Thread: Editorial in USA Today on Amnesty

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2006/11/post_45.html
Opposing view: No mandate for amnesty
Americans want to enforce our laws against illegal immigrants.
By Mark Krikorian

President Bush and his Democratic allies on immigration are pointing to the results of last week's elections as a mandate for what they call "comprehensive" reform — but what most people would rightly call amnesty for illegal aliens.

The results suggest nothing of the kind; in the face of deep discontent with Republicans over Iraq and a cascade of scandals, immigration probably didn't decide any races at all, largely because most Democrats wisely avoided any mention of amnesty and focused on enforcement.

Assuming the election analysis by the president and others is a sincere mistake, however, it likely stems from a misunderstanding of the options we face to deal with the illegal population of about 12 million people. Almost all polling has offered respondents only the unpalatable choice of mass deportations or amnesty.

But there is a third way, and that is the approach embodied in the bill passed nearly a year ago by the House. Sometimes called "attrition through enforcement," such a policy would strictly enforce immigration laws (something we have never tried) so as to limit new illegal settlement and cause illegal immigrants already here to go home over time.

The result would be an annual decrease in the illegal population, instead of continuing increases. Research by my Center for Immigration Studies found that this approach could cut the illegal population by half in five years, requiring only a modest increase in resources and using only normal law-enforcement tools.

In a pre-election poll of likely voters, done for the center by the Polling Company Inc. using neutral language (i.e., without the words "amnesty" or "aliens"), 44% backed enforcing laws "to cause illegal immigrants to go home over time." An additional 20% wanted roundups and deportations; only 31% supported legalization. When offered the full range of choices, amnesty is rejected 2-1.

Supporters of legalization would do well to keep this in mind, lest they be surprised in the presidential election of 2008.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports tighter controls on immigration.

Demos go this route, they are toast. I'm surprised they would be so stupid to fall for this one!!! They will pass George Bush's amnesty scam and as a result, give 2008 elections to the republicans because of it. I smell the brilliance of Karl Rove behind this one.

Spend some time looking at their web site.
www.cis.org

I like their "common sense" approach to solving illegal immigration. Instead of spending billions on high tech border defense, spend about $2 billion on workforce enforcement. As the jobs dry up, illegal immigrants will leave on their own; there's no real reason for them to stay if there's no job for them.

If Demo's are so dumb as to fall for this Bush Amnesty scheme (on their backs, I might add) , they don't deserve to run this country.

"Interesting Opportunities"
Are amnesty and open borders in our future?

By Mark Krikorian

Before election night was even over, White House spokesman Tony Snow said the Democratic takeover of the House presented “interesting opportunities,” including a chance to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” — i.e., the president’s plan for an illegal-alien amnesty and enormous increases in legal immigration, which failed only because of House Republican opposition..

At his press conference Wednesday, the president repeated this sentiment, citing immigration as “vital issue … where I believe we can find some common ground with the Democrats.”






"Interesting Opportunities" 11/09

Another “No Amnesty” Amnesty 06/13

Long, Hot Summer 06/09

Amnesty S.O.S. 05/15

Boycott & Backlash 05/01

Not Just Mexicans 04/11





Buckley: Milton Friedman, R.I.P.

Sowell: The Washington Meat Grinder

Murray: Al Gore Is Captain Planet

Smith: Political Science 101

Derbyshire: From Neoconservatism to Paleorealism

Murdock: Right Rudy

Robbins: The Draft Card

Lowry: Being Thankful

Sowell: Life Under the Dems

York: Clinton Pardoned Hastings’s Co-Conspirator

Martin: Winner’s Circle

Kudlow: The Era of Big-Government Conservatism Must Come to an End





Will the president and the Democrats get their way with the new lineup next year?

Nope.

That’s not to say the amnesty crowd isn’t hoping for it. Tamar Jacoby, the tireless amnesty supporter at the otherwise conservative Manhattan Institute, in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs eagerly anticipated a Republican defeat, “The political stars will realign, perhaps sooner than anyone expects, and when they do, Congress will return to the task it has been wrestling with: how to translate the emerging consensus into legislation to repair the nation's broken immigration system.”

In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria shares Jacoby’s cluelessness about Flyover Land: “The great obstacle to immigration reform has been a noisy minority. … Come Tuesday, the party will be over. CNN’s Lou Dobbs and his angry band of xenophobes will continue to rail, but a new Congress, with fewer Republicans and no impending primary elections, would make the climate much less vulnerable to the tyranny of the minority.”

And fellow immigration enthusiast Fred Barnes earlier this week blamed the coming Republican defeat in part on the failure to pass an amnesty and increase legal immigration: “But imagine if Republicans had agreed on a compromise and enacted a ‘comprehensive’ — Mr. Bush’s word — immigration bill, dealing with both legal and illegal immigrants. They’d be justifiably basking in their accomplishment. The American public, except for nativist diehards, would be thrilled.”

“Emerging consensus”? “Nativist diehards”? Jacoby and her fellow-travelers seem to actually believe the results from her hilariously skewed polling questions, and those of the mainstream media, all larded with pro-amnesty codewords like “comprehensive reform” and “earned legalization,” and offering respondents the false choice of mass deportations or amnesty.

More responsible polling employing neutral language (avoiding accurate but potentially provocative terminology like “amnesty” and “illegal alien”) finds something very different. In a recent national survey by Kellyanne Conway, when told the level of immigration, 68 percent of likely voters said it was too high and only 2 percent said it was too low. Also, when offered the full range of choices of what to do about the existing illegal population, voters rejected both the extremes of legalization (“amnesty” to you and me) and mass deportations; instead, they preferred the approach of this year’s House bill, which sought attrition of the illegal population through consistent immigration law enforcement. Finally, three fourths of likely voters agreed that we have an illegal immigration problem because past enforcement efforts have been “grossly inadequate,” as opposed to the open-borders crowd’s contention that illegal immigration is caused by overly restrictive immigration rules.

Nor do the results of Tuesday’s balloting bear out the enthusiasts’ claims of a mandate for amnesty. “The test,” Fred Barnes writes, “was in Arizona, where two of the noisiest border hawks, Representatives J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, lost House seats.” But while these two somewhat strident voices were defeated (Hayworth voted against the House immigration-enforcement bill because it wasn’t tough enough), the very same voters approved four immigration-related ballot measures by huge margins, to deny bail to illegal aliens, bar illegals from winning punitive damages, bar illegals from receiving state subsidies for education and child care, and declare English the state’s official language.

More broadly, this was obviously a very bad year for Republicans, leading to the defeat of both enforcement supporters — like John Hostettler (career grade of A- from the pro-control lobbying group Americans for Better Immigration) and Charles Taylor (A) — as well as amnesty promoters, like Mike DeWine (D) and Lincoln Chafee (F). Likewise, the winners included both prominent hawks — Tancredo (A) and Bilbray (A+) — and doves — Lugar (D-), for instance, and probably Heather Wilson (D).

What’s more, if legalizing illegals is so widely supported by the electorate, how come no Democrats campaigned on it? Not all were as tough as Brad Ellsworth, the Indiana sheriff who defeated House Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Hostettler, or John Spratt of South Carolina, whose immigration web pages might as well have been written by Tom Tancredo. But even those nominally committed to “comprehensive” reform stressed enforcement as job one. And the national party’s “Six for 06” rip-off of the Contract with America said not a word about immigration reform, “comprehensive” or otherwise.

The only exception to this “Whatever you do, don’t mention the amnesty” approach appears to have been Jim Pederson, the Democrat who challenged Sen. Jon Kyl (a grade of B) by touting a Bush-McCain-Kennedy-style amnesty and foreign-worker program and even praised the 1986 amnesty, which pretty much everyone now agrees was a catastrophe.

Pederson lost.

Speaker Pelosi has a single mission for the next two years — to get her majority reelected in 2008. She may be a loony leftist (F- on immigration), but she and Rahm Emanuel (F) seem to be serious about trying to create a bigger tent in order to keep power, and adopting the Bush-McCain-Kennedy amnesty would torpedo those efforts. Sure, it’s likely that they’ll try to move piecemeal amnesties like the DREAM Act (HR 5131 in the current Congress), or increase H-1B visas (the indentured-servitude program for low-wage Indian computer programmers). They might also push the AgJobs bill, which is a sizable amnesty limited to illegal-alien farmworkers. None of these measures is a good idea, and Republicans might still be able to delay or kill them, but they aren’t the “comprehensive” disaster the president and the Democrats really want.

Any mass-amnesty and worker-importation scheme would take a while to get started, and its effects would begin showing up in the newspapers and in people’s workplaces right about the time the next election season gets under way. And despite the sophistries of open-borders lobbyists, Nancy Pelosi knows perfectly well that this would be bad news for those who supported it.

—* Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and an NRO contributor.

You know here in Miami, some illegals are starting to talk about going away because they are starting to enforce the law and they don't want to be deported or arrested.
I know 1 family, from Argentina , they left for Spain

Numbers of arrests are down along the border, while there is more enforcement activity. One would think that more enforcement would result in more arrests, but the deterrent effect is obviously working. I did readd somewhere that a higher percentage of illegal immigrants are using guidess, so this might account for lower arrests.

My wife, who is a legal immigrant from Honduras, told me in the 1980s it cost about $500 to be smuggled to the U.S. A year or so ago the cost had risen to $5,000. To me this indicates border enforcement is making it more challenging, but criminal gangs who smuggle both drugs and illegals are also making more money from illegal immigration too.

I still think the most sensible approach is a combination of better control of the border, much more emphasis on workplace enforcement and hardd-to-counterfeit documents, and training/empowering local and state law enforcement to enforce immigration laws.

The training is essential because the immigration laws are very complicated, and without the training legal immigrants will get hassled. Note: Immigration already has the power to delegate some immigration enforcement to state and local authorities and a few state and local governments already are helping.

All these local measures to try and control illegal immigration by making it more and more of a hassle to be here illegally have an impact, but unfortunately on legal immigrants as well. I think it better to take a more direct approach and address the workplace and documents to dry up jobs for illegal immigrants.

I would give anything to walk into a public place and hear English again. It would be sheer music to my ears.

I don't think we can count on our federal goverment to solve this problem, they prove already what they really want .
The only way something is going to happen is each city, little by little acting and the illegals being pressiored to LEAVE

Interesting story about my workplace and what happened there just recently in October...

There was a mexican lady working there for maybe 5 years or more. Recently she was FIRED, yes, fired. From what I can make out Human Resources must have gotten a Social Security number mis-match letter and told her to fix it but she didn't within the 60? days allowed and they fired her because she could not fix it.

I asked this lady if she had gotten the 1986 IRCA amnesty and she said yes.

She cannot get a job anywhere and she does not speak English. She cannot get hired anywhere because nobody will hire her and our company refuses to rehire her and the temp agency won't touch her with a 50 ft pole.

The only thing I can figure out is that she is ILLEGAL as hell and working with a phony social security number and forged or false documents and our company found out and fired her. Nobody will hire her anywhere in town and this is a big big town...Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Because she cannot get anybody to hire her she is thinking of going down to Mississippi to live as she has an inlaw down there...rumor has it.

Really amazing story going around work. I thought she was legal but I guess I and many other people were wrong and this is a newspaper, no less, in the mailroom.

Imagine illegal aliens working for a newspaper.

Amazing story, eh?

She's been in our country that long and doesn't speak any English? Wow!!