Thread: The 'Strip-the-car' Approach to legalizing Aliens

The ‘Strip-the-Car’ Approach to Legalizing Aliens


By Michael Cutler



An article in the July 26 edition of the Washington Times reports on the new strategy of force-feeding immigration rewards for illegal aliens in a piecemeal fashion rather than in a one-shot "comprehensive" bill that includes them all. This piecemeal approach to an immigration giveaway program reminds me of a car thief who realizes that he cannot simply break into a homeowner's garage and steal his vintage sports car outright, so he resorts to stripping the car and over time makes off with most, if not all, of the prized vehicle. All he has to do after the piecemeal theft is to reassemble it in his own garage!



The level of chutzpah being demonstrated by those members of Congress who favor the strip-the-car approach to auto theft must really think that the citizens of our nation are brain dead! Polls indicate that the Congress has an even lower approval rating than the President, who is in a headlong dash to the basement where opinion polls are concerned. I recently read that Congress has a collective approval rating of 14%! That was not a typo; the approval rating for Congress stands at an unfathomable fourteen percent, yet many of these "Fools on the Hill" blithely continue along, refusing to do the work that the American people want them to do! The vast majority of Americans want our borders secured, and they want an immigration system with real integrity.



When the Senate stood poised to pass the utterly insane "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill I had dubbed the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007," a significant amount of attention was paid to the largely meaningless question as to whether the bill constituted an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. This debate was largely meaningless because although I certainly believed that the bill did constitute amnesty, the question I ask is, "So what?" It was obvious that aliens who had violated our laws would have been not only rewarded for their legal transgressions, but they would have been allowed to remain in the United States, work and send money back to their respective home countries, too. This was the reason that the majority of these illegal aliens violated our borders and immigration laws in the first place!



Some time ago, while explaining illegal immigration and the strategy needed to combat this crisis, I said, "No one would break into an amusement park if they could not go on the rides." And requiring illegal aliens to pay a fine for being here illegally does not work. If you go back to my amusement park analogy, consider the fact that when you go to various amusement parks, whether Disney World, Sea World, Great Adventures or any other, you will find patrons waiting in long, long lines paying significant sums of money to go on the rides!



These patrons are not deterred from going to the amusement park by the admission fees. Similarly, illegal aliens will not be deterred from coming to the United States by simply paying a fine so that they can go on the "rides" here in the United States. At the end of the day when they turn off the lights and shut down the rides, everyone heads for the exits. If our nation really is to deter illegal immigration, we must make it clear that any alien who violates our borders or otherwise violates the immigration laws will not be able to achieve the goals that propelled them across the borders in the first place.



When the President and other open borders advocates say that the illegal aliens do the work that Americans won't do, I am personally offended. My dad was a construction worker. He was a plumber. I grew up around some of the hardest working men you could imagine. They were my dad's buddies, members of the various construction trades who certainly knew what a hard day's work was. They possessed the "can do spirit" that had come to personify the American spirit. Today there are hard-working Americans to be found across our nation. They work in coal mines and steel foundries. They drive garbage trucks and work as firefighters, racing into burning buildings, risking their own lives to save the lives of total strangers. Our fellow Americans work in law enforcement, putting themselves between the criminals and the decent people they would prey upon, given the opportunity.



It is not that the illegal aliens do the work that Americans won't do. It is that illegal aliens do the work for wages and under conditions that are intolerable and often illegal. When illegal aliens were given legal status during the Amnesty of 1986, many of those legalized aliens began demanding proper wages and working conditions and were promptly fired. Their unscrupulous employers simply hired the next wave of illegal aliens who worked for those substandard wages under often illegally dangerous conditions. These aliens are among those who are now seeking legalization. There is absolutely no reason to believe that history wouldn’t repeat itself if we provide millions of illegal aliens with legal status. Once they were emboldened by their newly acquired legal status to demand proper wages and working conditions, they no longer would be the desirable employees that they had been, and the unscrupulous employers would simply fire them and replace them with the next wave of illegal aliens.



Additionally, we have such "leaders" as Senator Richard Durbin who is intent on providing in-state tuition for aliens who shouldn’t even be in the United States. I am still waiting for justification for that bit of legislative madness. Why would we provide such a gift to those who have violated our borders and our laws when our own children, citizens all, would not qualify for that giveaway program? Imagine if I agreed to subsidize the college education of my neighbors’ children but then told my own kids that they would have to work their way through college! Would you not question my sanity?



Harry Reid accused those politicians who opposed his giveaway program as attempting to placate "conservatives." Harry Reid seems to be oblivious to the fact that Americans of all sorts of political leanings are adamant about securing our borders and protecting the jobs of American citizens. The massive influx of aliens has caused a drastic drop in wages for many workers in the United States. Labor is a commodity not unlike petroleum or gold. As a commodity, it is subject to the basic economic rule of supply and demand. As the supply of a commodity increases, if all other factors remain constant, the price of that commodity drops. Several years ago the workers in the meat packing industry were earning nineteen dollars per hour. Today, with the massive influx of illegal aliens, these same workers are now earning nine dollars an hour! Many members of Congress seem oblivious to the plight of the average American who must work for a living.



If our federal government were to issue official identity documents to millions of aliens, especially those who could not prove who they really were, this would not enhance our security but actually create a national security nightmare! The only thing worse than no security is false security. In issuing official identity documents that would serve as "breeder documents" to millions of illegal aliens - whose true identities are unknown and unknowable and who have already demonstrated an abject disregard for our nation's borders and laws - would create utter mayhem for our law enforcement authorities. I am disgusted with politicians who invoke the 911 Commission findings and recommendations claiming that they want to provide millions of illegal aliens with "tamper-proof" identity documents. First of all, there is no such thing as tamper-proof. Second, what name do you put on these documents if you have no way of verifying their true names?



Members of Congress who insist that this will bring these illegal aliens "out of the shadows" are either demonstrating that they are too stupid to serve in the United States Congress or that they are too corrupt to serve in the United States Congress or, perhaps, both. Most criminals and terrorists use false aliases the same way a chameleon uses changes in coloration, to be able to hide in plain sight. According to the 911 Commission, the 19 terrorists who wrought such destruction on our nation and murdered our citizens used a total of 364 aliases and variations of their identities in order to facilitate their plans to attack our nation and slaughter our people. They are becoming ever more sophisticated in their efforts to launch terrorist attacks against us; and our leaders are becoming ever more complacent and compliant!



Do you know where your Senator or member of Congress stands on these most critical issues? It is vital that you find out and then, if s/he is in favor of this madness, I urge you to contact that "representative" and let them know your concerns. To borrow a phrase from President Bush; "they are either with us, or against us!"



Democracy is not a spectator sport!



Lead, follow or get out of the way!




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FamilySecurityMatters.org contributing editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a well-respected authority on immigration and border security issues.
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When the Senate stood poised to pass the utterly insane "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill I had dubbed the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007,"

good one, jannidot!

That Harry Reid is a big fat liar! During that debate he stood right on the Senate floor and stated, "there have been rumors of NAU and they are not true"!

ENFORCE ALL THE LAWS, DEPORT NOW, NO NORTH AMERICAN UNION, NO GUEST WORKER PROGRAM WITH MEXICO OR ANY OTHER SUBVERSIVE CONSPIRATOR