United States and for a guest-worker program that would bring in millions more “temporary” workers, they are withholding an important report that scathingly indicts the agency that would be processing the massive influx of aliens we would expect under the proposed programs. An investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the agency within the Department of Homeland Security in charge of adjudicating immigration benefits such as citizenship and...

WAKE UP AMERICA By Bob Haran What should be more frightening then foreigners in our country illegally and demonstrating in our cities, and LA used to be an American city. What is worse then foreigners waving foreign flags in American cities is, how well organized they are. American citizens should be up in arms over this invasion of our country. And yes, make no mistake about it, this is an invasion. An unarmed, peaceful invasion is still an invasion. Mexico lost Texas because they could not control the illegal immigration of Americans into Texas. Mexico is using that same tactic...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate tackles the hot-button election issue of what to do with the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants this week, with President Bush coming down on the side of letting many of them stay if they have jobs. Bush planned to use a naturalization ceremony set for Monday at 10 a.m. ET to swear in 30 new citizens to press his call for a "guest worker" program. The president's appearance comes after a weekend when hundreds of thousands of people rallied in Los Angeles and many other U.S. cities demanding that Congress abandon legislation passed by...

Frustrated by the Senate Judiciary Committee's slow progress on politically sensitive immigration legislation, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) introduced his own bill last night to secure the nation's borders and crack down on illegal immigration. ....... Some Republican aides said they believed presidential politics were at work. Frist, a prospective candidate for 2008, left out of his bill the guest-worker program that President Bush has demanded and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- a potential White House rival -- has championed. Such a program is unpopular with many conservative voters, who see it as amnesty for illegal immigrants. Many Republicans...

THE ILLEGAL ALIEN GOLD CARD By Michelle Malkin   ·   March 07, 2006 10:38 AM Photoshop courtesy of the Stein Report I'm not making this up: Key provisions of the Senate's main immigration bill would create a "gold card" program for illegal immigrants who entered the United States before Jan. 4, 2004, and create a guest worker program to bring in more foreign laborers, according to Senate Judiciary Committee staff members. The committee is to begin debating the measure Wednesday under a three-week timetable aimed at producing a final version for the full Senate by March 27. Sponsored by the committee...

When Cardinal Roger Mahony called on Roman Catholics this week to embrace immigrants regardless of legal status, he wasn't just reiterating the church's long tradition of reaching out to the downtrodden. Mahony and other U.S. Catholic bishops are increasingly weighing into the debate over what to do about the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States - a development that's being met with criticism from groups pushing for tougher immigration law enforcement. Catholic leaders have launched a "Justice for Immigrants" campaign, appealed to President Bush and congressional leaders for a legalization program, and sharply criticized a bill...

WASHINGTON - A south Texas rancher, Texas sheriffs, an Arizona district attorney and other law enforcement representatives urged Senate committee members Wednesday to heed their warning: The porous southern border of the United States is a national security risk. Witnesses told Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship subcommittee, at a hearing on border violence that without cooperation from Mexico, combined with federal support from the United States, the situation at the border will continue to deteriorate. Cornyn focused the hearing on recent reports of Mexican military incursions into the United States, increasing border violence...

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the House point man on immigration, yesterday said that a guest-worker program like the one proposed by President Bush is amnesty and that he cannot accept it in a final immigration bill. - "It seems to me that if you give these people the temporary cards, and the president talked a little bit about that yesterday out in Kansas, whether they are three-year cards or six-year cards or any other term, how do you get them to go back home when they expire?" he said. - He also said when Congress and the White House...

Bush says guest workers could not stay By Stephen Dinan THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published January 24, 2006 President Bush yesterday said illegal aliens who take part in his guest-worker program would not be allowed to stay permanently. "I do not believe that any guest-worker program ought to contain amnesty because I believe that, if you granted amnesty to people here working now, that would cause another 8 million people or so to come here," he said in response to a question from the audience at a speech at Kansas State University. Mr. Bush said illegal aliens could join the guest-worker...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that stepped-up immigration enforcement must be coupled with a program that will allow foreigners into the country on a temporary basis to seek employment.Chertoff said a new guest-worker program would meet the economic needs of businesses while creating a system to regulate the burgeoning flow of illegal immigrants into the country.snipSens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and John Kyl (R-Ariz.) have proposed a temporary worker visa program requiring foreigners to return to their home countries after two years, and mandating that illegal aliens leave the country to apply for work visas. The senators would add...

..........There's another reality Mr. Bush is facing up to and it's called the Hispanic vote. Paleocons and nativists may think the key GOP demographic is uneducated whites. But it's hard to imagine a majority Republican future without at least being competitive among Hispanics. In this sense, the guest-worker proposal isn't just an exercise in economic sanity but also in long-term party building on a par with FDR's capture of the black vote..........

© 2004 Jon E. Dougherty December 29, 2004 Well, it's the end of another year—time to take account of what our country has gained, what it has lost, and what's in store for its future. In 2004 the United States continued to battle oppression, aggression and evil around the world by spreading democracy and the ideals of freedom, despite being fought tooth and nail nearly every step in the way by the Appeasement Party, otherwise known as the Democrats. Our economy has continued to grow, most Americans are paying less taxes, and the "dream" is still alive for most of...

Back in 2001, George W. Bush, a newly elected president from a border state, had immigration on his mind. Within weeks of his inauguration, Bush vowed to extend a hand to Mexico, making an ambitious guest-worker proposal a hallmark of his administration. The president's dream was dashed by 9/11; tightening border controls, not loosening them, became the priority. He must have been serious, though, because just weeks after winning a second term, Bush has embraced the guest-worker proposal anew. Secretary of State Colin Powell and White House counselor Karl Rove have called the initiative a high priority. And Bush pledged...

January 07, 2004, 9:23 a.m. Jobs Americans Won’t Do; Voodoo Economics from the White House. By Mark Krikorian Today the president announced his plan for a vast new guestworker system, which would grant amnesty to millions of illegals currently in the United States, as well as import millions of new workers from abroad. (The president will also call for an increase in permanent legal immigration beyond the current rate of one million a year.) I make the argument against amnesty in the cover story for the upcoming print version of NR, but here I want to look at the basic...

What's Wrong With the Proposals for a New Guestworker Program? Proposals for a massive new "guestworker" program would: threaten homeland security grant amnesty for law-breakers, a step overwhelmingly opposed by the American public establish a back door immigration program threaten the jobs and wages of American workers. The politicians pushing a guestworker amnesty know that Americans staunchly oppose amnesty, and so they shy away from calling it what it really is, instead cloaking it in terms like "earned legalization" or "normalization of status." They are deliberately misleading the American public. THEY SAY that the overwhelming majority of people entering the...

Well Freepers our President has sold us up the river and hopefully this is a wake up call to conservatives. The guest worker program is a DISASTER waiting to happen. One of President Reagan's mistakes in 1986 was to give blanket amnesty to illegals prior to sealing up the border and overhauling INS. It was stated that by doing this it would curb and put an end to illegal immigration. Since then it has doubled. Now we are seeing the same thing all over again. O'Reilly pulled current numbers from the census bureau and foun the following. It costs this...

<p>ORANGE -- At Monday's premiere of what he's calling the "Ask Arnold Show," Arnold Schwarzenegger charmed a handpicked audience at Chapman University.</p> <p>The wife of the Republican gubernatorial candidate fared worse at a Sacramento Wal-Mart, however, where dueling protests overshadowed her effort to register voters for the Oct. 7 recall election.</p>