Thread: Amnesty Slipping Through Their Fingers

By Mark Krikorian
September 9, 2013 8:37 AM
National Review Online

They must be cursing Assad at the Chamber of Commerce and La Raza. If only he’d held off gassing his enemies (assuming it was, in fact, him) until after the House passed an immigration bill, it wouldn’t have been so bad.

As it is, “Immigration Reform Falls to the Back of the Line,” notes today’s New York Times:

Congress is likely to postpone consideration of an immigration overhaul until the end of the year, if not longer, even as advocates are preparing for an all-out, urgent push this fall to win their longstanding goal of a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants here illegally.

In Washington, the sudden debate over military action in Syria and a looming face-off with President Obama over the budget and the nation’s borrowing limit have shot to the top of the legislative agenda, while Republican angst about losing Hispanic voters in the 2012 presidential campaign has faded.

The Washington Post reports that one Wall Street consulting firm “has advised its clients that the chances of an immigration bill being completed by spring have fallen from 60 percent to 30 percent because of the Syria debate, and warned that the fiscal battles will be even more inflammatory.” I would have put it at 30 percent or less before Syria, and maybe 10 percent now, but the point is the trend.

Even the Roman Catholic Church’s lobbying campaign for amnesty and doubling immigration has been sidelined by Syria. Sunday was supposed to be amnesty day at churches across the country, with priests instructed to focus their sermons on the need for parishioners to call their congressmen and demand they vote for an amnesty/increased-immigration bill. While no doubt some of that happened, it doesn’t seem to have been as universal as planned. One reader sent this in reponse to my Twitter request for information on what people were hearing at mass:

Also, I saw your tweet about wanting feedback about any pro-amnesty homilies today. I attended mass tonight (Catholic) at St. Mary’s in Old Town Alexandria, and the priest didn’t say a word about amnesty, or anything remotely like code language (i.e. “welcoming the stranger”) for supporting illegal immigration. I asked my parents if it was mentioned where they go (St. XXXXXXX, in Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia) and they said the same thing, no mention of amnesty. However, both my priest and my parents’ priest briefly discussed Syria, which my priest mentioned all Catholic priests were instructed to address “Catholic doctrine on just war.” Perhaps Syria and the possibility of war trumped amnesty for illegals and they nixed their immigration lecture plan for this week?

You might wonder what the rush is. The current Congress, and thus any legislation passed by one house or the other, remains alive until the end of the current 113th Congress, which doesn’t end till January 3, 2015. So there’s all of next year to tackle the issue. But, as McCain told the L.A. Times, “It’s very important that we try and act before the end of this year, as we move into next year and an election season.” In other words, all the claims about the popularity of the Senate bill are lies because the politicians are terrified to have a debate on immigration right before the pesky voters go to the polls. Sure, people are willing to amnesty war-hero geniuses brought here when they were a week old, but not if the government is up to its usual tricks in gutting enforcement and not if a doubling of legal immigration accompanies it.

Politico noted that “Until a few weeks ago, Hill strategists in both parties had said they thought immigration had a chance in 2015. Now, the smart money is on 2017.” In other words, after the next presidential election. That’s as it should be — in the last election, we had more discussion of immigration in the abstract than we’ve had for a while, but nothing concrete. In 2016 (assuming the candidates actually disagree on immigration, as has too seldom been the case) they can debate the actual outline that’s been considered by Congress: amnesty before enforcement, plus increased low-skilled immigration.

The doesn’t mean nothing will happen over the next year. The NYT says of the open-borders advocates, “As they feel momentum slipping away, their anger is likely to intensify this fall.” And more:

In that case, some immigration groups have signaled that they could become more aggressive. In Phoenix last month, young undocumented immigrants who call themselves Dreamers chained themselves to a fence at an immigration detention center and sat in front of a police bus carrying immigrants to be deported. Church and immigrant groups have promised fasts and protests in the coming weeks.

Astroturf efforts like this aren’t going to persuade any congressmen to change their votes — but they can backfire. An unruly group disrupted a town meeting by Representative Pete Olson of Texas (career grade of A from Numbers USA), leading to applause from the actual constitutents in attendance when the police finally ejected the group. I’m hoping for even more entertainment along these lines; blocking the bridges from Virginia into Washington during morning rush hour would be a great move for these jokers. The SEIU, as part of its Justice for Janitors campaign, did just that on the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge in 1995, something the resulting congressional hearing descrbed as “traffic terrorism.” In fact, if they did it during afternoon rush hour, I imagine the frazzled commuters taken hostage by these antics wouldn’t wait for the police to arrive.

It seems like the real question is not whether this Congress will pass an amnesty and double immigration — there wasn’t much chance of that anyway. Rather, the question is whether the hotheads, who believed all the lobbyist press releases about impending victory, will be able to maintain discipline when they encounter reality. I’m looking forward to the show.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...mark-krikorian

Consider the source on this, but I am lovin' it!

;>)

-------------------

House Republicans reconvened this week, and promptly crushed a Dream. The Senate has already passed an immigration reform bill that would offer a path to citizenship for law-abiding undocumented immigrants. And House Speaker John Boehner had promised to take up the issue after the August recess, calling reform "a big goal of mine."

But alas, the Steve King wing of Boehner's party has prevailed. King is the House Republican who recently described undocumented children as having "calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert." Thanks to King and his ilk, immigration reform will now be deferred indefinitely, even though it could probably pass in the House today, with the votes of Democrats and moderate Republicans.

And "[w]hat happens to a dream deferred?" Does it "just sag like a heavy load? Or does it explode?" "Families in our communities are being ripped apart by deportations, and the system is in chaos," says Tony Stieritz, Director of Social Action for the Cincinnati Archdiocese. "A vote for delay is a vote for crisis and disorder in the current system." "The more they delay, the worse it will be for them," adds Eliseo Medina, leader of reform efforts for the Service Employees International Union.

At moments like this, we must forgive Republican leaders for feeling like the hapless Dr. Frankenstein as he moaned, "I started from my sleep with horror when I beheld the miserable monster whom I had created." The Monster in this case is the Politics of Resentment, fomented so assiduously over so many years by the Republican establishment, against the undocumented, the gay, the sexually active, on behalf of the devout, the old, and in general, the white.

The problem is that those groups getting hated on are now ascendant in the electorate, while those groups loving the hatred are descendant. And as those ascendant groups -- let's call them the villagers -- amass at the polls to defend themselves, defeating Republicans by popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the cool Republican tacticians who spawned the Monster can only watch in dismay as their uncontrollable creation continues to run amok. Because now, the Monster has a mind of its own, autopiloted by its own pundits, Tea Party organizers and Congressmen, its own media outlets -- those who have made their careers and fortunes being monstrous, and aren't about to give it up.

Let's begin with the havoc the Monster is wreaking on immigration reform, and ponder the following harsh realities:



--Barack Obama claimed 71% of the Hispanic* vote in 2012. Overall, he took more than 83% of votes of people of color, who increased from 1/6 to 1/4 of the voting population between 1996 and 2012. Currently, Hispanics account for half of all U.S. population growth. --Meanwhile, the base to which the Monster races is shrinking. While the Hispanic population increased by 43% over the last decade, the white population increased by one percent. This means of course that the percentage of white voters is actually shrinking -- by 2% just between '08 and '12. Minority births now outnumber white births, and by about 2040, whites will be a minority of the U.S. population.

--Currently, nearly 1 in 5 Congressional districts have at least a 25% Latino population.

--While it's true that immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle, it's also true that, even before the spigot closed, 62% of U.S. Latino population growth came from births, not immigration. Send in the Latinos? Don't bother, they're here.

And They're Not Just Democrats, They're Liberals!

Of course, if wishes were horses, Republicans would just ride away from this mess, and heaven knows they're trying. Two days after the election debacle of 2012, Charles Krauthammer wistfully opined that Latinos "should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family oriented and socially conservative -- on abortion, for example."

Unfortunately, the alchemy of wishes fails here, and Krauthammer's fond hope is no getaway horse. Exit polls from last November found that Latino voters were "not only more liberal than Republicans, they're sometimes more liberal than Democrats."Socially conservative? Sixty six percent said abortion should be legal; 59% said yes to same-sex marriage.

And on economic issues, Latinos are downright populist: fifty five percent have a negative view of capitalism! They want more spending on schools, and universal, public-run health care; they want government to help run the economy and are wide open to raising taxes on those who can afford it. A "natural Republican constituency," they're not.

But luckily for the GOP, they don't have to erase their Hispanic voting deficit, they just have to chip away at it to remain competitive. And if the party were serious about chipping away at Obama's margin with these voters, it might well court more-affluent Hispanics, who've shown some willingness (more than blacks, not as much as whites) to go Red, along with those first-generation immigrants who are conservative on abortion.

The Monster Keeps on Monstering

But instead of the outstretched hand, time and again, Latinos get "the murderous mark of the fiend's grasp" -- insult and injury heaped upon the very voters Republicans must court to remain viable. Even as Latinos tell pollsters that immigration is "personally important" to them and that most of them "personally know" an undocumented immigrant, the Monster continues his ravaging ways:

--In June, 220 of the 234 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to restart deporting 800,000 DREAM Act eligible young people, the same people President Obama's 2012 order would protect from deportation -- those who were brought here as children, and have since led law-abiding lives. But such injuries aren’t enough, apparently, and so Republican House members have added a few insults:

--"The U.S. should choose only the best immigrants, the way one chooses the pick of the litter. You want a good bird dog? You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog." (Steve King, R-IA, National Review, 4/16/13)

--"Illegal aliens are criminals and we need to treat them as such." (Paul Broun, R-GA, Huffington Post, 3/22/13)

--"We know Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels. We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they are radical Islamists...Finally the Israeli people said this is enough. They built a wall to prevent...the domestic violence from people that want to destroy them...We need to do that as well." (Louie Gohmert, R-TX, C-Span and Dallas Observer, 4/17/13)

--"Mr. President, build up this wall! The things that made America great are Americans like you that work and understand that it's a sacrifice. You don't get to come over here and be takers." (Randy Weber, R-TX, Houston Chronicle, 6/20/13)

--"My father had a ranch. We used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes. It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It's all done by hand." (Don Young, R-AK, KRBD, 3/28/13)

--"The people the Republicans should reach out to are the white voters -- the white voters who didn't vote in the last election, and there are millions of them." (Phyllis Schlafly, "The Dove" radio, 5/24/13)

--"What are the Republicans [moderates] doing? Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform and enraging their loyal [white] supporters, who gave Mitt 90% of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5% of his total votes? Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." (Pat Buchanan, American Conservative, 6/14/13)

At the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Monster is sent off to the Arctic to practice his social skills. And one day, the Republican Monster will also be asked to pack some warm clothes for a long trip. But for now, "IT'S ALIVE!"

*The terms "Hispanic" and "Latino" are only partially overlapping concepts. This essay uses the nomenclature of the original source: when a poll uses the term "Latino," that name is used here, and the same is true for "Hispanic."

In our next installment, we'll learn how the Monster is ravaging Republican prospects among the young, the secular, the female and the college educated.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/0...Its-Own-Party#