Roy Beck's Speech to the Penn Club (Congress and Everify)
Swimming Upstream | American-Rattlesnake
Quote:
That, of course, is Roy Beck, the founder and executive director of
Numbers USA, which-as I’m sure my readers are well aware-is the single most effective grassroots organization lobbying on Capitol Hill for immigration enforcement. I had the pleasure of listening to a fascinating address he delivered at the Penn Club in Manhattan last month, the penultimate in a series of lectures sponsored by the
Center for Immigration Studies-events that attempt to cultivate journalists, writers, and intellects living and working in New York who share a common interest in the subject of immigration.
Mr. Beck’s speech focused largely upon the Sisyphean task he and his colleagues face in persuading resistant lawmakers to address our sieve-like system of federal immigration enforcement. Numbers USA was created from the ashes of the Jordan Commission, whose recommendations-including that the number of immigrants return to its historical norm of 200 to 250,000 per year-were wholly ignored by both Congress and the president at the time, William Jefferson Clinton. The
testimony of Congresswoman Jordan is worth revisiting, for it illustrates how far short the federal government has fallen of the goals laid out by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. Contrast how she frames her first point:
Our goal should be zero apprehensions-not because aliens get past the Border Patrol but because they are prevented entry in the first place.
With the wholesale abandonment of enforcement at the border by
the current administration, which coincides with ICE’s administrative amnesty for
over 300,000 illegal aliens. One of the primary objectives of the Jordan Commission is as elusive as it was when first enunciated nearly two decades ago...
