http://www2.townonline.com/weymouth/opi ... eid=459173

Casimiro: Son of Pinocchio
By Alfred Robert Casimiro/ Wake Up, Weymouth
Wednesday, March 29, 2006

In his Saturday radio address, President Bush said he will "not be satisfied until we have control of our borders."
Do you remember when Bill Clinton was called President Pinocchio? Well, meet Son of Pinocchio. Son of Pinocchio has been president for five years and now he wants to secure the borders? What has he been doing the last five years?
President Bush also repeated his call for a "guest worker" program for the estimated eleven to twenty million illegal aliens in the country.
The question of what to do about the flood of illegal aliens into our country has finally boiled to the top of Washington's agenda.
In December of last year, the U.S. House passed its bill, H.R. 4437, the "Border Security, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005." This bill has two elements: border security and enforcement; there is no guest worker/amnesty program.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is finalizing its immigration reform recommendations. The Senate bill will likely include border security and enforcement elements along the lines of the House bill, but it will likely have a "guest worker" program along the lines of what President Bush is requesting.
Any "guest worker" program will be a disaster for this nation.
First off, these are not "guests," and any program passed by Congress and signed by the President will be an "amnesty," despite the claims of proponents like Senators McCain, Kennedy and Specter.
Here's the definition of amnesty: "In law, exemption from prosecution for criminal action. It signifies forgiveness and the forgetting of past actions."
The illegal aliens who would be given legal status under one of the several plans being discussed in the U.S. Senate are serial lawbreakers: border jumpers are criminals; visa over-stayers are guilty of a civil infraction; hiring an illegal alien is a violation of federal law; providing false documentation to an employer is a crime; being paid "under the table" and not reporting taxes is tax evasion, a felony; driving with a false driver's license is another infraction; etc, etc, etc.
That's a whole lot of forgiveness and forgetting. That's amnesty!
We are looking at 20 to 30 million people, including dependents, who would be given legal status, and a program to do that would be totally unworkable.
It was tried with IRCA, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That act provided amnesty for illegal aliens and was designed to stop people from coming here illegally by making it a federal offense to hire illegal aliens. No jobs, no illegal aliens, was the thinking. The amnesty part worked, as approximately three million were given amnesty. The other part was a failure; there has been very little workplace enforcement. They have continued to come, and we are in another crisis situation, one brought to us through the shameful, seditious, and destructive neglect of those who took a Constitutional oath to provide for our safety, security and maintain our national integrity.
They are now trying to sell us the same old nostrums: a "comprehensive" program of border security, enforcement, and a guest worker/amnesty program.
And why would it not work?
First of all, the Bush administration would have to implement it. And remember, this is the Bush administration of hurricane Katrina ineptitude; this is the Bush administration of DB World port security indifference; this is the Bush administration of soaring budget deficits and fiscal mismanagement; this is the Bush administration that has shown an appalling disdain for the America worker by its promotion of off shoring/outsourcing jobs.
We also have a federal government that has failed at the simpler task of cleaning up the backlog of visa and green card applications. Several years after being given that mandate, we still have a backlog of several million applications for legal entry into the United States, and over 600,000 are waiting in foreign countries for their green cards.
And this government is going to process millions of applications by illegal aliens that will include background checks, health checks, etc?
Harvard economist George Borjas states in Bruce Bartlett's book "Impostor" that it would take thirty-two years to process green cards for every illegal immigrant, and even that would require increasing the annual number from 150,000 to 450,000.
Any "comprehensive" plan would be too complex to be successfully implemented. Even trying to combine border enforcement with interior enforcement would be chaotic. First, secure the border. Then turn to interior enforcement, and then consider a rational guest worker program, such as the one devised for the post-World War II period.
As I was listening to Son of Pinocchio give his radio address, I could visualize his proboscis elongating as he declared "I firmly oppose amnesty." Ouch! That must hurt.
A.Robert Casimiro can be reached at arcasimiro@msn.com