Thread: At Hearing on Immigration, Not All Is as Planned

July 19, 2006
At Hearing on Immigration, Not All Is as Planned
By JULIA PRESTON

WASHINGTON, July 18 — A hearing before a House subcommittee on Tuesday was supposed to highlight conservative support for House Republicans’ position on immigration legislation. But the results were decidedly mixed.
The panel had lined up four witnesses to voice backing for a House-passed bill focusing on border security and making it a crime for illegal immigrants to be in the United States.
But though expressing support for the legislation, one witness, the Christian conservative advocate Phyllis Schlafly, devoted most of her testimony to her assertion that President Bush had betrayed Americans by supporting a rival Senate bill that offers a route to citizenship for most illegal immigrants already in the country; the House measure has no such provision.
Another witness, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who was called because he served in the Border Patrol for 26 years, dismissed the hearing as “a waste of time,” saying the Republican-led Congress had repeatedly failed to provide enough money for border enforcement.
And one Republican on the subcommittee, Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona, who had sponsored a measure closer to the Senate version, called the session a “faux hearing” at a time when, he said, the two houses should be in negotiations to reconcile their differing approaches.
In her testimony, before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, Ms. Schlafly accused Mr. Bush of lying to voters by maintaining that the Senate bill was not a grant of amnesty like one that Congress adopted in 1986. “The American people are not willing to be cheated again,” she said.
Ms. Schlafly and two other witnesses who support the House bill — Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, and James R. Edwards Jr. of the Hudson Institute — also sought to allay concerns that the measure would lead to mass deportations. A fear of such roundups was one factor prompting two major protests by immigrants this spring.
“Nobody is calling for deporting large numbers of people,” Ms. Schlafly said under questioning by Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California.
Ms. Schlafly said the House was likely to revise its bill to make illegal presence in the country a misdemeanor rather than a felony. Illegal immigrants would be forced out of their jobs, she said, but there would not be wholesale enforcement of the legislation if it was enacted.
Mr. Camarota said the House goal was “attrition”: cutting illegal immigrants off from American jobs and society so they will eventually deport themselves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/washi ... 20Refugees

Doesn't it sound like no one is willing to speak the truth?