Jun 25 2007
Immigration Bill Prediction
If the immigration Bill is going to pass the cloture vote we know it will be close. I am not sure which way it will go but I think it will pass the cloture 62-37 27. The 37 27 opposed will be mostly the GOP deadenders. If it passes this test it will go through the amendment process and we shall see what flavor of sausage comes out the back end. I still think it has a chance to succeed, which is why the Amnesty Hypochondriacs are in a lather again. It is this or nothing for ten years. So either they lose and America wins some progress or they win and we are stuck with the same old mess for a lont time to come. I think it is sinking in on everyone there are not any more shots at this for some time to come. The perfect bill is not coming to save the day…..
Lurker: I was afraid you were going to do that; now you’re asking me to do more research!
I’m not sure I have the time now; still at work, and I post in-between phonecalls, etc.
But, you raise good points/objections/ideas, most which I don’t know the answers too; have to ask some of the more knowledgeable people on Immigration, such as LE, etc., to see what they suggest!
Yes, biglsufan, they are here. That is OUR argument. That nothing, absolutely nothing, has been to stop the invasion our nation has experienced. But I am sure you don’t like the word “invasionâ€. Prefer the most PC correct term “migration†I am sure.”
The border states benefited too fro their labors. They buit , they wer employed in busness that helped so the growth on theose border states. It is not all one sided.
THis returns the rule of law and we get great enforcement measures. Also there is a protection for the 3.1 million americans kids of mixed status and many spousces. Saving us from a huge costly bill down the road. IT is a good resolution
I was almost, and I say almost, getting ready to say, let’s just believe the good intent of these people in trying to get the bill passed, and get on with it!
Then, I just read this:
“Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and others have made it clear that any provisions in the final bill with which they disagree will simply be stripped out during conference committee negotiations anyhow; in other words, just as this bill began in closed-door meetings, it will end in closed-door meetings.”
And there we have it; I knew better than to EVER trust Teddy Kennedy, and I said it before on this blog, IF Teddy Kennedy is FOR the bill, it MUST be bad for America.
I was right, and I apologize for my weakness!
I am now no longer on the fence but am ADAMANTLY OPPOSED to this Bill, and I’m calling my Senators in the morning, to MAKE sure they vote against Cloture.
Teddy Kennedy and his pals are pulling scam, and our only hope is to kill this thing, and wait for Fred Thompson to become President.
““Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and others have made it clear that any provisions in the final bill with which they disagree will simply be stripped out during conference committee negotiations anyhow; in other words, just as this bill began in closed-door meetings, it will end in closed-door meetings.—
That is as to poison pills too remeber or thing closely resembling it. Amendments that had bipartisan support I suspect the Senators will try to stick together on. Alos remeber this things had to go the House and there will be amendments there. THe Conference committee is nothing strange. Most major legislation has to go throught there. Rememebr it still has to pass a a cote once it gets out of conference
Dale, LOL!
Kennedy had been one of the sponsors of this bill since the beginning.
Once I heard of his sponsorhip, I was leery of this bill.
There are some things about this bill that I like but other things that I don’t like.
While I am on the fence about this bill, I still don’t understand why Congress still cannot get existing laws enforced.
I would like to see one bill – just one bill passed…and that’s to build a physical fence all the way on both the south and north borders, starting with the south borders.
Then find ways to enforce existing laws and, if necessary, amend existing laws to get them enforced.
Kessler’s
Americans Favor Immigration Bill
Biglsufan, so because the illegals took jobs in the Southwest that were traditionally held by undereducated Americans you think that is a reason to support this bill? I think it is exactly the reason to NOT support this bill. With illegals driving down the wages of undereducated Americans, what chance do those Americans have to support their families? Or even themselves?
And what is dumping foreign nations’ unwanted citizens on our nation going to do? It will not do one thing to help those of us who need entry level jobs to gain work experience.
What none of you who favor this bill seem to want to discuss the things that Kennedy said in both 1966 and 1986. Things like how our cities were not going to wind up full of illegals. Now you want to back a bill that is by the same clown that made empty promises to us before, only to never insist that his legislation be enforced. He walked away from it. Now he is trying to sell us the same load of bull that he has twice before. And you are buying it.
ok…my guesstimate 🙂
It will NOT pass cloiture (not even close). IF, the senate is willing to debate the bill further, it will survive. If not..it will die. By that, I mean..the people who are pushing this bill…it’s up to them. If it’s cloiture or nothing..(ie…shut off debate or nothing)…it will be nothing.
That’s what every poll since this started has said. So…let us see.
Subject: Medical Care for Illegals
Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas is a fairly famous institution and for a variety of reasons:
1. John F.Kennedy died there in 1963
2. Lee Harvey Oswald died there shortly after.
3. Jack Ruby-who killed Lee Harvey Oswald died there a few years later…by coincidence
On the flip side, Parkland is also home to the second busiest maternity ward in the country with almost 16,000 new babies arriving each year. (That’s almost 44 per day — every day!)
A recent patient survey indicated that 70 percent of the women who gave birth at Parkland in the first three months of 2006 were illegal immigrants. That’s 11,200 anchor babies born every year just in Dallas.
According to the article, the hospital spent $70.7 million delivering 15,938 babies in 2004 but managed to end up with almost $8 million dollars in surplus funding. Medicaid kicked in $34.5 million, Dallas County taxpayers kicked in $31.3 million and the feds tossed in another $9.5 million.
The average patient in Parkland’s maternity wards is 25 years old, married and giving birth to her second child. She is also an illegal immigrant. By law,pregnant women cannot be denied medical care based on their immigration status or ability to pay.
OK,fine, that doesn’t mean they should receive better care than everyday, middle-class American citizens. But at Parkland Hospital, they do.
Parkland Memorial Hospital has nine prenatal clinics. NINE!! The Dallas Morning News article followed a Hispanic woman who was a patient at one of the clinics and pregnant with her third child—her previous two were also born at Parkland. Her first two deliveries were free and the Mexican native was grateful because it would have cost $200 to have them in Mexico. This time, the hospital wants her to pay $10 per visit and $100 for the delivery but she was unsure if she could come up with the money. Not that it matters, the hospital won’t turn her away. (I wonder why they even bother asking at this point.)
“How long has this been going on? What are the long-term affects?”
Well, another subject of the article was born at Parkland in 1986 shortly after her mother entered the U.S. illegally—now she is having her own child there as well. (That’s right,she’s technically a U.S. citizen.) These women receive free prenatal care including medication, nutrition, birthing classes and child care classes. They also get freebies such as car seats, bottles, diapers and formula, etc.
Most of these things are available to Ame rican citizens as well but only for low-income applicants and even then, the red tape involved is almost insurmountable. Because these women are illegal immigrants, they do not have to provide any sort of legitimate identification — no proof of income. An American citizen would have to provide a social security number which would reveal their annual income — an illegal immigrant need only claim to be poor and the hospital must take them at their word.
“My husband is a pilot for the United States Navy (yes, he fought in Iraq) and while the health care is good, we Navy wives don’t get any of these perks! Car seats? Diapers? Not so much. So my question is this: Does our public medical care system treat illegal immigrants better than American citizens?”
Yes it does!
As I mentioned, the care I have received is perfectly adequate but it’s bare bones, meat and potato medical care — not top of line.
Their the illegal’s)medical care is free — simply because they are illegal immigrants? Once again, there is no way to verify their income.
Parkland Hospital offers indigent care to Dallas County residents who earn less than $40,000 per year. (They also have to prove that they did not refuse health coverage at their current job. Yeah, the ‘free’ care is not so easy for Americans.)
There are about 140 patients who received roughly $4 million dollars for un-reimbursed medical care. As it turns out, they did not qualify for free treatment because they resided outside of Dallas County. So the hospital is going to sue them! Illegals get it all free! But U.S. citizens who live outside of Dallas County get sued! How stupid is this?
As if that isn’t annoying enough,the illegal immigrant patients are actually complaining about hospital staff not speaking Spanish. In this AP story, the author speaks with a woman who is upset that she had to translate comments from the hospital staff into Spanish for her husband. The doctor was trying to explain the situation to the family and the mother was forced to translate for her husband who only spoke Spanish. This was apparently a great injustice to her.
In an attempt to create a Spanish-speaking staff, Parkland Hospital is now providing incentives in the form of extra pay for applicants who speak Spanish. Additionally, medical students at the University of Texas Southwestern for which Parkland Hospital is the training facility will now have a Spanish language requirement added to their already jammed-packed curriculum. No other school in the country boasts such a ridiculous multi-semester (multicultural) requirement.
In the meantime, I have to end my column here. I have to go buy a car seat.
Sorry for the length, but this needs wide circulation—- particularly to our “employees” in Congress.
If you want to verify accuracy go to: http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/parklandasp
You can just type in Parkland Hospital at snopes.com to read the whole article.
Quote of the day:
Only 16% think this compromise will address the problem it purports to solve. Forty-one percent believe it will make illegal immigration worse than before. That means a quarter of the people who support the bill do so while believing it won’t do anything to solve illegal immigration.
When we say that Congress lacks credibility, this is what we mean. When was the last time Congress worked so hard to pass legislation that so few supported, so many of which supported it because it won’t work, and whose opponents hated it so badly? Certainly not within my memory.
Captain Ed
Another on the Amendments:
This is a very big deal, because it means that several senators on the fence, who had felt that their amendments were the make-or-break factor in the bill, won’t know whether their amendments are in the ones approved by McConnell.
It’s either vote no, and never know whether your amendment to fix the bill would have made it through, or vote yes, and hope that yours is one of the dozen or so.
Jim Geraghty
Perhaps, rather than a few, writting this Behind Closed Doors, it would have passed the smell test.
This is Precious:
What!?! A Missed Enforcement Deadline??? [Rich Lowry]
Known as Project 28, for the 28 miles of border that the towers will scan, the so-called virtual fence forms the backbone of the Secure Border Initiative, known as SBInet, a multibillion-dollar mix of technology, manpower and fencing intended to control illegal border crossings.
If successful, hundreds of such towers could dot the 6,000 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders.
But glitches with the radar and cameras have forced the project to miss its June 13 starting date, just as Congress focuses anew on border security in the Senate measure to overhaul immigration law.
Officials at the Homeland Security Department insist that Boeing, which has a $67 million contract to develop the project and others, will soon put it back on track, though they are not providing a new completion date…
“The department’s failure to be forthcoming and the repeatedly slipping project deadlines not only impede Congress’ ability to provide appropriate oversight of the SBInet program, but also undermine the department’s credibility with respect to this initiative,†Representatives Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Loretta Sanchez of California, chairwoman of a border subcommittee, both Democrats, wrote in a letter on June 19 to the department.
Time to hit the sack. This would be funny, if it wern’t so serious.
Retire, we are at Full employment. Texas was begging for people during the boom. It needed the labor and Texas profited as a result. Also, I am not buying the idea that we should we try to stay with the old system as to “unducated Labor”. These are new economic times. The old models have already passed. We are now getting way passed the point where people were trained for a specific job and that is it. People constantly have to udpadte their skill. That is just a fact. I am curious why you think its profitable to keep native born Americans in that out of date and in the end limited life.
Further, As to Kennedy. Sorry I am not the type of person that when he reads about Kennedy on Worldnutsdaily I make the sign of the cross. I oppose him on many things and wish he wasn’t there. But he is no dark merlin type politician. He will not have power to enforce or not enforce this law. He will not cast a magical spell over the bill if it becomes law so the legislative language is changed on the parchment.
We know why the 86 bill failed. NO verfication and no ID. IT was predicted. We did enforcement only bills in the 90’s Guess what they failed to solve the problem. THis type of bill should have been done in 86. IT wasn’t Worker verfication, border security, ID,Guest worker. That is all the stuff that should have been in 86.
THere are few people left from 86 in the Senate. ANd unlike you I guess, I don’t think Kennedy has power of mind control to where I can’t make an honest evaluation of this bill
BY the way if this bill passes we will have to deal the with the Strive act in the House. The turn over has been even greater in the HOuse. Who will be the boogy man over there
Whew! I was sweating this vote until reading your predictions AJ. Given your past track record, I’ll sleep a LOT better tonight.
If your past record at predicting political events is any guide, this bill is doomed for failure.
You can’t keep putting the squeeze on the middle class. You can’t keep exporting good jobs out of the Country, while simultaneously importing cheap labor for the remaining jobs.
Our elected representatives are there to represent legal residents and citizens. They aren’t there to represent those who enter or remain in our Country illegally.
How the hell is this even a possible consideration??????
The Know Nothings thought the European Catholics were part of an invasion force. In fact they firmly believed that the Pope intended to take Cincinnati by force and create a new Catholic empire here.
That is what I think of whenever I read that people believe this is an “invasion” and the people coming here are going to force us all to speak Spanish.
Back in the 30’s the US government shipped people out of California to make room for people like my grandparents, the Okies. It turned out that half of the people they shipped to Mexico were in fact American citizens who were Spanish speakers because they were from a part of the country that had been traditionally Spanish speaking. These people were not compensated.
And it has always been the case that there were parts of the country where people spoke a language other than English. I am not saying it is a good thing, but the idea that there is something strange about signs in Spanish or Spanish stations belies the fact that we had German town in Cincinnati, China town in San Francisco and many other major cities, Hassidic Jews speaking Yiddish in Brooklyn, Amish speaking Dutch in Indiana and Penssylvannia, Cajun speaking French in Louisiana. This has been the history of our country.
So, I find the sanctimonious and hysterical speeches about invasion to be insane.
As for the laws being enforced etc, if it was all that simple then common sense should tell us we would not be here.
People bellowing on talk radio will not fix this, Malkin putting on a cheer leader outfit and prancing on You Tube will not fix thing, name calling on the blogs will not fix this, demonizing Kennedy will not fix this.
It will take compromise and bipartisan support and resources of the federal government to fix this. That requires a bill. There is nothing sinister about that. The tradition is Senate bill, House bill, conference to reconcile the two and then onto the President.
That is our tradition as Americans. We do not decide things by mob rule or polls or demagoguery. We do not assume that our political opponents are all traitors. That is our tradition, that is what makes us Americans.
Whatever we do will require the resources of the federal government, and that will require a bill of some kind. Now we can argue all day about the details, but there will always be people who are just sure they know a better way. However, sooner or later they will have to do more than promise.
And Sue, I don’t see the hardliners doing that. Their role is short lived, kill the bill, maintain the status quo, bitch about the status quo.
In other words, I do not think that Sessions and Tancredo have any intention of just enforcing the laws, because they know better. They are just using the issue for their own political purposes.
This business of “needing the labor” just doesn’t cut it. If this is true, why must we “import” that labor from a country that has territorial designs on the US, and whose citizens do not wish to assimilate? (I put “import” in quotes because we’re not doing any importing–these workers are breaking in!). That’s just dumb. There are many people worldwide who would love to come here to become Americans, and not wish to subvert our culture and sovereignty.
Does this bill include a budget? Surely, they would not approve without budget allocated.
Biglsufan, you could not be more wrong. We are a supply-side economic system. The labor pool should be tied to market needs. This bill doesn’t do that.
If the farm industry needs 100,000 workers during harvest season, our temporary work visa program should be adjusted to suit that need. Allow those who come to work to remain here long enough to complete the job they were hired to do and then they must return. That is how Canada handles it. But there should also be some responsibility placed on the farmers/employers who use temporary visa workers. They should be responsible for notifying ICE if the worker skips out and doesn’t come back. In a post 9-11 age, we need to know not only who enters our nation, but who leaves it, as well.
But what is goint to happen if we have a downturn in production? We then have 12-20 million people here who have no jobs but are entitled to all social welfare benefits just as American citizens are now.
And yes, Texas experienced a boom. It has not ended. Americans from every state in the nation came to work. I know. I hired a lot of them. But they were quickly replaced with illegals from Mexico by employers who were trying to increase their profit margin. Cheaper wages mean higher profits. The laying off of residents of northwest Arkansas, who had worked in the chicken plants for generations, only to replace them with illegals, because standard operating procedure. The wages at places like Tysons’ and Pauls plummeted. A couple, who both worked at Tyson, could not support their family any longer on the wages offered by Tyson. They were out of a job, out of money and living on welfare (your money). The Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas has most of the signs now in Spanish, not English. Some of the cashiers do not even speak English. The small towns around Rogers and on the lake, were once nice mid-income areas. Now they are barrios. How many times has Tyson been busted and what was the outcome? Prosecution of the executives that actually sent people to Mexico to recruit workers to replace those laid off residents of Arkansas? Nope.
You say we are way past the point of people staying in the same job for their entire career. Tell me, do you know any carpenters? It is a profession that pretty well stays the same. Yeah, you can go from framer to trim to craft (as in staircase building) but it was a job that someone who never completed highschool could support their family on. Those jobs have been taken by illegals who are willing to work for $5.50 an hour instead of $20-25 an hours. Who gains? The big home builders like Cen-Tex Homes in central Texas.
Where in this bill does it address the concerns of American workers? It doesn’t. It is a union busting deal with only some unions, like the United Service Workers Union, who want it because it means more dues money for a union that is shrinking. Unions that provide health insurance for their members, like the Teamsters, are against the bill. They see the handwriting on the wall.
If you think that Simpson-Mazzoli failed because it did not provide for verification, you have not read it. It even outline the fines to be imposed on employers who violated the worker verification law.
If this bill passes, it will be the first time in my memory that the elites in Washington have totally ignored the will of the people who elected them. We will then have to ask ourselves if we are still a “representative” form of government. And the answer will be a loud “No”.
And here is another thing no one talks of; the minimum wage is due to increase. What is going to happen when all these newly “minted” legals start demanding the new $7.75 minimum wage? I can tell you what will happen. More and more companies will move off shore and those who have been working under the table or for sub-standard wages will then be unemployed. But they will be legally here and will be eligible for unemployment benefits, welfare benefits all paid for by you. And if you think the noise from the illegals marching in the streets was loud, just wait until they all start demanding higher wages.