Thread: Immigration: Congress gets the sequel NAVARRETTE

Immigration: Congress gets the sequel

By Ruben Navarrette, UNION-TRIBUNE COLUMNIST

Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 12:04 a.m.

The immigration debate is back. And it’s hard to find anyone who is pleased to see it return.

Not Democrats, who see the immigration issue as one that divides their party, with labor on one side and Latinos on the other. Not Republicans, whose usual demand for a guest worker program won’t go over too well with a national unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.

Yet the debate must go on. This isn’t just one of the toughest issues.

It’s also one of the most pressing. What else do you call it when tens of thousands of people feel they have to march on Washington, as they are doing today, to demand that President Barack Obama keep his campaign promise to work toward comprehensive immigration reform? The activists are fed up with foot-dragging by the administration, the fact that immigration only merited 37 words in the State of the Union address, and speculation by pundits that Obama intended to follow up health care reform with a focus on jobs and education and save the immigration issue for a possible second term. Immigration-reform advocates – many of whom supported Obama – decided to push back.

Just the idea of an anti-Obama protest from the left was enough to embarrass the White House. Last week, Obama announced his support for a comprehensive immigration reform bill scheduled to be unveiled by Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. It’s a good bet that the legislation will try to accomplish the seven goals that Schumer spelled out in a speech last summer – curtailing illegal immigration, controlling the borders, creating a biometric employee verification system, requiring illegal immigrants already here to follow a path toward earned legalization, keeping family reunification a priority, encouraging high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States, and making it easier for people to come here legally.

The key is the employee verification system. According to media reports, it would consist of a national biometric identification card for all U.S. workers designed to tell employers who is eligible to work and who isn’t. With such a system in place, the government could more easily sanction employers who break the rules – and attack the problem at the root.

In fact, an ID card is so important that when I asked former Sen. Alan Simpson, the father of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, why that legislation wasn’t as successful as it could have been, he said it was for lack of a “secure identifier.â€

This is so much bullspit! And I am sorry to hear that so many American people do not realize the impact this will have on their lives and jobs. I see it daily about town when no one can understand me as a customer. A few years ago, the pear trees were in bloom in the parking lot and I asked the cashier what kind of trees they were. She did not even understand what a tree was.
Giving illegals legal residency does not guarantee they will ever assimilate -- odds are against it.

What else do you call it when tens of thousands of people feel they have to march on Washington, as they are doing today, to demand that President Barack Obama keep his campaign promise to work toward comprehensive immigration reform?

And what do you call it when millions of American citizens melt down the Congressional switchboard to say NO!!!!!!!

RELATED

Time to get serious on immigration SCHUMER/GRAHAM

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-192088.html

We already have "A Path To Citizenship". It.s called LEGAL immigration.

Go home and apply for it and wait your turn like all of the great LEGAL immigrants to this country.

NO AMNESTY

Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of ILLEGAL aliens by giving them citizenship.

What else do you call it when tens of thousands of people feel they have to march on Washington, as they are doing today, to demand that President Barack Obama keep his campaign promise to work toward comprehensive immigration reform?

Yeah well thousands of Americans marched on DC saying NO to Obamacare...Obama's answer was a huge SCREW YOU to us. That's pretty much the answer these "activists" should get.

Remember November!!