Thread: In Indy, looking for political savvy on the 'illegals'

So which is it?

On the one hand, The Associated Press reports a Mexican government claim that migration, mainly to the United States, has fallen dramatically, with fewer Mexicans abandoning their native land to look for work abroad as a result of the worldwide economic downturn.

The AP quotes Eduardo Sojo, who heads up Mexico's National Statistics, Geography and Information Institute, to the effect that net outflow, legal and illegal, declined more than 50 percent in the 12 months ending last August. Fewer jobs abroad, fewer folks conniving to cross the border -- net outflow down 204,000 between August 2007 and August 2008, from 455,000 the previous year. But wait.

Fox News says, "Federal immigration officials are reporting a surge in the number of Mexicans crossing the border to seek asylum in the U.S., an increase analysts say is due to the drug violence and criminal activity that claimed a record 5,300 lives in Mexico last year."

That's supposed to be creating a lot of new work for immigration officials, because the American system requires asylum seekers to jump through many legal hoops before their cases are decided. Most lose, ultimately, and are sent home, but not before many months have passed and lots of paperwork has piled up.

Whether the worldwide recession is keeping more Mexicans at home or drug violence and criminal activity are sending more abroad as asylum seekers, Indiana state Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, thinks America's illegal alien problem remains big and ominous, and isn't going to go away by itself.

He suggests at least part of a solution: Senate Bill 580, which would crack down on those who employ illegal workers.

Unlawful immigration remains a big deal, even though it has been overshadowed in Washington by other things. In Indianapolis, the Senate committee hearing Delph's bill took the unusual step of holding three -- count them -- separate meetings so it could hear from all the supporters and opponents. The full GOP-dominated Senate presumably will vote on his proposal this coming week, and Delph says only the really bad actors should worry, because the really tough punishments are reserved for repeat offenders who knew what they were doing.

Meanwhile, something different seems to be easing its way through the GOP political infrastructure -- a conviction that (according to Richard Nadler of the America Majority Foundation think tank, in the latest issue of conservative holy writ National Review), "conservatives should stop trying to remove 12 million illegal aliens from American soil, either by rounding them up or by inducing them to 'self-deport.' "

Nadler believes that such approaches have dimmed the conservative movement's prospects in the Southwest, the West, the Northeast and Florida.

Some 6.6 million U.S. homes contain at least one illegal immigrant, and in those households reside 4.9 million children and 3.5 million American citizens. So, Nadler argues, "Conservatives who present themselves to Hispanics as pro-family had better reflect" on the numbers.

Indiana lawmakers have argued about Delph's version of a state solution for a couple of years. "This past December," the Carmel senator says in an op-ed piece for our newspaper, "the Feds arrested 15 illegal contract workers at the BP refinery in Whiting, Ind." He says that's only one example of a security problem at a major facility. Then there's cost:

A survey at four Indiana hospitals shows total unreimbursed health care for illegal aliens running $2.7 million per year, a figure that Delph says must be "multiplied across the state." The price tag for educating members of such families he puts at more than $200 million per year.

And none of that, he insists, includes "the cost of displaced Hoosier workers who unfairly compete for jobs with non-citizens."

(The text of Sen. Delph's commentary on immigration and the rule of law can be found at www.courier-journal.com/opinion.)

But Nadler argues the practical politics of this issue.

He points out that, as conservative focus has shifted to state-level targeting of employers, "Few conservatives foresaw how employers would react to the replacement of (a) weak federal standard with a patchwork regime of conflicting state and local immigration-enforcement statutes."

Business has rebelled.

At some point, he argues, "conservatives must reflect on how many allies, and how many issues, we are willing to sacrifice in a fey and futile attempt to get fieldworkers, busboys and nannies out of the country."

Over the past couple of years, the immigration issue obviously has arrived in Indy, but has political savvy?

David Hawpe's columns appear Sundays and Wednesdays in the Community Forum. E-mail him at dhawpe@courier-journal.com.


http://www.courier-journal.com/article/ ... /902220391

Mexico just doesn't want these people back; then it becomes THEIR PROBLEM.

Don't worry with the new Obama appointee from Maryland "Perez" to head up the "Immigraion and citizenship" the asylum sekers will be rushed right through....just another excuse and another open door for them to come in.

When you close the back door you just find more front doors...to hell with the millions of unemployed Americans...assimilation or anything else!