Redstate

The roll back of the fence from 700 miles to 350 miles is unbelievable. The fact that the congress and the president went back on their word on that only shows that they will be ready to go back on their word and not enforce this bill either.

I am sick of them stabbing us in the back and going back on their word. I want to see them keep their word on the 700 miles of fence. I want to see them keep their word and enforce existing laws! If they keep their word on that, and the increased border security, then, and only then, am I ready to swallow the rest.

To quote another post here, I am tired of us being Charlie Brown and the Republican Party in office being Lucy Van Pelt. We are smart enough to know that the ball is going to be pulled away again, and I am for one am not buying it anymore!

At the very least, the clear and measurable benchmarks to demonstrate the increase in border security will be the spoon full of sugar to make the rest of it go down a whole lot easier. ...but I want to see the increase in border security first!

"Wubbies World" - MSgt, U.S. Air Force (Retired): "Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know." -Jer 33:3-

#1) Nothing, or #2) Some variation of this Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007

I pick #2.

We have the laws to solve the problem now. We have the manpower. What we need is the will.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

The current situation is untenable.

But this bill perpetuates the situation rather than ending it.

With the bill, we get more border security and it starts right away.

Congress passed a bill last year for more fence than this. Why do we need this bill, which seems like a step backward?

Increased penalties and enhanced employment verification.

Nobody believes this, except those who still belive in Santa Clause.

The guest worker program should be whacked.

I agree with you there.

I get nervous when our federal government is making decisions about what market demand will be.

This whole bill is government fiddling around with the labor market at the behest, or even the bribe, of the busness community. No point in getting squeamish now.

Provided that Z visas are sufficiently tamper-proof and forgery-proof, illegal immigrants are brought out of limbo and can more fully assimilate.

Why do people keep assuming that they will do this? This strikes me as liberal law making at its worst, with the glib assumption that everyone will do what the people writing the law think they should do. I'm sure a lot of them will pass on the Z visa, Why shouldn't they? What are we going to do, deport them?

I suppose the next step will be to sweeten the offer to get them to "come out of the shadows". No doubt we will be offering them thousands of dollars to do so at some stage.

While the antis may feel good about killing the legislation, the conditions that brought us 12 million illegal immigrants remain in full force and effect, and there is no reason that 12 million couldn't rise to 20 million a few years hence. To me, such a "victory" would be pyhrric.

There are already 20 million here. If the Democratic party wants to pass this bill, the GOP should stand back and let them.

We are being encouraged to go along with this to provide cover for a few different people. One group is the Democrats, who plainly badly want the GOP to jump over this cliff with them. Why should we do what they want? The other party is President Bush. It would be awkard to keep up the fiction that he is a Republican if he signs off on a bill supported only by Democrats. I don't think that would stop him if it came to that, but he still wants the cover.

My advice; Kill this bill, or dare the Democrats to pass what they and Bush like against the GOP's wishes. If they do they will be screwed with the public. Which is why I'm guessing they won't do it. Say what you like about the Dems character, but they have ten thousand times the political savvy of the Bush administation or the GOP leadership.

because the Amnesty & Anarchy Act of 2007 has potential to be much worse. remember, the Muslims only want to kill us. the commies want to make us slaves.

also, you're just naive (or, worse, intentionally misleading) if you expect any of the half-baked security components to be enforced or effective

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority among the other Redstate moderators and the directorship

I can count at least half a dozen Redstate moderators/directors who are for this bill. And there may be more. But you are in the distinct minority of the readers of this site and the Republican Party. It would be interesting to see a site poll matching up enforcement first vs comprehensive immigration reform.

This is nothing more than the "Immigration Surrender Act" of the American Homeland.

Any bill in any form is worthless and means nothing without taking real action to secure borders. How can you take internal action without securing the border first?

That is like bailing your boat without plugging the hole. A lesson in futility.

Real change requires real change. -Newt Gingrich

I just thought I'd post this link to the recommendations of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, delivered by Barbara Jordan, that nativist, in 1996.

Read it and weep at what our country has ceased to be.

I hate hearing the excuse of, "We had better pass this bad legislation now, or something worse may come later."

Why not raise taxes now, maybe the rate increase won't be as bad if a Bush signs the legislation instead of a President Obama?

I've got a novel idea, how about Republicans fight this to the bitter end, and let the chips fall where they may?

If this legislation passes with bi-partisan, Republican support, it will tear the Republican Party apart.

I can guarantee you a Tancredo-type third party will emerge, and justifiably so, and then hand the White House to the Democrats.

This is a golden opportunity to bludgeon the Democrats, amnesty is not a political winner, and the Dems are scared they will be exclusively tied to this legislation.

If the Democrats want to destroy this country, and themselves, the Republicans shouldn't give them any cover.

"Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich. "

William F. Buckley, Jr.

I really don't get it. We have -educated- people from the world over looking to work here, yet we are willing to to give 12 million citizenship for simply being "workers". The cost of having an uneducated mass willing to do "jobs that Americans won't" is too great to bear. They have already proven a reluctance to assimilate (live in Phoenix for awhile), and costs will only continue to rise. Why hasn't anyone mentioned the problems in Mexico that cause this influx? Time spent there would be better spent. Secure the borders, and help make their homeland a place to live in peace with good jobs. We do this in other places of the world, why not our backyard?

"The current situation is untenable. There are 12 million reasons to explain why the current laws and current policies have failed. The existing law is not being adequately enforced, there is no real mechanism for moving immigrants from illegal to legal status, border security is porous"

This is exactly why any "compromise" needs to be based on the principle of "enforcement first". The current administration and congress simply have no credibility whatsoever when they promise increased enforcement this time around. That the already passed border fence is already being neutered is hardly a good sign. (Odds are, that just as in 1986, nothing will be done, and ten years down the road, we will be looking at another 10-20 million amnesty.)

Hence, the current bill (which is being rammed through in roughly the same fashion that a high-powered salesman would sell Florida swampland to retirees) must be killed.

"If "kill the bill version one" succeeds, then who knows when better legislation will happen."

Well, no legislation is better than the current legislation. Which is good enough reason to kill the bill.

"Increased penalties and enhanced employment verification."

They promised that the last time around as well. Fool me once... Again, they are the ones with zero credibility on this issue. They must prove their sincerity first.

"A population the size of Missouri is officially recognized. "

Apart from the fact that, empirically, Mexican-americans on average 'assimilate' towards African-american norms in social variables such as income (even after three generations, or a hundred years), this will indeed be the largest possible incentive that could have been given for even larger illegal immigration. After two amnesties, why should border-jumpers not expect a third? Or a fourth? Because "this time we're really, really serious"? Please. There really is no crisis here that motivates the breakneck pace of legislation and legalization.

"The current situation is untenable."

So your solution is to make it worse? Both past Ted Kennedy-authored amnesties have done nothing but exponentially worsen the problem, just as critics said it would. Only in Washington can repeated massive failures be rewarded with "more of the same". There is absolutely no reason to think, especially in reading the bill and its many deliberate loopholes, that the result will be any different this time. I, for one, am not insane enough to try the same thing over and over and over and expect a different result.

"Trying to deport all the illegals immediately or over a number of years is fantasyland."

And, for the billionth time, completely unnecessary. This is the straw man argument most thrown out there by open border's types - that the choice is "mass deportations" versus "comprehensive reform". That is simply a false choice designed to confuse the public and obscure the real, easy solution.

The solution? Merely enforce existing laws and add very tough employer sanctions for those that hire illegals. With this you will take away the ability for illegals to find any work, and cut them off of any social services. As a result, they will have no choice but to SELF-DEPORT. Go home themselves.

This solution is fair, common-sense, and very low cost. It needs no fence and no massive overhaul of the system. And it will not destroy the Republican party forever by willfully importing tens of millions of new Democrat voters, which the Democrats recognize will occur with glee but "party men" who are for this seem clueless about.

You say "we won't enforce existing laws", so you'll say this solution won't work. I would ask you if we won't enforce the easier existing laws why on earth do you think we'll enforce the more difficult laws in this monster of a bill? THAT is a fantasyland. Head-in-the-sand style.

"If "kill the bill version one" succeeds, then who knows when better legislation will happen."

Better no bill and try to get a chance later than a bill that will make things dramatically worse, as it has in the past. The enforcement provisions simply won't happen - the bill itself has loopholes to prevent them already. And at least with no bill, we won't be gifting the Democrats with millions of new elligible voters to change the political orientation of the country forever.

"The incentives that lure illegals to the United States do not go away, and the disincentives that inhibit illegal border crossings do not get implemented."

Again, none of this will happen anyway. It hasn't with past amnesties, and the enforcement provisions are already hollow and loop-holed out even in this bill. And past amnesties have given us no enforcement and a massive increase in illegal immigration for those wanting to get in on the NEXT ride. No bill might not change the status quo, but this bill will do what all the others did before it - add MORE incentive for MORE illegals, which has happened time and time again before.

Why would it be different now?

I'll get to the rest later, as I need to get back to work.

But one question - why are Republicans laying down for this thing when it will be the death of Conservatism and the Republican party? It's a demographic certainty. The Democrats are jumping for joy about this and we're laying down for it. Why?

But again, the solution is low-cost and simple, and should be tried FIRST before we do anything massive and potentially so affecting to America. I believe most people don't realize how simple the "attrition" argument really is, or that it even exists. Becuase time and again, I see pundits like Fred Barnes or you, or others talking about this and acting like it's a choice between comprehensive reform or amnesty and "sending them all back!" They often use the "we can't send them all back!" line as some kind of trump card.

But that's just an obscuring of the issue. That confuses, it does not enlighten. So most people think those are the choices, but they are pissed off enough to want to even TRY to "send them all back" anyway.

I believe if we just rejected the way the argument is presented, and present the easy solution I layed out above as the alternative, that it is so simple, cost-effective and common-sense that people will outright demand that we try that first.

That's how we can win - stop letting the open borders operatives define this debate with the false choice of "mass deportations" versus "amnesty". That's not the choice at all.

At the end of the day, this is a huge problem, but the solution could hardly be more simple.

Think about what comes next if this passes. Is there any doubt that the Democrats will come up with something like this:
"Instead of putting this onerous financial burden on those hard-working people who are least able to afford it, why not take money we'd spend building a fance that a) will make Mexixo mad and b) won't work anyway and use it to offset the fines in the bill we just passed? We'll save money in the long run because it will make these members of the working poor less dependent on social services than they would be if we took away so much of their hard-earned money."

I also expect to hear: "Given that these people had to prove they were breaking the law working here as long as possible, the only fair thing is if we go back and give them credit for social security payments for that period of time and allow them to file income tax returns so that they can receive refunds based on Earned Income Tax Credits."

So the bottom line to me is that this bill lays the groundwork to make things much much worse.
1) We know how the Dems feel about enforcement since they've already gutted half of last year's bill on the wall - the other half won't be far behind regardless of what this bill says.
2) We are going to make 50-60M more citizens and, just like people predicted in 1986, will encourage a new set of people to replace them "in the shadows" to wait out the next exercise in 15 or 20 years when we'll hear the same stuff about being unable to deal with so many millions yada yada yada.
3) Dems will find a way to pour even more free government money at all these potential Democratic voters, whether it be back SS credits, back income tax credits, reduced/eliminated fees/fines, etc.

Impeachment of the President for not doing the most important job for which he is elected, protecting the sovereignty of the US, however as this selling out of America moves forward I am sure I can be made to support it more.

I am not really keen on just handing people citizenship that came here illegally. But I am not sure making them all go back to where they came from, and applying to come here legally is realistic, so I am not really opposed to the whole Z-visa idea.

I also agree with you that the guest worker program should get scrapped. I have long been in favor of raising the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country anyway, I would rather raise that number and to streamline the proccess to make legal immigration easier than to put people in perpetual limbo, and honestly give people the legal opportunity to come, and the illegal opportunity to just hang around and not leave, which is what I think will happen with the guest worker program. They will just be illegal on the far end rather than from the beignning.

My biggest beef with this bill and previous bills is the enforcement. Previous bills have had enforcement provisions, but our government has never bothered to really pick up that aspect of the bills and do their job to stop immigration.

If we are going to stop immigration we have to make coming here painful for those who would do so illegally, and we need to especially make hiring illegal workers painful for employers. The pain has to make legal immigration the better option.

I don't see our government actually picking up that mantel, so what I see is another almost amnesty bill (I agree with you that the Z-visa technically isn't amnesty, but it is pretty close) that in the end will short shift the endforcement end, because the government isn't going to really go out of its way to enforce.

We may get the extra border agents, and we may get the fence, but I bet we don't really go after the illegals, and we sure as heck won't be going after the employers.

After the disaster of past reforms, which promised enforcement and amnesty but only gave us the latter, and made the problem exponentially worse in the process, don't you think that this time the government owes it to us to do it the other way around?

Considering this history, don't they owe it to us to PROVE that enforcement will actually occur this time BEFORE we address any of the rest of it?

That would seem both common courtesy and common sense.

Demanding the same thing from the country yet again, after past catastrophic failures, strikes me as particularly arrogant and dishonest.

We fell for it twice. We shant fall for it again. Prove it this time, or get out of our faces and stop wasting our time trying to sell Immigration Disaster Part 3.

Do nothing. If they wanted to secure the borders for real, it could have been done in separate legislation. This legislation is a fraud with agendas that will contribute to the end of America's borders, language, and culture.

This bill is not perfect, but it is better than the present situation and better than the likely alternatives.

For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection.

Obviously the author must not live in a border state as I do. When it gets to the point that the population is between 33% and 50% hispanic, drugs are flowing across the border like mad, gang violence and higher crime rates permeate the entire southwest, and every phone call you make asks you to press "2" for Spanish, then maybe you will realize that the answer to the problem is deportation of all illegals.

The INS, Border Patrol, and US Customs services are inept, undermanned and the most corrupt police agencies in America.

I was going to write a blog entry explaining why I cautiously support the immigration bill, but you did that for me. Thanks!!

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And statesmen at her council met
Who knew the seasons when to take
Occasion by the hand, and make
The bounds of freedom wider yet
- Tennyson, _To the Queen_

Mildly support is a copout. This is an up or down vote. Do you vote yes or no, and why?

Real change requires real change. -Newt Gingrich