All Things Beautiful

Postmortem On The Immigration Bill

"St Jerome and the Angel" by Simon Vouet 1620s, National Gallery of Art, Washington

 

Do you have that heavy headed feeling this morning? Like the one you may have experienced after a little too much to drink the night before...

Well that is how this postmortem on the Immigration Bill feels to write about. I have gone around the block and back in my assessment of this issue, and during my trip, so many points have come up clouding my judgment, that quite honestly taking a migraine pill may do the trick. Perhaps I'll simply start writing, and pray for some clarity. I certainly shan't get it from the left, who are busy with their own agenda.

Prior to the conference committee slamming it, and this actually never getting to end up on the President's desk, let's look at what we have:

The Senate yesterday approved legislation that would trigger the biggest changes to U.S. immigration policy in decades, by strengthening border security, establishing a guest-worker program, and providing the means for millions of illegal immigrants to stay in the country and possibly become citizens.

The product of a tenuous bipartisan coalition that faced tough conservative opposition, the measure calls for 370 miles of triple-layer fencing along the Mexican border, a complicated three-tiered system for determining who can stay and who must leave the country, and more jail cells for those awaiting deportation. It would declare English the country's national language, a gesture that many advocates found insulting but accepted in hopes of helping millions of undocumented workers achieve legal status.

The Senate bill passed 62 to 36, with 23 Republicans joining 38 Democrats and one independent in one of the few displays of bipartisanship on a big piece of legislation in years. The President won one of his very few acknowledged victories, and yet the complications I see coming forth are plentiful, despite the passing of Binghaman's Amendment limiting the total number of aliens, including spouses and children, granted employment-based legal permanent resident status to 650,000 during any fiscal year. Heh

Gen. Edwin Meese, who served as Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, cuts through the chase in his New York Times column, and points to the similarities with the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty, in the present climate a dirty word.

How Do We Legalize Illegality?

"The Holy Family with St Mary Magdalen" by El Greco 1595-1600, Museum of Art, Cleveland

 

You know posts like this really tee me off. On Monday I said the vultures were out and of course they were just revving up, culminating into the usual feeding frenzy. So now if we disagree with the President on anything, it's labeled "Bush cult impeachment hysteria", and we, the supposed Bush cultists are now Judases reincarnate and ready to burn the President, and

that the cult-like reverence for Bush would begin to disintegrate once he weakened and it became clear that he was too weak and unpopular to support the movement. They would then turn on him and depose him and seek to replace him with a new leader.[...]

Ever since he dropped below 40% - and he is now at 29% - that is what has been happening. Harriet Miers was the real start. Dubai was next. And we now have open warfare. Dissent of this type was never seen for the first four years of his presidency - except from those who were deemed outcasts - which is why the open conflict during the Miers nomination was so notable. Because it was so new.

Please try to explain this to Tom Maguire, Jeff Goldstein and that circle - slowly and clearly - so that I don't have to repeat this explanation every week for the rest of my life to the hordes of people who come here from those blogs and excitedly and with great self-satisfaction make this same "point" over and over like they've discovered the cure for cancer.

Eh? Glenn Greenwald my friend, you are full of bull.

I along with a large majority of the President's supporters, wrote this on Monday:

The Address. It is quite obvious that the Administration is not committed to border control, and are just giving us lip service. This was a lame speech with some sort of an apologist center solution where 6,000 unarmed National Guard officers will be decorating the border for one year, not apprehending illegals, but ahem, deterring. Yeah right. This half way message has not even been communicated down from the President to his foot soldiers, who are clearly stating the opposite to what we are being told. Fence, what fence? Julie Myers does not even know what we are talking about. Is that a border, what border?

I have no problem with reason and patience, if we are talking about the same solution, but I fear we are not. Political suicide may be fashionable, but does it have to be televised?

John is right "He had his chance and blew it". The vultures are already circling. Jeff is right there: "And?"

Disappointing to say the least, I just hope that my assumption in my original text post above is correct, otherwise, we would have lost credibility for absolutely nothing. At the moment, even this is beginning to sound better, and the "Open border drinking game" better still. We are now resorting to reminiscing about our accomplishments, and going off the wall completely? Sorry Mr. President you have totally lost touch with reality here.This is certainly one sell he did not make. Check here and here for the rest. It's time to turn toward Mecca, and our favorite Allah.

Does the President really think we are such cheap dates? Heard it all before? Or should I say it may not end up being the way it was before....Fausta wisely thinks this is a start. I dearly hope she is right.

And? We disagree with the President on the immigration issue, and so what? The Dems don't even have an immigration plan to disagree on. We are Bush cultists whilst the going is good, then we abandon the cult the moment we disagree with the President. If we support Bush, we are cultists, if we  oppose him, we have decided to miraculously ride tandem with someone else in order to follow in a different direction. Yeah right.

The Numbers Game (UPDATED)

UPDATED WITH THE PRESIDENT'S LAME SPEECH AND REAX

China has become the factory of the world. 1.2 billion Chinese ensure a seemingly limitless source for cheap, but mostly unskilled labor, even at the current one-child-only policy.

It seems the US wants to hedge its bet by competing with China and India on the Numbers Game, whilst partly hoping to keep a trump ace up its sleeve: Flooding America in the next 20 years and beyond with a new mix of skilled and unskilled labor. This is in contrast to the Chinese and Indian model where wage competitiveness relies on the seemingly never ending supply of rural, unskilled labor in the foreseeable future.

Hours before President Bush's address on immigration reform, today's report by the Heritage Foundation on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA) is an absolute must read! It highlights the fact, that the raging debate over the fate of 11 Million illegal immigrants is actually a mere sideshow given the projected influx of legal immigrants over the next 10-20 years for which the CIRA would pave the way. LGF just posted the link Senate Immigration Bill Would Allow 100 Million New Legal Immigrants over the Next Twenty Years adding that it "...should make Americans very uneasy. [...] Even if you support legal immigration, this bill seems completely nuts."

If enacted, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years, allowing an estimated 103 million persons to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years—fully one-third of the current population of the United States.

Much attention has been given to the fact that the bill grants amnesty to some 10 million illegal immigrants. Little or no attention has been given to the fact that the bill would quintuple the rate of legal immigration into the United States, raising, over time, the inflow of legal immigrants from around one million per year to over five million per year. The impact of this increase in legal immigration dwarfs the magnitude of the amnesty provisions. In contrast to the 103 million immigrants permitted under CIRA, current law allows 19 million legal immigrants over the next twenty years. Relative to current law, then, CIRA would add an extra 84 million legal immigrants to the nation’s population. The figure of 103 million legal immigrants is a reasonable estimate of the actual immigration inflow under the bill and not the maximum number that would be legally permitted to enter. The maximum number that could legally enter would be almost 200 million over twenty years—over 180 million more legal immigrants than current law permits.

These projections are simply staggering. As the report points out, "if enacted, CIRA would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years," and would dwarf the Great Migration:

Guantanamo Detainee Border Crossing

 

The talented writer and some time blogger from New York, Tom Joscelyn, who mainly focuses on terrorism, foreign policy and matters involving the intelligence community, has interesting news:

As the nation continues to debate what to do about our southern border, I thought I would point out a piece of information I found in a cache of documents released by the Pentagon in early March. In connection with a lawsuit brought by the Associated Press, the Pentagon released thousands of pages of documents transcribed during tribunal hearings for the hundreds of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There is a lot of interesting information in those documents, including the allegations against one detainee who was caught while trying to sneak across the Mexican border.

The name of the detainee was not given in the original two-page transcript I reviewed. Just recently the Pentagon released the names of hundreds of Guantanamo's inmates, but I haven't been able to match one of those names to this suspect, yet.

The U.S. government alleges that the detainee “attempted to be smuggled into the United States” and “traveled with forged travel documents, including a passport and other travel documents.” The detainee admits that he was caught while attempting to illegally enter the U.S., but claims that he “was going to find a job to make some money.”

What the government thinks the detainee was really up to is not clear. The transcript does not contain any allegation that the detainee belongs to a terrorist organization or that he was attempting to carry out a terrorist plot. However, many of the details surrounding the detainees at Guantanamo remain classified and its possible that the government has more specific terror-related information about this detainee.

The details of the detainee's travels and the smuggling operation that attempted to sneak him into this country are especially noteworthy.

Shut Up And Put Up

 

I woke up this morning to a comment in my comments section in Spanish, telling me that President Bush is an idiot, and that I had better get used to this commenter's language, as it will be officially recognized in his part of the country, within a few years.

Deal with it.

That's what we get, and yes the President is being naive. So as Michelle Malkin has predicted all along:

The open-borders lobby has been phenomenally successful at getting the Beltway elite in both parties and in the media to embrace its blanket overgeneralizations and platitudes about the illegal alien population.

"They just come here to work."
"They're all Americans, too."
"Illegals aren't criminals."

And so on.

Those who impertinently challenge such characterizations in an effort to bring the homeland security debate back to reality are attacked as overwrought immigrant-bashers with no compassion. We're the ones accused of overgeneralizing even as the pro-illegal immigration forces blather about lazy Americans who won't do the jobs "undocumented workers" will do.

The Immigration Chip

 

Further to my recent post 'A Chance For A Better Life', the subject of immigration is still the hot button issue, threatening future presidency prospects for some, and getting both the left and the right in a state of a political and legislative gridlock. The ever brilliant Mark Steyn has the 'answer':

Here's my immigration "compromise": We need to regularize the situation of the 298 million non-undocumented residents of the United States. Right now, we get a lousy deal compared with the 15 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented American community. I think the 298 million of us in the over-documented segment of the population should get the chance to be undocumented. You know when President Bush talks about all those undocumented people "living in the shadows"? Doesn't that sound kinda nice? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork.[...]

Given that the new immigration "compromise" bill retrospectively approves all the millions of people who've been through the super-efficient Luis Martinez-Flores immigration system but without doing anything to improve the sclerotic U.S. government immigration system, maybe it would be better just to subcontract the entire operation to Senor Martinez-Flores and his colleagues. It would certainly be cheaper. The extensive Undocumented American support network manages to run it out of the back of the car from a parking lot without a lot of air-conditioned offices full of lifetime employees on government pensions, and given that the net result is exactly the same people who'd be living here anyway, why not go with the lowball bid? Legal immigrants to the United States can only envy the swift efficient service Messrs. Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar received outside that 7-Eleven.[...]

With all due respect to the President, we surely cannot even begin talking about guest worker programs, until we secure our borders and enforce immigration laws. Whatever happened to The Minuteman Project, which was sabotaged by the MSM and snubbed with great disdain by the ACLU and Co. dubbed as a vigilante project.

A Chance For A Better Life

 

Big corporations and the far-left have one thing in common: both like to employ cheap illegal immigrants to do their heavy lifting.

The leftist media have tried to portray this weekend’s massive protests against House measures to curtail illegal immigration as the uprising of “The Other America”: forgotten, humble, hidden Hispanic members of the working poor simply demanding their “rights.” As events spanned from California to Detroit, Phoenix to Washington, D.C., the media kept up its anti-enforcement drumbeat. Although some have credited Latino DJs for the 500,000-strong illegal immigrant turnout in Los Angeles alone – and some credit is deserved – the real legwork was done by a more eclectic group of organizations: leftist labor unions, George Soros-funded agitators, Open Borders lobbyists [...]

Michelle Malkin obtained a copy of a letter Lagrosa wrote Monday to the students of the school district stating LAUSD would chauffeur students to high school after they protested on the freeway. The letter states after the rally, the district “will provide buses to return students to schools when appropriate.”  Moreover, “we will do everything we can to ensure that those students who do leave the campus are supervised as they leave the campus.”

Naturally, the leftist groups, illegals, and teachers unions could count on the media to cover for them. Mickey Kaus pointed out in Slate that the L.A. Times wrapped the protesters in the American flag, erasing all references to the Mexican standard, although the Mexican flag was hoisted at least as often in the crowd as Old Glory.

Gone from the media coverage, too, was mention that these protests had all the hallmarks of leftist riots of bygone days.[...]Michelle Malkin has preserved some of the protestors’ other extremist messages.

This is a tough issue, emotionally charged for some, irrelevant to others and an excuse for the remainder to eagerly pull out the racism card. LA Shawn bloggs on the issue, after she took some tranquilizers:

That takes nerve, mis amigos, gathering in large groups to protest in a foreign country, which you entered in violation of that country’s federal law. Surrounded by law enforcement officials who ought to haul you in and ship you back to the Third World hole from which you came, you’ve got the cojones to demand rights. In my country.

I’ve got your rights right here: You have the RIGHT to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…

Lord, I hope you haven’t foreordained my election to office. I can see the snipers now, lined up at the windows, ready to strike me down for advocating the immediate deportation of illegal ingrates mocking my country’s laws and giving the American people a collective finger. Dónde está George Bush? Right here.

On an emotional level it is difficult not to sympathize with the President's understanding of the largely Hispanic population who are keen to embrace a better life, and earn $50 rather than 50c. However, whatever the bigger picture, one core problem for the US economy is of course the constant export of US dollars into Mexico, and Latin America by predominantly illegal workers, to their families back home. This net loss of domestic purchasing power and consumption hurts the economy. It would be different on a purely economical level if the illegal immigrants were to re-invest their earnings into US businesses and services; if they sought to build a life and future on American soil. In that instance they would contribute to US economic growth and as such be part of the economic cycle. Because they are  not participating in this way, and inherently obviously not paying any taxes to boot, their activities place a drain on growth.