Thread: Santorum, Casey seize on immigration issue

Santorum, Casey seize on immigration issue
'Amnesty' is key word in Senate campaign

http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/27358

By Linda Espenshade
Intelligencer Journal

Nov 02, 2006

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - If you watch their ads and read their mailers, you couldn’t imagine two candidates being further apart on the issue of illegal immigration than Sen. Rick Santorum and his challenger, Bob Casey Jr.

A flier from the Santorum campaign accuses Casey of supporting tax breaks, Social Security benefits, higher wages and even college tuition breaks for illegal immigrants.

Casey, the state’s treasurer and former auditor, accused Santorum in an Oct. 12 debate of using the immigration issue to gain political traction just weeks before the election.

“He voted seven times against stronger border security,” Casey said during the debate. “Yet he talks and talks about how important it is. He voted several times against holding employers accountable.”

But a closer look at what each man stands for reveals Santorum and Casey agree on almost every aspect of the issue. Both:

* Oppose illegal immigration and insist the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States must stop.

* Support increased border enforcement, from fences to electronic surveillance.

* Want stricter enforcement laws against employers who hire illegal immigrants and the employees who work for them.

* Support a verification system that requires employers to confirm the legal residence of a job applicant with a federal agency before hiring.

* Support a guest-worker program that would allow American companies to hire workers from other countries for limited periods of time.

So wherein lies the rub?

Santorum wants all illegal immigrants and their children, regardless of their American citizenship, to return to their countries of origin, while Casey would create a way for illegal immigrants who have been here for five years to stay in America and eventually become citizens.

And from that difference arise the accusations and insinuations both candidates are using to woo voters.

A lot of the campaign rhetoric revolves around the word “amnesty.”

Santorum calls allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the United States amnesty. To do anything less than force them to return home, he says, is rewarding people who broke the law when they came into the U.S. illegally, worked here illegally and used false identification.

Casey supports a provision in the Senate’s immigration-reform bill passed in May that would allow illegal immigrants who have lived in the country for five years to earn their citizenship.

The bill would require them to pay a $2,000 fine, work an additional six years before being eligible to apply for citizenship, pay any back taxes owed to the government, pass an English proficiency test and keep clear criminal records.

“Amnesty?” Jay Reiff, campaign manager for the Casey campaign said in a phone interview. “Wait a minute.

“It’s a tough, practical solution to the problem (of an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in America), and it’s realistic.” Reiff said.

•••

The path to citizenship is one of many provisions in the 796-page Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 — a law Casey publicly said he would have voted for if the alternative was to do nothing.

In addition to the act’s citizenship option, Reiff said, Casey supports its tiered system, which would require immigrants who have lived in the U.S. from two to five years to return to a point of entry and apply for a guest-worker program. Anyone living here less than two years would need to return to his or her country of origin.

But Santorum says the process of verifying how long someone lived in the U.S. and how much they worked “would be a nightmare.” In addition, the senator said, the bill would prompt a whole new set of forged documents as immigrants tried to prove they were eligible to stay in the United States.

The Casey campaign doesn’t expect the process to be simple.

“If your point is there are no easy solutions, there are not,” Reiff said in response to the Intelligencer Journal’s explanation of Santorum’s position.

“It’s going to be complicated. It’s going to be messy to solve this problem,” Reiff said.

Also, Reiff said, voters need to understand that just because Casey would have voted for the bill doesn’t mean he agrees with everything in it.

Take, for example, the above-mentioned flier from the Santorum campaign that accuses Casey of supporting tax breaks and other benefits. It’s simply not true, Reiff said.

Santorum can make the claims because those provisions are included in the Senate’s Immigration Reform Act — the act Casey said he would have voted for.

The act would allow immigrants who become legal residents to claim Social Security benefits for the time they worked illegally — as long as they paid Social Security taxes during that time, according to a Senate Judiciary aide.

But, said Reiff, “Casey does not support that.” Nor does he support the college tuition breaks, tax breaks or increased wages.

Casey would deal with those kinds of provisions in the Senate bill after the election, Reiff said, when the House of Representatives and Senate work together to create an immigration reform bill both branches of Congress can approve.

Even Santorum couldn’t say he agreed with every provision of every bill he ever voted for during his 16 years in office, Reiff said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Reiff said. “We could have a field day with that.”

In a similar fashion, Santorum spokeswoman Virginia Davis defends the senator’s above-mentioned votes against measures designed to beef up border security.

Davis doesn’t deny Santorum’s voting record, but says you have to look at his rationale. Each time he voted against a bill, she said, it was either a case of the law not being strong enough or of Santorum believing it wasn’t fiscally irresponsible.

For example, Santorum voted against a March 2005 amendment that would have allocated funds to train 1,000 more border guards.

“The Department of Homeland Security had repeatedly said it could not train more than the 2,000 new border agents it already was training per year,” Davis wrote in an e-mail. “Simply allocating funding for additional agents the Department of Homeland Security didn’t have the capacity to train won’t solve the problem.”

•••

Santorum says his strict approach to illegal immigrants is consistent with the laws of the country.

“If we are not a country of laws, we are not a country,” Santorum said in a phone interview last week. Letting people stay in the country after they broke the law multiple times defies America’s law and encourages others to break the law.

Children of illegal immigrants, including those who were born American citizens, might have to bear the consequences of their parents’ actions by going to their home country with them, he said.

“It’s a tragic thing that children have to suffer because their parents did something wrong. In this case they have the ability to bring their children back to Mexico,” Santorum said.

The real solution, the senator said during an Oct. 16 debate, is tightening border security, “throwing the book at employers who fraudulently hire illegal aliens” and implementing an improved employer-identification program.

Casey agrees. It’s what happens next that divides them.

“If we have an improved employer-verification system so we have forgery-proof IDs, and illegals cannot work in this country without having good identification, which we don’t have now, they will have no choice but to go back and come in legally,” Santorum said during the debate.

Santorum said he would give immigrants and employers a year’s notice of the implementation of the employer-verification system. That would give immigrants enough time to go back to their home country to apply for the temporary-worker program, without jeopardizing a company’s work force.

He said he would not penalize anyone for past violations of document fraud, identity theft and income-tax evasion, as long as they went back to their countries of origin, he said. Their history also would not jeopardize their legal return to the country as temporary guest workers.

Casey believes allowing established workers to remain here is a much more reasonable and practical option than uprooting 11 million people.

“The logistics are just ludicrous,” said Reiff, speaking for Casey. “Its just not a practical solution.”

The vast majority of the immigrants who are here illegally are “hard-working and if given the chance, will do the right thing,” said Reiff.

They will earn their citizenship, he said, and prove they can be good citizens before they’re handed their certificates.

* Support a guest-worker program that would allow American companies to hire workers from other countries for limited periods of time.

So wherein lies the rub?

Santorum wants all illegal immigrants and their children, regardless of their American citizenship, to return to their countries of origin, while Casey would create a way for illegal immigrants who have been here for five years to stay in America and eventually become citizens.

The problem is that Santorum has straddled the ILLEGAL FENCE and might
be for the "pence bill." He's not solidly in the 'enforcement' camp and has
left himself open for deeper scrutiny.

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2ndamendsis wrote:

The problem is that Santorum has straddled the ILLEGAL FENCE and might be for the "pence bill." He's not solidly in the 'enforcement' camp and has left himself open for deeper scrutiny.

While that may be true, the fact remains, he did not sign on to the horrific S. 2611 bill. Casey has openly admitted he would have voted "yea" on the Senate Comprehensive Immigration Reform (S. 2611) bill. That alone would be enough for me to support Sen. Santorum over Casey.

Unfortunately, in some of these races we're just not going to be able to have our cake and eat it too.

Santorum screwed himself by playing games with the ILLEGAL issue.
He gave the libs a foothold.

I can't find any comment I've made that said NOT to support him in this race........can you, MW?

Simply stating facts about a 2 faced member of congress and how it's affected us.

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2ndamendsis wrote:

I can't find any comment I've made that said NOT to support him in this race........can you, MW?

I don't believe I implied that you did. I was just sharing my observation on a huge difference between Santorum and Casey. Sorry, I had no intention of offending you, just sharing my opinion.

Originally Posted by MW

2ndamendsis wrote:

I can't find any comment I've made that said NOT to support him in this race........can you, MW?

I don't believe I implied that you did. I was just sharing my observation on a huge difference between Santorum and Casey. Sorry, I had no intention of offending you, just sharing my opinion.

No offense. And yes, there's a difference between the two. Sadly, not so much that Santorum is in a deep danger zone. I understand as of today, he's not pulled out of it.

My belief is that Santorum, by playing two ends against the middle, used the House vote to cover his tracks. Thankfully, his vote was very important and helped to get it passed but I've had it with these double talkers and won't let them skate any longer. No different than the islamic maniacs, these guys will shake your hand firmly while putting a blade in your back.

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