Jun 25 2006
GOP Utter Failure IV
While the democrats want to cut and run from Iraq, Republicans cut and run from our border security and left us open to terrorist attack by a stubborn fear of immigrants possibly becoming US citizens in 10-15 years (the so called ‘amnesty’ which only someone with severe obsession would confuse with the liberal goal of immediate citizenship).
Sen Bill Frist attempts again to make some in-roads on this issue in apiece out today in the Washington Times (h/t RCP). He is mostly right, but very wrong in some place. He realizes we need a multi-pronged solution.
Simply strengthening physical border security or beginning a guest worker program will not fix the deep, underlying problems in America’s immigration system. Any bill Congress sends to the president must enhance border security, create an operational temporary worker program, provide for work-site enforcement, and address the status of the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
It is a reasonable checkist (though some things overlap). All of these fronts need to be addressed to even have a prayer of working. Those people who try to get just one element passed (i.e., stronger borders) and try to hold off issues they cannot face are kidding themselves. Personally, I am not buying the silver-bullet excuses. I stopped believing in those not long after I realized the tooth fairy is not real.
Fritz points to one of the biggest problems we have right now – workable work-site checks and enforcement.
Workplace enforcement stands atop my list of concerns because it’s a prerequisite to any other type of immigration reform. Right now, employers have no effective way to verify whether an individual has proper permission to work in the United States. Unless we develop an effective work-site system, the economic pull of jobs will lead both illegal immigrants and employers to evade whatever barriers we place in their way. While the Senate bill contains some good ideas, I believe its work-site enforcement provisions need improvement.
Well, the jab that employers are too greedy to check is patently unfair. There is no way for an employer to resoundly determine if someone here is legal. Employers have been saying for decades that if the government would provide the system (like gun owner checks) they would use it. But people who run small businesses do not have the revenues to pay for detectives on every employee.
What I do not grasp is the idea that someone who has paid into Social Security should not get that money back out. It is not hard to believe more than half (if not all) of the people in social security have a record of breaking a law, for example speeding, uninspected car – much more dangerous actions to me and mine than someone working for a living and paying their taxes. In the grand scheme of things a drunk driver is much more of a risk to society than someone working without permission. So are we going to set the precedent that you can lose your social security because you broke a law?
This is the kind of mindless ‘severe punishment’ mentality that tries to equate working without permission with robbery, assault and murder. These punishments will set a precedent that can and will be used by politicians in the future as things that are ‘good for the gander’. We treat people equally here. So laws that apply to one group can be broadened out to apply to all of us at any time. Are we ready to have some bureacrat in DC tell us when we break certain laws they will take all the hard earned money they forced from us originally and now keep it?
Folks, those immigrants who are real criminals need to get the boot. We need to stop releasing immigrant workers (who are indistinguishable from vacationers I must point out) at the border as best we can, but what we really need to do is bring the underground workers into society so that they do not undermine our way of life but join in it. No stick you would not use on yourself for equally bad transgressions is going to be seen as fair and measured. The irony of this one sticking point is this is a case where these illegal workers paid their fair share of taxes, and now some in DC are trying to find a way to punish them for this. We want the tax cheats folks, not the tax payers.
Someone needs to show some sanity on these issues. And soon. We are still completely exposed to terrorist attack from our borders and from within this underground society that has been building up for decades. This was an inexcusable failure by the GOP. Fear of an immigrant becoming a citizen in 2016 or later is no excuse for leaving Americans at risk for terrorist attack today. Any attack that does succeed through this path will be laid on the heads of those who made this mistake.
Addendum: I see the ‘do-nothing’ crowd are still rationalizing the GOPs disasterous blunder. Seems they don’t like the point I keep making and keep looking for cover in polls which mean nothing to the issue. How many people in this country would agree that fear of immigrants becoming US citizens in 2016-2021 is a higher concern or priority than stopping terror attacks here in the US today? Sorry folks, but the American people are not obsessed. Very few minds would conclude it is better to risk a terror attack today (which kills and maims) than risk people whose only crime is making a living becoming US citizens in the far future. The only reason the GOP is not being decimated on this issue is the Dems keep trying to surrender to Al Qaeda in Iraq. One party is surrendering and the other party is fixated on immigrants being nationalized in 10-15 years. Neither is thinking straight. Please don’t bother and try and impress me with how correct all of this is. That just destroys your credibility. There is nothing admirable in any of this.
patrick:
In other words if I want a bill I should remember that people like me should only be seen when they show up and vote for the “right” people, otherwise we should shut up and do as we are told.
Because patrick if you do not have a way to deal with the constant tide of people trying to come in the fence will be like that Maginnot line that the French built thinking it would stop the Germans. They will go around the damn thing.
Almost half these people did not even come in the country that way.
And if that is all the Congress they wanted they should have left out the felony provisions in the House bill and just worked on beefing up the border through Homeland Security. They were the ones who said we had to start loading em up and shipping them out crap.
They could appropriate the money and start the wall first, none of this is going to happen that fast. There are ways they could do it, they just don’t have any respect for the opinions of the majority or the president or anyone who disagrees with them.
I voted for Bush, I did not vote for the rest of these people, sure as hell not Michael Savage or Michelle Malkin.
And it seems that every few months the same suspects are out there raising hell demanding that the rest of us say how high when they say jump. Just one tantrum after another.
I understand that your position is that my opinion is meaningless and that I should just shut up and go with the program so that the obstructionists can get their way, again.
Well you know what? I am getting to the place where I just plain don’t give a damn anymore and once Bush is out of office I think it might be time for some of these folks to be reminded that they don’t always get what they freaking want.
crosspatch:
It is like this. I don’t want chicken and mashed potatoes. I just want mashed potatoes. Put that chicken on my plate and I will feed supper to the dogs and no one will eat.
I’m at work.
1. I am truely sorry, I had no Idea about bandwidth.
2. I could not link to them, as they require 24/7 membership, therefore, without it, they would be unreadable.
3.Other than Mac Ranger, and a note to Clarice Feldman, I’ve never posted anywhere before.
4. I really thought Rush made excellent points, that perhaps someone else would say, you know, he is correct.
Sorry again, I’ll faid away, as other than ENFORCEMENT Guy, most everyone else seems to have a desire to let ’em all in, and let ’em all stay. By folks, sorry to use up bandwidth, never crossed my mind.
Terrye,
The border states like the Senate bill. The main goal is to get rid of the illegal employment and if you give these people a way to legally work, they aren’t exploited. What is happening now is that they are afraid to go to the hospital with a workers comp injury, so they just so up at an emergency room with a nail through their arm claiming they did it at home. Employers don’t pay them the local going rate and so they must take what they can get. They can’t drive because they can’t get a license in most states so they are dependent on their employer for transport. They can’t just go looking for another job. Basically it is exploitation and there are many who want to keep this system in place. In some very rural areas of Utah and Nevada, they are held in nearly slavery conditions. They might be 50 miles from the nearest town and have no transport other than their feet.
Attitudes are very regional, even within the states themselves. Chances are the further you get away from the border, the more anti-immigrant people are. When you have areas where a very meaningful segment of the population are either illegals or decended from illegals, attitudes are different … and these decendents vote.
The Republicans, or better, the knuckle-head self-proclaimed “base” Republicans are driving millions of voters to the Democrats and it’s votes that win elections, not posturing. These people are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They will maintain their positions and drive their own party into oblivion … but they will be “right!” by golly!
Truth is we are a nation of immigrants and always will be. The Republican party needs immigrant votes and the votes of the children of immigrants. If we treat people like dirt, who are they going to vote for? So yeah, the Republicans are coming across as “mean spirited” bigots who hate them.
Bush comes from a state with a huge Hispanic population AND a huge population if Independent voters. He had to compromise to be governor. Digging in your heels on either the right or the left will not get you elected in Texas.
Write this down:
The Presidential candidate that carries Texas in 2008 will carry the nation.
Terrye,
You make another good point … *half* the illegals here didn’t sneak across any border, they came across legally, and just stayed … because they like it here better than where they came from. We have illegals from all around the globe. My county has a lot of Korean and Chinese illegals too.
Interesting statistics I just looked at. Of cities with 500,000 or more people, look who is in the top ten safest cities:
1. San Jose, California
2. El Paso, Texas
5. Austin, Texas
8. San Antonio, Texas
9. Fort Worth, Texas
Want to know the three most dangerous?
1. Detroit
2. Baltimore
3. Washington DC
Crosspatch:
Detroit is one of the few cities that scare me. I wonder where New Orleans would be on that list?
Well you know, my old granny hired a Mexican to help her out arund the place after my uncle died, he was nice to her and his kids were so well mannered that she let him bring them with him. He had lost an arm when he was about 11 years old working in a saw mill. His oldest son was going to go to college and he was so proud of him. College, and here he was almost illiterate. You know what? I don’t know what his status was, I doubt if my Grandma did. It would never have occured to her to ask.
New Orleans didn’t make the “over 500,000 population” list this year but they are #8 on the top 25 most dangerous cities overall in the US.
I have had working for me for about 10 years a Mexican woman who not only came here legally, she has started a housecleaning business. The women who work for her are probably undocumented. If I so much as leave a penny on the floor, I will find it on the counter when I come home from work. If they break something (has happened once or twice over 10 years) they place it in the center of the kitchen table so we will know.
I have never experianced a single dishonest act. They don’t speak english but I do speak a little bit of spanish and they love my kids. They are very strong family values, church going people. If everyone else in this country has as strong a work ethic, honest nature, and deep family values as I have witnessed with my own eyes, this would be a much better country. I have no problems with giving them 10 years probation to get citizenship. We could use more citizens like that. They could serve as a good example for some of the jackasses that were born here.
Stevevvs
Don’t apologize to Terrye it is not his blog.
Excuse your self to AJ it belongs to him if you feel the need.
You definitely have an oversize ego Terrye. Unless AJ put you in charge I think you are being a bit presumptuous
You logic in criticizing Stevevvs is the same when you call us HARD CORE idiots etc.
DO you see the similarity?
You sound more like a liberal every day.
Telling us all how, what, when and where!
That’s the problem will emotional thinking no room for error.
I am not a he and no one ask him to apologize to me or take orders from me.
The president had two objectives, social secrurity reform and immigration reform. The socalled conservatives have not helped him with either and so they will probably not get either. And then they will complain.
Bloody spartan do not yell at me. Your side does not have the votes to get what they want and so they are going to stop any bill going through.
That is not my fault.
crosspatch:
My exhusband’s family was from Cincinnatti, Ohio. His father was Dutch, his mother German and they lived in a German part of that city. First generation. His Dad told me once that when he was 9 years old and in the fourth grade the teacher told them all that from that day forward they would speak only English in school. Up until then it had been German. So Al’s first language was German even though he was born in this country.
I wonder how many other people are like that? Remember Lawrence Welk? I thought the man had a speech impediment until I heard an interview with some people he grew up with in South Dakota. They all sounded like him. It was some isolated immigrant community who developed their own speech patterns.
But people do need to learn English.
Spartan,
About the “liberal” comment. I for one didn’t register with the “Conservative” party, I registered with the Republican party. Sometimes you need to look at what is best for the country and set personal feelings aside. Emotion doesn’t lead to the best decisions. I know how the thought of “amnesty” *makes people feel* but in the long run, I believe the probation option proposed by the Senate is the best thing for the country in the long run no matter how the idea of it *makes me feel*.
They should probably market the plan as “probation” rather than “amnesty” because that is closer to what it really is. And I believe that language would quell some of the emotion from the far right because “probation” recognizes a conditional in it’s very meaning. Had the Republicans spun it as “probation” they would have probably got the bill.
The Senate bill did require people to learn english. But your point on local dialects is a good one. When I was a child, I could remember barely understanding people from some of the more isolated Chesapeake Bay communities. The watermen would come around selling oysters and I could hardly understand them. They were speaking the same dialect as the people who settled those towns spoke in the 1600’s.
My great-grandmother was born in Germany and moved here as a teenager. My family got holy hell from the locals in WWII even though my mom was second generation born here, and I was third. But we were and always would be “those krauts”. Amazing. Until you have experianced that kind of bigotry first hand, you just can’t explain it.
You know what pisses me off? Today the terrorists killed the Russians they were holding. Video is out there. We keep killing them and they keep killing men on their knees with their hands bound behind their backs.
And while Bush is fighting people like this I see websites of people who call themselves conservatives, talking about impeaching Bush, telling Bush he can go eff himself, saying Bush is part of some weird conspiracy with Fox, threatening to stay home and let the Democrats win etc while this terrible barbarism is going on and a back stabbing press and opposition party are doing everything they can to make this harder.
And conservatives? Well they are sulking and driving down Bush’s numbers because he continued to have the exact same stance on immigration he had when they voted for him for president.
So spare me the lectures about being a liberal.
Terrye,
I believe the real issue is that certain people don’t really want things to change and will torpedo anything that promises to do so. I suppose Ronald Reagan was a great big liberal too.
I commend you for attempting to take some serious post on this issue. I can read the polls as well as anyone and they pretty much show that the deport or starve them all policy is not a majority position. Besides the poilcy question no one has convinced me that a plan that without exception will deport or starve people that have here been here young children, break up families that are mixed(a combination of legal and illegal), etc is going to be accepted by the American people when they see it 24/7 on TV. The American people Latino or otherwize will turn on this party.
Policy wize, When I ask if a personcould accept a plan where an illegal registers pays taxes, pays a fine, is on a 12 year probation perios and has to learn English 9 times out of ten people say they can live with that. Its unscientific but its what I have found. The biggest defense then is that that won’thappen. Instead of trying to get a good bill that would make sure that happened and helping to prepare society(Churches, non profits, charity groups) t help do that there is often just a flat refusal to consider it.
This issue is the issue that the Republic will rise or fall over some. For the majority of Americans its clear that it isn’t. I do know this. The longer this issue is aloowed to fester and if this immigration road show occurs this summer groups will take advantage of it. The voices and the direct mail will get more shrill and nasty and at the end it is the GOP that will pay for it.
Terrye.
I figures I would say a he isnstead of an it.
Not knowing everything and not knowing the feminine side of Terrye I guessed.
I am wrong at least 2x a day.
Second of all I am not yelling, but you do have a condescending attitude to what you think we HARD CORE are thinking.
You and AJ have a consistent talk down atitude.
Always in the negative terms.
IE, GOP Utter Failure XXIV
Neither makes you right or me wrong or vice versa, But it is AJ’s blog not yours yes?
He should be the one complaining.
I will explain your problem and mine as well.
I am on your side as well as you on mine there are no sides.
They are not mine no more than the others are yours.
EIther you are an American or Not.
I don’t give a damn about the rest until they pay their dues.
I owe my allegiance to you not them Assuming again you are an American.
IF you want to email me or slap me in private let me know, I don’t want to waste any more bandwidth.
Me on the other hand have dual fiber links. So I am spoiled.
Cross I like what you said and I disagree but I appreciate the way you tell it Thanks.
I must disagree I am not emotional on this as you would think,
I saw hispanic woman on fox and she said.
These people are criminals right or wrong that is what they are.
They are demanding, extorting and such.
If there were not over 200 spanish stations in this country I would agree with you but assimilation is a myth.
It is not happening…
History teaches us that all civilizations collapse.
There must be signs are we missing them, maybe I am wrong but I do not think so.
Bush has his own agenda, King George as I call him is not the man I voted for..
Why after all these years is no one punished for leaking, This goes way back to before Clinton and John Deutsch.
I think they are mostly all too filthy and corrupt.
RR would not have made the same mistake twice Cross.
Be Well All.
terrye,
the reason the fence has to come first before anything else is because of the 30 year track record to date. every immigration reform bill since LBJ has the same BS you are trotting out. what happens in reality is the perks are doled out which leads to millions more being seduced across the border and the fence never gets built. as i said before the senate, in a moment of honesty, voted against the amendment for a fence first provision. they do not want the border closed. so for the love of god stop repeating their BS. what part of this don’t you understand—close the border now and everything else is possible. that’s what this petition is about. the truth–you can’t agree with it because you do not want the border closed–you are all making excuses. you think not? just read your posts here and at all the other sites that you post. it’s the same old story–“i want the border closed but”………..
Okay, lets walk through this again.
If you completely closed the border with a 5,280 foot-high fence with barbed wire, landmines, and machine guns on it you would reduce the entry if illegals immediately by 50%. That number would then diminish as people found ways around, over, and under and through the fence.
Cross I have no idea where you are getting your numbers from but that is not Israels experience.
More like 90 plus percent.
But your self defeating “OH it’s only half and sooner or later they will figure a way around it” It’s the same old crap.
It’s not perfect so don’t do anything.
How come it’s never we’ll eventually we get the other 50%.
You are using the classic glass half full but since we want it its half empty.
Just trust us and let us protect you.
Come On
Unkess your Ox is gored right.
Specious Logic .
By your Hypothesis Cross East Germany should have been empty by the time the wall came down.
Being senile I forget, was it?