Posted by
jarhead on Wednesday, June 20, 2007 3:35:33 PM
I just read Clint Bolick's article
GOP Runs a Big Risk of Losing Hispanics. My first reaction was anger at his presumption that those in the Republican party opposing this bill are anti-immigrant. We are anti ILLEGAL immigrant. We very much support legal immigration. That said this article, along with all the other attempts to push this law forward, are flawed for several reasons.
First and foremost the enforcement first folks like me are concerned about our national security. Some of the Fort Dix conspirators came across our southern border. There is no telling how many others are already here and there have to be yet more trying to use that wide open back door to get at us. Just how long can we expect to keep getting lucky? We have to shut down the border NOW for reasons of national security. To have failed to do so in the years since 9/11 is simply criminal.
The next flaw is the attempt to portray this as the best we can do anyway. The best we can do is enforce our laws. We don't enforce any of the existing laws on the books. Some of those may not have the stiffer penalties included in the new law but if there has been no will to enforce our borders and existing immigration laws including the approval for 700 miles of fence then why would any reasonable person believe that the same laws rehashed will be enforced either? All these new laws are window dressing to try to make amnesty look better. In the end this is about bidding for votes. The point of Bolick's article is that the republican party needs to reach out to the Hispanic community and that this bill does that. A lot of the jobs that illegals are taking at under the table wages are coming from hard working legal Hispanics. I would bet that they are no happier with illegal immigration and the risk to their families that borders open to terrorists poses then anyone else. Selling out our countries security for a few votes, that may not change to republican anyway, is at best irresponsible and at worst traitorous.
Last but not least is the simple fact that the current immigration tracking systems are inadequate for the current burden of tracking current immigrants in the system. Members of almost every terrorist plot we know of were here on expired visas. These are folks from 'countries of interest' and we can't keep track of them or find them to get them under control. And this same system will be asked to take on 12 million more?? Really?? How utterly silly. Some of these ideas might even make sense if there were the mechanisms in place to enforce and track and check out illegals but there simply not such mechanisms so the enforcement side of this bill is DOA.