Jan 17 2007
Note To Republicans: You Can Stay In The Minority
I have a message to Republicans who want to punish people who are trying to make a living and simple do not have the forms to do so. Like the lack of any other license, the penalties for not supplying paperwork usually are fines and probation. Illegal workers are not felons (note to Reps, you lost that battle too). So confiscation of property and a forced march to the borders is out of the question as a measured punishment.
The President’s worker program has penalties: back taxes must be paid, jobs must be out in the open an compliant with employment and tax laws (which will reduce take home pay), and no time in country up until registration into the program can be used towards citizenship. These are not trivial and a lot more than most Americans would face for not having their papers in order (or not filing their taxes). The carrot for immigrants is the ability to work openly – if they can keep employed and stay out of trouble. Background checks will toss out the criminal element no one wants here, but which are a small minority of the illegal population.
Reps claim they will fight Mel Martinez (Senator from ‘third world Florida’ according to one rabid Rep) over his support of the guest worker program. Right now the word ‘amnesty’ from a Rep equates with “I am ready to lose more elections to liberals because I won’t listent to the conservatives who disagree with me”. So the response is immediate from the other side. The anti-amnesty folks are a non starter in every sense. And if it means the Reps remain out of power, then so be it. There are plenty of options out there for voters. And if you doubt this let me make the obvious point. Florida is the anchor to Republican Presidential bids. Dems have CA and NY tied up and the Reps haveTX. Without FL Reps will never see the White House. And Florida is not a deep red state. It has one Rep and one Dem Senator. It was the 2000 decisive battlefield with the closest Presidential race in modern history. Insulting Floridians will only deepen the Reps period in political ‘time out’ for misbehaving. Why some marginal Reps are so obsessed with extreme punishment in this matter is beyond me. But their extremism on this one issue will anchor the Reps in the minority for as long as it takes for them to get over it.
RO5
Makes no difference if they pass the compromise bill, it won’t and can’t be enforced. There is no history of any enforcement ever, of any immigration law dealing with illegal aliens.
Passing a law doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be implemented. Look at the fence law just passed. It’ll never be implemented.
The only two provisions in the comprehensive amnesty law that may happen will be the amnesty and citizenship. (yes it’s called something else, but a spade is a spade)
the law contains no requirement for funding(funding bills must orig in house) but the house could add it.
Allows persons with 1 felony and 3 misdemeanors to come in.
No provision for requirement to learn English.(just sign up for classes.)
And as I said, it doesn’t matter anyhow. It is just a vote buying deal for politicians and a ‘feel good’ deal for those that want to have a good feeling.
The last election was about Iraq. The next may be about immigration, but doubtful. Only citizens want border security, politicians don’t, so we won’t have it.
There is no way it could be enforced even if someone wanted to.
Enforcement, I don’t disagree with a thing you say. Yes, this is a feel-good policy just as was LBJ’s Great Society which was supposed to end poverty in the U.S. It failed just as this immigration “reform” will fail.
With the passage of the new minimum wage, and the expectation that they will be made legal with no consequences for violating U.S. laws, immigrants will continue to come; in droves. If you were making $200 a month in Mexico or China and you had the possibility to make $1,300.00 a month in the U.S., what would you do? But it will not end the oncoming hoards. The same employers who hire illegals for substandard wages now, will only look for more illegals (who are not out of the shadows) to replace those who have been made legal and are now demanding minimum wage. That is the very reason I advocate severe punishment for employers who hire illegals. And what will happen to those who have been made legal and have been let go from their jobs because they are now eliglibe for standard wages? They will be replaced by more illegals willing to work for substandard wages and they will then draw unemployment and will wind up on the welfare rolls. Even the Pew Hispanic Research Center states that the competition among illegals for jobs in the United States is driving down the wages that illegals earn.
All this is not rocket science. And it is going to create a whole new segment of poverty level residents who are eligible for welfare. The costs to schools, law enforcement, courts, medical facilities and other social services is going to rise and so will our taxes to cover those additional costs.
Carol Keyton Strayhorn, who ran for governor of Texas, bragged how illegals brought $1.5 billion into the state coffers through sales tax. What she didn’t bother to tell Texans was that there was an extra $3.5 billion that was spent for services to illegals over and above the revenue generated by them.
And here is another glitch; with the imprisonment of Border Patrol officers Ramon and Compeas today, I look for BP to start resigning in mass numbers. I personally know of four who have applied with the Texas Department of Public Safety because they say their boss, the federal government, will not back them when they do their jobs.
FE and Retire, Both of you are right on the Mark. I just talked to my mother in Tuscon and my nephew who has been fighting his way through lunch everyday for the crime of being a white boy, has had to be taken out and put in a charter school because his parents feared he would be severely hurt or even killed. HE IS ELEVEN. This really pisses me off! I’ve been down there and you can sense the racial tension in that town so thick you can cut it with a knife. When they were having their immigration marches, things got pretty heated down there, it came real close to being an all out riot.
Retire, your points about illegals competing with other amnestied aliens are so correct. There is no real logic to this plan. As I have said before, the same people who say we need this bill because our immigration system can’t handle the load are willing to increase the load tenfold and believe it will work out just fine! Brilliant! We have had whole areas of employment, such as construction, taken over to the point where most other people have had to leave the state to work in that field in order to make enought to get by on. Most of my friends who build anything anymore get a bunch of their friends to help them with it. I recently helped a friend of mine put a second story on his house because he didn’t want crappy work done by day laborers that the contractor picked up in front of home depot.
I think you’re right, it will not take very long for people to find out how stupid it is to just let anyone who wants to come into the country. A country that does not defend it’s borders is a squatters domain!
About those two border patrol agents. OH MY GOD! If that don’t get your blood boiling, you haven’t got a soul. Two guys out of my office went to meet with some Border Patrol and ICE agents today on unrelated issues and they talked about that case and the mood in the border patrol is extremely dark to say the least. Who want’s a job that your boss doesn’t even want you to do, to the point of being imprisoned for it? I’ve been hearing the fallout on local radio all day today and people were screaming and crying and swearing, you name it. I’ll bet you anything that the jury was predominately hispanic., who the heck else are you going to get on a jury down there, they make up about eighty percent of the population. This is why Brian Bilbray so soundly beat “You don’t need papers for voting” Busby TWICE now for the fiftieth congressional district even here in liberal california!
It’s amazing to me how bad things are getting out here and the east coast dolts living on the east coast just don’t have a clue. When I heard AJ telling Steve, “You clearly do not understand the laws on the books. ….. Another thing that needs to be fixed. One strike and you are out, never to return. That of course would be for serious crimes.” Never to return!?!?! Does he really think that we can deport someone never to return. Most of them are back within a few days! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, he cleary doesn’t understand the revolving door and disdain for the law that the illegal community has now!
RO5, did you read my post? I said everything you said and agree with every word in yours. You said it ain’t gonna work, I said it ain’t gonna work. Maybe you should re-read mine. It says the same thing yours does, just uses some different examples etc. Any law passed is not going to be enforced, there’s no history of it and every attempt has made things worse, because no one (in congress) wants it to get better.
bikkerken
“One strike and you are out, never to return. That of course would be for serious crimes.†Never to return!?!?! Does he really think that we can deport someone never to return. Most of them are back within a few days! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, he cleary doesn’t understand the revolving door and disdain for the law that the illegal community has now!”
As I said earlier, in Wisconsin a guy ws deported to Mexico and was back in Wisconsin in LESS than a week and committed another felony. ICE then wasn’t even interested, the local judge put him under $5000 bail for a sexual molesting a child case and he skipped. Of course. That case has been on O’Reilly a couple times. I’m sure he’s just moved and living under a different name.
As I said, nobody is interested in enforcing any laws.
AJ, If we can do all that bull_ _ _ _ you claim that’s in the compromise bill what happen in 1968 & 1986? Amnesty then and Amnesty now. Winning elections with Bush in bed with Kennedy turns my stomach. Fool me once (education bill) and you look for Brutus again. If that’s winning elections, no thanks. P/S “racist” is a democrat word. AJ, great blog-read you almost every night. You are the man that can start a fire and keep it going.
Many Thanks Tony!
BTW, I am totally against the real amnesty. And no way am I for making these folks citizens. I only want reasonable penance. Paying years of back taxes is a burden that will be on them for years to come. It sucks all your spare money from your wallet for years.
Recouping those taxes is the best thing those 10-12-100 million (depending on the hype of the source) workers could do for this country and us tax payers. And that is one thing those who want these people deported or starved out forget – the tax revenues which could go to pay for any registration program, health care costs and maybe even more tax cuts for the rest of us.
And I want these people to step forward instead of us spending security assets chasing down roofers where we should be chaising down al Qaeda. Another factor people dismiss.
Sorry, don’t have time to answer every boring little question with easy answers.
If they are easy answers, why not answer them?
I’ve never seen AJ answer any Questions, sadly
Enforcement, yes, I did read your post. And yes, I agree with you.
The problem is that illegal immigration has, until recent years, been a border state problem. When it was limited to the border states, no one cared. So what? Let Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California deal with it. I watched as Tejano friends who were carpenters, plumbers, sheet rockers and all other construction positions, lose those jobs that they had always supported their families on, to illegals who were willing to work for a hellofa lot less. These were not 1st or 2nd generation Tejanos, these were 6th generation Tejanos. And they are bitter. They feel like the federal government has deserted them. One friend, who owned a landscaping company where he and his four boys worked, lost his jobs to landscapers who hire illegals. He can tract his family back to the days where his family fought with General Sam Houston and one member was at the Alamo.
We were sold a bill of goods in 1986 and nothing changed except for the increase in illegals coming across our borders.
So now we have two Border Patrol agents in prison while the drug dealer they shot is sueing the federal government for $5 million and has already been caught twice again, running his poison into our nation to distributed to kids. Last week a BP from the El Paso sector killed an illegal drug runner and now Mexico is demanding that he be imprisoned. National Guard at a BP station are fired on by Mexican banditos and we do nothing. Armed Mexican military come across our borders and the kidnappings of Americans who live on the border is on the rise. And we do nothing.
Perhaps in the spirit of being neighborly, we should adopt the Mexican system of dealing with illegals.
The pro-illegal crowd want to throw the immigration waves of the 19th and 20th centuries at us and say “see, they didn’t destroy America”. And this is true. But they also did not drain the system of the very nation they wanted to live in. Immigration is designed to benefit the host nation, not the immigrant, not the nation the immigrant comes from.
“They are just coming here to work” is the carnard. But the Pew Hispanic Research Center learned that over 90% of the illegals that have come here, had jobs before they left their native land. They were not unemployed and even managed to save enough money that many times they could pay cayotes $2,000 and more.
We are facing a threat from radicals who want nothing more than to see us dead. Do we really need 50 million people who not only have no desire to change their own government for the better but who would not stand up for ours when the chips are down? That should be the one question that is on everyone’s mind with immigration “reform”.
I wonder if the illegals, on their way to citizenship get to (or have to) file taxes for each and every identity they have used while in the US.
The way I understand it works is, they file a return under several different names with multiple dependents and get a refund for Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on each return. Now that may not happen, or it may, but I strongly suspect it will depend on whether they can get away with it or not. I’ve heard of examples of it. But that has to be questioned because I don’t know who would have the details on something like that, so I’m skeptical. (of multiple filings by individuals)
I don’t feel like the American people are going to come out in the plus column in net taxes out of this deal.
Retire05, I’ve seen the same thing here in Louisiana with contractors that you mentioned. The only contractors that have survived are the ones that are using illegals. A contractor can’t pay a carpenter $15-20 hr. when other contractors are paying them $5 hr.
All landscapers are illegals, all legitimate ones are out of business.
Almost all the imported people that are working in New Orleans now are illegals, everybody is looking the other way.
So I guess I don’t see why a worker, working under the table, and getting $5-10 tax free is going to come out and sign up and lose his job. Because once he signs up, he’s going to go up to the $15hr rate and be replaced by the next one that is willing to work for $5. Is he just going to change his name and go back to under the table. I don’t know the answer to this question. But I suspect I do