Thread: One Argument, 12 Million Holes + SAVE ACT UPDATE

One Argument, 12 Million Holes

The big fat immigration bill that died last year in Congress was, for all its flaws, an anchor that kept debate tethered firmly to reality. Like it or not, it contained specific remedies for the border and the workplace. It had a plan for clearing backlogs in legal immigration and managing its future flow. Perhaps most critical, it dealt with the 12 million illegal immigrants already here, through a tough path to earned citizenship.

Unmoored from a comprehensive federal bill, the debate was pushed into the states and is now floating in the La-La Land of the presidential campaign. The Republicans have been battling over the sincerity of their sound bites and trying to make their fixation on one dimension of the problem — tough border and workplace enforcement — sound like the solution.

But it isn’t, of course, because it ignores the fundamental question of what to do about the undocumented 12 million. A locked-down border won’t affect them. There is no way to round them up and move them out all at once. Not even the most eagerly anti-immigration candidate would dare talk about detention camps. Amnesty is a Republican curse word. So what’s the plan?

This is the cavernous hole in anti-immigration policy that its proponents want to cover with chain link and razor wire. It’s where swaggering Republicans get vague and mushy. [b]The emptiness of their position was acutely exposed in the Jan. 5 debate, when Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, ripped into Senator John McCain of Arizona for sponsoring an “amnestyâ€

I have decided NY Times has learned this type of trash journalism Pandering sells papers but may eventually put them in the same downward spiral as the BOA.