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    CPAC's 2014 Amnesty Panel

    By Jon Feere, March 7, 2014

    Nearly every speaker at the first day of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) avoided any discussion of immigration or amnesty, a sign that Republican politicians are starting to understand that conservative voters have very little interest in doubling legal immigration and amnestying illegal aliens.

    Of all speakers, which included Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and governors Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal, only one speaker spent any time on immigration policy: Donald Trump. He came out strong on sovereignty and garnered strong applause for noting "we're either a country, or we're not; we either have borders or we don't." Trump also noted that amnesty is a benefit for the Democratic Party, while calling out Rubio:

    When you let the 11 million — which will grow to 30 million people — in, I don't care who stands up, whether it's Marco Rubio, and talks about letting everybody in, you won't get one vote. Every one of those votes goes to the Democrats. You have to do what's right; it's not about the votes necessarily. But of those 11 million potential voters which will go to 30 million in a not too long future, you will not get any of those votes no matter what you do, no matter how nice you are, no matter how soft you are, no matter how many times you say 'rip down the fence and let everybody in' you're not going to get the votes. So with immigration, you better be smart and you better be tough, and they're taking your jobs, and you better be careful. You better be careful.

    In addition to speakers on the main stage, CPAC holds a number of panel discussions on a range of topics throughout the conference. One panel topic was immigration and titled "Can there be meaningful immigration reform without citizenship?" Unfortunately the panel was largely slanted in favor of amnesty and high levels of immigration, something that conservatives should be wary about according to the polls and data compiled in a new report from Eagle Forum.

    Curiously, CPAC has not yet posted its video of the panel discussion; if it becomes available, this blog will be updated. The Q&A period got a little heated and is worth watching.

    The panel was made up of five people, four of whom are advocates of mass immigration and amnesty, or as they called it "comprehensive reform" for "the undocumented". Their talking points, summarized below, largely avoided any discussion of the political impact of immigration for Republicans and would have fit in perfectly at a liberal conference even though CPAC is obviously supposed to be for conservatives. The speakers were Helen Krieble, founder and president of the Vernon K. Kriebel Foundation; Rev. Luis Cortés, Jr., president of Esperanza; Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles; and Derrick Morgan, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. It was moderated by Mercy Viana Schlapp of Cove Strategies.

    The discussion was held in a small conference room in an obscure corner of the large convention center and fewer than 50 people turned out to listen. It began with some brief thoughts from Ms. Schlapp who spoke of how "undocumented immigrants" were all "helping the economy", apparently unaware that around four million illegal aliens in the country are not working. She noted that amnesty (my word, not hers) "takes courage" and that the event had "courageous panelists". This refrain about "courage" has been uttered by many amnesty advocates, suggesting that they are well aware that doubling legal immigration and amnestying illegal aliens is not popular.

    The first speaker was Helen Krieble, a billionaire heiress who operates a massive equestrian center in Colorado. According to the Rocky Mountain News, Krieble complained that she was "struggling to find American-born workers willing to fill entry-level jobs" and decided to push for more foreign labor, creating a proposal she calls the "Red Card Solution". The plan is even highlighted at the top of her horse park website. Her plan — which she has pushed unsuccessfully for years — would legalize illegal aliens but not allow them to obtain citizenship. It is a guestworker program that would arguably create indentured servants who are tied to their jobs, or as Mark Krikorian has called it, "a Saudi-style labor-importation system".

    She attempts to sell it as free-market solution that would take government out of the equation, but doesn't seem to understand that it would take American voters out of the equation as well. By electing representatives to decide how much and what type of immigration we should have have, Americans maintain control of sovereignty. The Red Card solution would put businesses who don't want to hire American citizens into the position of deciding who gets to enter the country. And the costs of this cheap labor would inevitably be passed on to the taxpayer. Like all temporary non-citizen workers, these workers would have children who would be considered U.S. citizens and these children would eventually be able to grant citizenship to their parents because of existing immigration law. If a guestworker ditches his job and becomes an illegal alien, it is unlikely he'll ever be deported, particularly if he has a U.S. citizen child. On top of this, guestworker programs always lead to more illegal immigration because they send the message around the world that the United States is granting legal status to anyone who manages to sneak into the country. Whether or not that is the actual outcome, that is the message that many will hear.

    In her talk at CPAC, Krieble didn't mention her horse operation. She spoke out against Congress's visa system that she defined as "special deals for agriculture workers, for Dreamers, for high-tech workers, even cruise ship employees ... and ski instructors". It was difficult not to hear that as Krieble being upset that she has been unable to get a piece of the action. She then stated her thesis: "It's wrong for Congress to set artificial quotas on the number of workers every business can have." Of course, no law prevents an employer from hiring as many Americans as they want. What Krieble wants is an endless supply of cheap, foreign labor. She mentioned no concern about the social and fiscal impact of such a proposal, and didn't seem to have any concern about why businesses wouldn't be interested in hiring some of the tens of millions of unemployed people in the United States.

    Kreible also had no qualms about creating a two-tiered society, explaining, "They are not second-class citizens because they aren't citizens."

    Krieble attempted to frame the immigration debate as one involving two sides: either we give all illegal aliens citizenship, or we do nothing. Apparently "enforce the laws on the books" is not a concept on her radar.

    She spoke out against the recently released "GOP Principles" on immigration, arguing that immigration shouldn't be about Republican principles. Instead, it should be about "American principles". Yet she really never made a persuasive argument connecting American principles with a limitless supply of foreign labor being brought into the country at the request of Big Business.

    Next up on the panel was Derrick Morgan of the Heritage Foundation. He was the lone panelist to speak out against comprehensive amnesty. He noted that "granting legal status, or amnesty, is bad policy that's unfair, it's costly, and it won't work."

    "For every one illegal immigrant here, there are three immigrants who are waiting in line the right way, under the law." He noted that granting legal status rewards bad behavior.

    Morgan cited a Heritage report that found that "adding millions of people to an already over-burdened welfare and retirement system would add trillions of dollars of costs over the lifetime of illegal immigrants." He explained: "That is money that is going to have to be paid by someone, and that someone is you: the American taxpayer."

    He also cited a CBO report, which found that the Senate amnesty bill would not stop much illegal immigration, noting "the day we pass amnesty, the problem starts over again."

    Morgan explained various problems of amnesty and then argued that even if you supported the idea, it would be foolhardy to trust the Obama administration to implement the law considering its track record on Obamacare delays and the lawless Deferred Action policy that Obama has used to legalize over 500,000 illegal aliens.

    He also pointed out one of the key problems of non-citizenship amnesty, namely that it will not benefit Republicans and will only give Democrats a campaign issue: "I think it's far more likely that before the ink on president Obama's signature on such a law is dry, that the left will decry the Jim Crow status of these newly legalized immigrants." This has already started happening, of course. The audience applauded loudly to this political insight that none of the other panelist had apparently contemplated.

    Next on the panel was Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and former staffer in the George W. Bush administration. He is all for amnesty and increased immigration and is praised by Jorge Ramos, a Univision anchor and fierce amnesty advocate. To give you some perspective, Ramos once said the following: "Republicans, you have to listen to [the following people] for the immigration debate: Jeb Bush, Carlos Gutierrez, and Alfonso Aguilar."

    Aguilar apparently has much faith in Obama enforcing new immigration laws (or, conversely, doesn't care if Obama fails to enforce certain provisions) and said that "Conservatives need to address immigration, and they need to do it now. We cannot wait for a Republican administration. We have to do it now."

    Aguilar argued that visa limits are arbitrary quotas that don't reflect the market. He claimed that "immigrants are coming here because we need them" and that they "do jobs Americans don't want" (which is false). He argued that they do jobs where businesses can't find Americans of working age to do them. Apparently Aguilar is unaware that there are currently tens of millions of Americans of working age who are not working. Completely missing from his world view is the concept that businesses who can't find an employee might want to consider offering a better wage or benefits in order to attract Americans to these jobs. Like Krieble, Aguilar believes that an employer should be able to offer a wage unappealing to Americans and, after finding no workers, appeal to Big Government to provide the employer foreigners who think the low wage is wonderful. And when the worker discovers that the wage makes life difficult in America, Aguilar and Krieble apparently have no problem with taxpayers subsidizing the welfare and medical care that the low-wage earner will inevitably collect.

    Aguilar promised that if Republicans deal with immigration, it's not going to be like Obamacare. It is unclear why he thinks one 1,000-page bill is going to be treated differently than any other by the Obama administration.

    Aguilar also illustrated his detachment from the average American when he argued that the Tea Party would not oppose an immigration bill. He apparently does not realize that the Tea Party has its origins in protesting against the Bush administration's amnesty efforts that he championed.

    Without any articulated principle backing his position, Aguilar declared that immigration laws should be enforced after an amnesty, but not today, or, as he put it, "prospectively, but not retrospectively".

    He also called it "factually incorrect" that we'll have another flow of illegal immigration after legalization. Considering that La Raza was calling for an amnesty only four years after the 1986 amnesty due to an increase in illegal immigration, his claim is difficult to swallow. His argument is that a guestworker program would simply have to be large enough to accommodate anyone who wants to come here, meaning that they won't come illegally and we therefore won't have illegal immigration. He didn't seem to understand that this would represent Americans no longer having any control over sovereignty.

    Aguilar also argued that "attrition through enforcement" is "not going to happen". This is troubling because the concept of attrition is simply that if the federal government enforces the law, people will return home. In a sense, Aguilar is saying that the federal government is never going to enforce immigration laws. Again, he is seemingly content with Americans having no control over our sovereignty.

    Aguilar reiterated the need for "courage", suggesting again that amnesty is unpopular among conservatives.

    Thought he didn't mention it by name, Aguilar also referred to NumbersUSA's immigration report cards and called Numbers "one of those anti-immigrant groups". In other words, if you oppose illegal immigration or want lower immigration levels, you are "anti-immigrant" in the mind of Alfonso Aguilar.

    The last person on the panel to speak was Rev. Luis Cortés, Jr., president of Esperanza, a group that claims to be the largest Hispanic faith-based community-development corporation in the country. It is unclear what makes Esperanza conservative, however, and its website dedicates space to "climate change" and "comprehensive immigration reform".

    Cortés argued for amnesty saying that it would help separate the "good from the bad" as only those illegal aliens who come forward to register would be good people. Cortés argued that bad people wouldn't apply for fear of being deported. Clearly, Cortés hasn't followed the immigration debate all that closely.

    The 1986 amnesty granted citizenship to tens of thousands of people who acquired the legal status through fraud. Most problematically, it granted citizenship to the ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Had we simply enforced our laws in 1986, the ringleader and his cohorts would have been deported, and the attack might never have occurred. Instead, the amnesty gave Mahmud Abouhalima a green card, which facilitated the terrorism because he could then work at any job he wished and was able to travel to and from the United States freely. In fact, according the October 4, 1993, issue of Time magazine, it was only after he received his green card in 1990 that he made several trips to Pakistan, where he received combat training. The legal status he acquired as a result of the 1986 amnesty is what made his training by al Qaeda possible.

    The federal government has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to separate the good from the bad, and the most recent example was the bombing of the Boston Marathon. The government welcomed in refugees who turned out to be bad people, even granting one of them citizenship on September 11, 2012. The FBI investigated the two bombers prior to the attack and found nothing, despite a comprehensive investigation that included interviews with family and neighbors as well as a look at their Internet usage. Background checks for the 11 million illegal aliens in the country will not be anywhere as comprehensive. Amnesty will not make us safer as the reverend claims. On the contrary, it has the potential to empower some very dangerous individuals.

    Reverend Cortés also claimed that all religious denominations are for amnesty. And while it is true that the those who claim to speak for their parishioners are in favor of amnesty, the fact is that people sitting in the pews are not so interested in calls for doubling legal immigration and amnestying illegal aliens.


    http://cis.org/feere/cpacs-2014-amnesty-panel
    Support our FIGHT AGAINST illegal immigration & Amnesty by joining our E-mail Alerts at https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

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    Santorum offers yell-O at mellow CPAC event

    12:01 AM 03/08/2014



    Neil Munro
    White House Correspondent

    Likely GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum used his Friday slot at the annual CPAC event to shake things up by calling for GOP policies that aid working Americans, rather than the employers usually favored by the GOP establishment.

    “I’ve always felt an obligation to come to CPAC and be a contrarian,” Santorum told The Daily Caller after his speech, given just a few miles from central Washington D.C.

    Santorum’s pitch was a break from the event’s orchestrated show of establishment unity against President Barack Obama, say numerous attendees.
    CPAC’s organizers downplayed and sidelined the many furious intra-GOP debates about foreign policy, crony capitalism, sex and society, tea party efforts to unseat incumbent GOP legislators, student loans, conservatives’ reform agendas and the progressive movement’s push for increased immigration.

    Those hot-button topics are taboo among the business-friendly leaders that dominate the GOP.

    Instead, the organizers highlighted morale-building speeches by establishment and libertarian Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul.

    “We must stop this president from shredding the constitution,” Paul declared to applause from the many young people who may choose to become campaign volunteers.

    “Mr. President, we will not let you run roughshod over our rights…we will not let you shred our constitution,” Paul declared to more applause, during his Friday speech.

    Paul’s turn at the podium came right after Santorum, who had used his time to slam GOP advocates who only criticize Obama without offering an agenda that can win a critical mass of economically worried swing-voters.

    “People come out on this stage and they bang away on President Obama. It is fun, I know that, it is always easy,” Santorum said. “Get it our of your system, because after you leave here, we’ve got a job to do, we’ve got to win, and we will win not by further dividing, but by uniting,” he concluded, in a polite but divisive statement.

    Matt Kibbe, the president and CEO of FreedomWorks, wanted a much more dramatic agenda at CPAC.

    “It is a little too establishment for my taste… it’s a feel-good event,” he told TheDC.

    The organizers, he said, ignored “the whole debate that is happening behind the scenes in the conservative movement — do we win by standing for something or do we win by not talking and having a beauty pageant?”

    “The self-proclaimed leaders of the GOP and the conservative movement want to tell us who the candidate should be, they want to decide who should go onstage [but] outside the [convention] center… there’s lot of energy in that decentralization,” he added.

    For example, CPAC could have hosted debates between GOP legislators and their challengers in the Republican primaries, he said. “That would be awesome…it would have been real,” he said.

    “I was hoping here would be some good battles here, defining battles on various issues,” such as amnesty, said talk-show host Steve Kelley, who hosts a Denver show titled “Kelley & Co.”

    Instead, he said, “it’s basically a giant cheerleading event.”

    Oregon-based radio host Lars Larson said he wanted “a bit more pro-life, a bit more anti-amnesty.” When established GOP leaders “talk about immigration reform, what they really mean is immigration expansion, which is bad for the budget, bad for the deficit and bad for the American worker,” he said.
    Some of the top organizers of the event, including Grover Norquist and Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, are prominent advocates of large scale immigration.

    Last summer, the Senate passed a bill that would invite 40 million new immigrant or guest-workers to compete for jobs against the 40 million Americans who will turn 18 during the next decade. The GOP House leadership has not advanced the Senate bill, partly because polls show its terms are very unpopular among GOP supporters.

    The event should have featured “more about defense, about Ukraine,” Larson added.

    “Economic conservatism and libertarianism… tend to be predominant here at CPAC,” said William Cole Smith, a vice-president at World magazine, which is a social-conservative outlet with a mostly Christian audience.

    “Social conservatives would like to have seen more focus on same-sex marriage, abortion, the social issues that we think are really undermining our culture,” he said. “Many of us believe the economic issues and other more political issues are downstream from these cultural issues, and those important cultural issues are not getting that kind of play here,” Smith said.

    House Representative Allen West called for a greater focus on national security. “The main thing that we really need to have a resurgence in is talking about foreign policy and national security,” West said.

    “The most important responsibility for the federal government is to provide for the common defense,” he said.

    Cardenas, however, called for GOP supporters to rally behind their established leaders.

    “As conservatives, we must recognize that success only comes when we focus on the biggest threats to our freedom and our liberty,” Cardenas said Friday.
    “And our biggest threats are not coming in the form of other conservatives… [but] from liberals and if we are to effectively battle the forces that endanger our country, we must not battle each other,” he insisted.

    “We have far too much work to do to spent one more minute caught up on the internal workings in our movement,” Cardenas said.

    The FreedomWorks head disagreed.“I think being authentic is a better strategy,” said Kibbe.

    “That’s how we get independents and conservations and tea partiers and libertarians who have opted out of Republican politics to participate,” he said.

    “Putting out a phony show leaves them at home” on election day, he said.

    http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/08/santorum-offers-yell-o-at-mellow-cpac-event/


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    Newsletter Week of Mar 7

    This Issue: Conservative Elites make it clear how they stand on amnesty during annual conference

    Conservatives from across the country are descending on Washington this week for the annual CPAC convention hosted by the American Conservative Union. While immigration has been mostly scrubbed from the program's agenda, the list of invited speakers and the list of regular speakers who were not invited makes it clear that the organizers favor a pro-amnesty agenda.
    Only one panel overtly focused on immigration - "Can there be meaningful immigration reform without citizenship?" CPAC did its best to hide the panel by holding it in a room at the end of a hallway that most conference attendees don't even know exists. Further, it was scheduled against a marijuana panel (popular with CPA C's younger attendees) and a main stage appearance by Donald Trump (popular with CPAC's older attendees).
    Of the four panel members, only Derrick Morgan from the Heritage Foundation spoke out against amnesty even though the majority of the 100 or so attendees were more in tune with his positions than those of the other three.
    Alfonso Aguilar was the most prominent pro-blanket amnesty voice. The former George W. Bush-appointee pushed for more foreign workers and misled the crowd on at least two separate occasions. He told them that no one uses the H-2A agriculture guest-worker program (183,860 H-2A visas were issued in 2012) and there is no "line" for legal immigration. The la tter claim comes as news to the married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens from Mexico and the Philippines who have been waiting more than 20 years for their green cards, according to the State Department's March 2014 visa bulletin.
    Rev. Luis Cortes represented the religious bloc that supports amnesty. He repeatedly told the group that this is the one issue that all the churches agree on. Recent polling from Pulse Opinion Research, however, tells a different story when church followers are asked for their opinions on the topic.
    H elen Krieble pushed her Red Card program that would grant an unlimited number of guest-worker visas to anyone who wants one. It's worth mentioning that Red Card is a contributing sponsor of CPAC.
    Absent from the main stage this year are Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Shlafly - both are outspoken champions of controlled immigration. Two other CPAC fixtures, Rep. Michele Bachman and Ann Coulter, were also snubbed by organizers at first. But both were late additions to the main stage program on Saturday, and it's a safe bet that immigration will work its way into their speeches.
    On Thursday, Frank Gaffney (founder of the Center for Secure Policy) and Breit bart News organized an event in a nearby hotel to focus on the issues that CPAC avoided, including immigration. NumbersUSA's Rosemary Jenks participated in the panel along with Phyllis Shlafly, and Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies. Rosemary made the case for America's unemployed who would be most impacted should Congress grant amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens and double legal immigration numbers.
    While GOP Leaders have downplayed the chances for amnesty in 2014, it's clear from CPAC's agenda and the newest push by FWD.us this week (the Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook group) that the pro-blanket amnesty advocates aren't giving up their fight.

    chris chmielenski
    Fri, Mar 7th
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

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