Linda Chavez Laments Failure of Amnesty Bill

Let me start off by saying, MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  No Linda, you can't have Amnesty, NOT YOURS! 

She starts off by saying;

Immigration reform is dead. But before conservatives who killed this bill start popping champagne corks, they ought to consider the following.

Start?  Honey, we've been celebrating since cloture failed.  Whatever, continue...

Our borders will be less secure, not more.

Okay, so lets propose a bill that just builds a wall and increases the US Border patrol.  Certainly we all want the border secured, right?  And given that the government has proven itself wholly untrustworthy to accomplish, well, anything, perhaps we need to just focus on basic security measures, y'know, baby steps.  Hey, Michelle Malkin has a good idea, we could use that $4.4 billion offered in the Amnesty bill last time around to help build it! Anyway, let's see what other bits of wisdom Chavez has to offer.

Employers who want to do the right thing and only hire legal workers won’t have the tools to do so.

 

So how about tamper proof IDs for all legal immigrants here in the US? There aren't that many, so it wouldn't be hard to put together such a system.  Plus, I'm sure you are aware, many employers are less than cautious about their hiring practices. 

I have to admit, though she isn't my favorite person in the world, Ann Coulter offered up a nice suggestion, how about allowing illegals to sue for back wages from when they worked for under minimum?  I bet that would give some motivation to the agribusiness giants that are pushing hard for open borders to actually look into who they're hiring.  My guess is unless they are real sure someone is legal, they won't hire them. 

The 12 million illegal aliens who are here now will continue to live in the shadows, making them less likely to cooperate with law enforcement to report crimes and less likely to pay their full share of taxes. In other words, the mess we created by an outdated and ill-conceived immigration policy 20 years ago will just get worse.

Mi corazón!  It aches knowing that people who violate our laws aren't going to be rewarded for doing so and have to live in the shadows.  They're less likely to pay their share of taxes?  Um, duh, that's kind of the point, why do you think they get hired in the first place?  So that businesses can evade taxes, insurance, conditions, regulations, health codes and things like worker's comp.  Plus when they are legalized, they will likely be given full access to entitlements, and will likely drain much more from our economy than they already are. 

But you won’t hear this if you tune in to talk radio or read conservative blogs.

Oh we hear it Linda, and we have an army of people that just revels in ripping these weaksauce talking points to shreds. 

There will be lots of gloating over having killed “amnesty.” 

Will be?  Try is, and it was hard earned.

There will be claims that senators finally “listened to the people.”

They did, with a huge grassroots effort, it took us breaking their fucking phone system because we overloaded it, but they listened.

And, no doubt, some conservatives will be emboldened to consider the next step in their war against illegal immigration, namely to deport those now here illegally.

Aww, are you mad that we'll be taking advantage of our popular support to trounce your open border dreaming, que lastima!

What you won’t hear is that liberals are just as relieved that this bill didn’t pass as conservatives - and they know time is on their side. Their plan is to wait until January 2009, when they expect bigger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a Democrat in the White House, and then reintroduce immigration legislation. They know that the present laws can’t be enforced, not because of lack of will but because the laws themselves are inadequate and contradictory.

 

Maybe, but Ace has suggested similar in the past, and I agree with this line of thought, that the Democrats needed to have the cover of bipartisanship in order to 1.) Pass responsiblity off to the GOP, which the Short-Bus All*Stars in the White House and the Capitol were all too eager to do, and 2.) make it less obvious that it was a ploy to get more voters.  So they might not be so brazen to try this, not to mention how many of their newest representatives ran to the right on issues like immigration.

They might try this, but the dirty little secret is that there is significant opposition internally among the left in this matter too.  Labor and Union people hate it, as do African Americans, for similar economic reasons (though their elites try to tamp it down), plus there are many older style Democrats who don't like what they're doing, and regular people who just know its shady.

Then this, they know the present laws can't be enforced?  How, no one has actually tried to enforce the laws on the books!

Under current law, an illegal alien can present a fake Social Security number and a fake identity card with a photo so long as it reasonably looks legitimate. If the employer is suspicious about the authenticity of the documents, there is little he or she can do now. Questioning the prospective employee could lead to a civil rights law violation - such objections are now one of the largest sources of civil rights complaints filed with the Justice Department.

So, make it easier for employers to check for bogus papers, you know, making tamper proof IDs for people here legally, and a system to check things easily.  Do stings on fake ID makers, how hard could it be given how sloppy enforcement has been for decades, they aren't used to actually having to watch what they do.  Next!

Even the government’s own program to check employment eligibility - Basic Pilot - is unreliable, failing to detect fraudulent employees so long as the Social Security numbers they use are valid and aren’t being used by other persons. Worse, the system spits out a high percentage of false ineligibles, in other words, citizens or legal residents who are entitled to work but are flagged because of outdated or inaccurate government data bases.

We have enough nuclear firepower to wipe out all life on the planet, we've put several men on the moon.  We've sent spacecraft out of our Solar System.  I think we can do this if we apply ourselves. Its a question of willpower, and the DC set don't seem to want to apply themselves now to cleaning the mess that they made through their own gross negligence.

 
    

So how do you enforce the employer sanctions provisions of current law? You can’t, except sporadically, by raiding companies suspected of wrongdoing. Those raids make headlines, but they barely dent the problem of illegal workers. And, truth be told, if all illegal workers disappeared overnight, we’d be in a bind.

We can enforce the law, and we will, there are many people who have written extensively on this subject.  The raids are more a PR stunt (both for the positive and negative, it makes both sides happy in theory, enforcement people see the law enforced, open borders people get a new sob story) than anything. 

As for the need for illegals, Rector's study (linked above) shows what a crock that last sentence is.  They'd end up costing us a fortune in entitlements, more than they'd ever produce. 

The United States creates 1.5 million to 2 million jobs every year, but without immigrants - legal and illegal - we’d have a hard time filling all those jobs. The sensible way to solve that problem would be to create a market-based legal immigration system that would increase the number of persons admitted when job creation justified it and decrease the number when unemployment rose.

You're right Linda, lets just reward the people who broke the law instead of people who are sitting in their home countries, hoping and praying they get a reply from the US government Immigration system.

On top of that, until I see 0.0% unemployment of US citizens, I don't buy that we need low-wage income workers.  We need people who are living off of taxpayer dole to do those jobs.

Of course, the priority for new jobs has to go to Americans first - but some jobs, at both ends of the job skills spectrum, will go unfilled unless we allow foreign-born workers to take them. Not enough young Americans are studying engineering, science and math to fill all the jobs that require those skills. And Americans are over-educated to fill the jobs at the lowest end of the skills spectrum.

Again, when I see 0.0% unemployment, I'll cede you the point on needing migrant workers.  As for the engineers and other tech workers, totally, we should expand immigration to let more in.  One of our big boosts in the Post WWII era was that a large number of Europe's big brains came here because there was more opportunities available to them, as Europe was an economic mess. 

But none of this matters to the radio talk show hosts who encouraged their millions of listeners to shut down the congressional phone system with calls protesting “amnesty.” Nor does it matter to the myriad direct mail outfits opposing immigration, which will reap tens of millions of dollars in donations to fatten their coffers as a result of this “victory.”

Dean Barnett would like a word.

Meanwhile, the real majority of Americans will have to wait for genuine immigration reform.

You mean all 25% of you and the Elite of DC?

And Republicans who believe this is going to help them at the polls in 2008 may well find themselves sitting on the back benches for years to come.

 

Because giving Democrats a huge new voting bloc of people who live off of government entitlements is gonna put us in charge for years to come, right Linda?

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