June 12, 2007


A Better Illegal Immigration Plan If Congress Is Listening
Lee P. Butler

"Listen, the immigration debate is a tough debate. I'm under no illusions about how hard it is," President Bush told a news conference in Bulgaria's capital Sofia. "There are people in my (Republican) party that don't want a comprehensive bill. There are people in the Democrat Party that don't seem to want a comprehensive bill."

The President just doesn’t see how detrimental the Senate illegal immigrant bill is not only to the issue of illegal immigration that desperately needs to be addressed or to the psyche of Americans who want the problem solved humanely, but to those of us who have advocated for some time now for a ’comprehensive plan’.

Most Americans want that plan to have two parts, the first part starts with securing the border in whatever means is proven to be effective… even if that means building a wall to amnesty and the second part would be a true comprehensive plan that truly addresses the issue.

Many commentators don’t think both can be achieved simultaneously and based on what happened in the late Eighties after millions of illegal aliens were awarded amnesty and Congress did nothing about securing the border as they had promised that expectation would be accurate.

Following that tact, let’s assume we can achieve a grandiose feat like entirely closing the border and do so in a way that can be accomplished in a manner that will clearly be able to be defined, monitored, and presented to the American public so we all know without question that the border has been ‘sealed’.

Then what?

Those same commentators say we will take care of the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens once the border is secure, yet they never elaborate any farther than that. They also say we should just ‘enforce the laws that are already in place’.

Does that mean the deportation of those millions of illegal aliens or not?

Peggy Noonan recently addressed that issue when she wrote, “Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America will never deport millions of people. It's not what we do. It's not who we are. It's not who we want to be. The American people would never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn't accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus.â€