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Immigration Debate This Week
Posted by Raven on June 4th, 2007
The Senate is set to debate this week. Nationally, fund raising for the GOP has declined, but individual state GOP parties have seen an increase when the state OPPOSES the current draft legislation. Wonder of wonders.
President Bush’s immigration bill is hurting fundraising by the Republican National Committee, but fierce grass-roots opposition to the legislation is helping several state Republican parties.
Shocking:
Tina Benkiser, chairwoman of the Republican Party in the president’s home state of Texas, says raising money has been successful “in large part to our principled stance against illegal immigration.”
[...]
“In Michigan, seven out of nine congressional Republicans oppose the bill, our activists are publicly opposing amnesty, and we are also re-establishing our brand image by fighting a Democrat attempt to increase taxes,” Mr. Anuzis says. “These issues are keeping our people engaged, where otherwise we could feel a [donations] drop-off.”
[...]
Similar reports from other state Republican officials in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and Delaware suggest that opposition to any form of amnesty for illegal aliens is a fundraising winner.
The question is: Will these state parties allot this money to candidates who oppose any form of amnesty? Let’s hope so.
The New York times thinks illegal immigrants who have committed identity theft type crimes should not be labeled as criminals:
…That means beating back a particularly noxious amendment from Senator John Cornyn of Texas.
Its ostensible purpose is to “close a gaping loophole” that Mr. Cornyn says would allow terrorists, gang members and sex offenders into the country. But his real target is bigger than that. He had no appetite for the bipartisan compromise and now wants to destroy it by attacking one of its pillars: a path to legal status for an estimated 12 million immigrants.
Mr. Cornyn would do this by significantly expanding the universe of offenses that make someone ineligible for legalization. Some people who used fake identity papers — a huge portion of the undocumented population — would be disqualified. The amendment would also expand the definition of “aggravated felonies,” an already overbroad category of crimes, to include the act of entering or re-entering the country illegally.
Big Dog has an interesting post up about those jobs Americans won’t do:
The idea that we need to have 12 million ILLEGALS here to do jobs that Americans will not do is ridiculous. Most of the ILLEGALS are family of the actual worker and with a wife and a number of kids per worker the actual number needed is far fewer than 12 million. The balance are those who suck the most blood out of our society and hurt our economy. By using welfare recipients and inmates we might be able to make up a large number of those jobs done by ILLEGALS and reduce our need thus allowing us to deport them without all the tears and excuses from the left. We can then have a guest worker roster that would be more easily managed and provide workers who come here when WE say and go home the same way.
We also have many people who once worked at these jobs- who have been laid off and who are now working part time at some McDonalds- earning less money than these measly paying jobs now infested by illegals. Is one better than the other? The claim that there are not enough people to do these jobs is moronic at best. PAY the American PEOPLE a little better and I guarantee you they will work. And don’t threaten me with a pricier package of lettuce either. American workers are worth the extra 2 pennies…and the Businesses CAN take a little cut in their bloated profits.
The GOP will prove to us this week who they represent. The people or the business lobby. Only we the people can VOTE though.
The GOP needs to remember this.
June 4th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Nothing will have meaning until the border is secured. Bush and Chertoff have pretty much shown they don’t give a damn about that problem. Homeland Security has launched a grandiose $multi-billion program they call the Secure Border Initiative, SBI, which is more a smoke screen for covering inaction than anything. I said last May that the boy scout troops and 4-H clubs in the border counties, with the adult supervision of the local ranchers, could get that damned fence built from San Ysidro to El Paso in a few weeks, if the government would get the hell out of the way. What you fundamentally need is a well marked borderline with clear fields of fire, and the will to enforce the boundary. All the rest of it, amnesty, special catagory light-penalty non-amnesty amnesty, guest worker multicolored cards and alphabet soup visa classes all mean nothing unless the damned border is secured. Here’s what Homeland Security offered in November, 2006 in their SBI Fact Sheet: Under SBI, our goal is to have operational control of both the northern and southern borders within five years.
Meanwhile, Congress is stalled and the administration is clueless. Hint to Congress: You don’t need more laws. You need to enforce the laws you have. And, take your hands out of the pockets of the businesses that are profiting from the cheap labor.
June 4th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
It’s a waste of money- the border. Because the draft legislation ALLOWS more and more to come on through, with various classes of visa of course.
And we CAN run the illegals out of this country if we really wanted to:
Dry up the jobs, they will go. Easier said than done. I think the businesses have to be HIT and hit HARD because I believe firmly, that this piece to the puzzle is the most important. I don’t believe for one second that businesses cannot do better; cut some profits ASS HOLES and hire Americans.
June 5th, 2007 at 4:59 am
The border has to be controlled. It’s not a waste of money, it’s not hugely expensive, and it’s not rocket science. It’s naive to think we can run the illegals out of the country simply by drying up the jobs. Your suggestion is essential to the whole solution, but until you can shut off the inflow, you don’t even have a handle on the numbers you’re dealing with. The ones who would leave under your scenario are the most desirable, the ones who want to work, and it’s questionable if they’d even have to leave, given the welfare bonanza they’ve got here already. Without border control, you’ll still attract them, but with no jobs, they’ll survive by crime, or just slide into the welfare system. You might sing a different tune if you spent some time in the states along the border.
I agree with you that the businesses, and their lapdogs in Congress, are a huge part of the problem. It’s just a part of the problem that needs fixing after, or at the same time that, the borders are controlled.
I heard my Congressman on a local talk radio show in California after the shit hit the fan in May of 2006. This is a conservative who I’ve always supported and respected. Until that day. His answers regarding illegal immigration were nothing but waffling generalities about the complexity of the farm labor issues, blah, blah, blah. His family runs a winery. It would take an earthquake to unseat him from his district. Nancy Pelosi’s family profits from the same low labor costs in their business operations. It’s bipartisan corruption. I’m not holding my breath until you get Congress to hit ‘em and hit ‘em hard. And, even though enforcement is an executive responsibility, the agencies are extremely sensitive to Congressional whims. They know where their bread is buttered. Even if we don’t need new or revised laws, the will to enforce the existing laws is compromised from the halls of Congress every time an agribusiness or construction executive calls his representative.