A good friend who has been all over the immigration issue since 2007 noted a particularly dishonest op-ed by Senator Michael Bennet in the Denver Post, and undertook to annotate it. His comments are scathing but, I think, highly effective:
Bennet throws everything in here…including the Holocaust!…sickening. Is there anything these guys won’t say or do?….for the scofflaw employers and La Raza?
“Our outdated laws tell bright, hard-working, young students — like the ones I saw as superintendent of Denver Public Schools — that they can’t [sic] go to college, because even though they were raised in this country and know it as their only home [highly dubious], they weren’t born here.”
What a liar!….it’s that they can’t get in-state tuition, not that they can’t go. They are illegal…they should be deported. We won’t even send them a bill for the public services they used! They get affirmative action admissions! They take the place of an American or legal immigrant…and we’re supposed to rail at the injustice of it all? Because they have to pay the same as an American from out of state?!!! A rate which is already subsidized by taxes they don’t and have not paid. And all because the “system is broken.” Unbelievable…if the system weren’t “broken”…if there was simply enforcement of the existing, democratically enacted immigration and labor law, instead of systematic subversion by his pals of the laws HE is pledged to uphold, then these people wouldn’t even BE here! Which was exactly the intent of the laws the subversion of which he openly supports.
This is actually hilarious:
“It forces [sic] our farmers on the Western Slope and Eastern Plains to watch their crops rot on the vines because they can’t get [sic] the guest workers [sic] they need [sic].”
Oh, the humanity!….. boo-effing-hoo! My heart just bleeds…for the farmers “forced”…forced, I tell you!….to “watch their crops rot”…and all because they won’t pay the going market rate for labor to pick the low value crops they over planted. It’s just not worth it, so it’s better to let them “rot” than pay what the labor costs. Piteous…just piteous!
And every word of this is a lie…a shameless, intentional lie…actually laughable in its brazen assumption of our lack of intelligence and ignorance of what they intend:
“It will secure our borders [outright lie], strengthen our economy [laughable, unless you think taco stands are the wave of the future], and establish a rational and sensible system for the future flow of immigrants [to be determined and limited only by the rapaciousness of the most marginal, low value-added, venal economic interests].
It creates a path to citizenship for millions of people who came to this country for a better life [SFW?], but are now living in the shadows [as if!]. The path is not easy, and depends on whether certain border security requirements are met [an outright lie], but it is real and attainable.
It includes new visa programs, agreed to by both business and worker groups [wow! both?….must be great then…rather than a conspiracy, in secret, against the people], which are more aligned to the needs [sic] of our 21st century. [meaning unlimited 3rd world immigration so the lowest value-added economically marginal activities can take place right here! Think of the GDP!] And it provides measures to protect American workers. [laughable…another outright lie]”
Seriously?…is there anything these guys won’t say or do to get the unlimited immigration and grotesque giantism they want?….anything they won’t stoop to? They must know they are dissimulating, prevaricating shameless artful dodgers. They just don’t seem to care.
That was all my friend. He feels strongly about the immigration issue, as you can tell, and I think he is right in every particular. Meanwhile, one of my biggest frustrations with regard to the immigration debate has been conservatives’ tendency to focus on the secondary (at best) issue of border security. Even with respect to illegal immigration, interior enforcement–cracking down on scofflaw employers–is 50 times as important as what we do at the border.
But far more important than the Gang of Eight’s failure to prevent another wave of illegal immigration is what it does with respect to legal immigration, which it proposes to expand by somewhere between 30 and 60 million new legal residents over the next ten years. This issue would have been entirely off the radar screen, but for the tireless efforts of Jeff Sessions. Today, after months of silence, the Associated Press finally let the cat out of the bag, for the benefit of those who depend on the dull-witted media for their news:
Landmark immigration legislation passed by the Senate would remake America’s workforce from the highest rungs to the lowest and bring many more immigrants into the economy, from elite technology companies to restaurant kitchens and rural fields. …
Illegal immigration across the border with Mexico would slow, but legal immigration would increase markedly. …
Although the bill aims to secure the borders, track people overstaying their visas and deny employers the ability to hire workers here illegally, it by no means seeks to choke off immigration. Indeed, the U.S. population over the next two decades would be likely to increase by 15 million people above the probable level if no changes were made to immigration laws, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That’s a lowball estimate.
“That is baked into the basic premise of the bill,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, “which is that you need to provide legal avenues for people to come to the country both in longer-term temporary and in permanent visa categories in order to meet the needs of the future and avert the incentives for illegal immigration.”
That’s right. Exactly as, if you repeal the laws against speeding, you “avert the incentives” to speed.
The level of immigration under the legislation has been a political issue in the debate and will probably continue to be disputed in the weeks ahead as the House’s GOP majority wrestles with how to respond to the Senate bill.
Well, I certainly hope so. Note that, while the level of legal immigration that we should anticipate “has been a political issue in the debate,” this is only because it has been raised by Republican critics of the bill. No member of the Gang of Eight, and no other supporter of the Senate bill, has been willing to provide an estimate of how many millions or tens of millions of new legal immigrants we should expect if the bill becomes law.
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