Immigration Reform Details Not Appealing

The more we find out about this immigration “compromise”, the more the term sounds exactly applicable. Kris Kobach, an attorney representing plaintiffs in court cases against states that defy immigration law by handing out government benefits to illegals, warns us in the New York Post about the fine print in this Senate bill that threatens to surrender the southern border to all comers:

With a few exceptions, today’s immigration judges (who serve for life) are dedicated to enforcing the law, and they do a difficult job well. This bill forces all immigration judges to step down after serving seven years – and restricts replacements to attorneys with at least five years’ experience practicing immigration law.
Virtually the only lawyers who’ll meet that requirement are attorneys who represent aliens in the immigration courts – who tend to be some of the nation’s most liberal lawyers, and who are certainly unlikely as a class to be fond of enforcing immigration laws.
It gets worse. Immigration judges are now appointed by the attorney general – whose job it is to see to it that laws are enforced. The Senate bill gives that power to a separate bureaucrat, albeit one directly appointed by the president, making immigration courts more susceptible to leftward polarization.

That’s not something likely to make headlines in the coverage of this Senate collapse on security. Instead of embracing the independent judiciary to oversee immigration-fraud cases, the system put in place by the Senate will instead force out judges after a short period of time, to be replaced with activists from the immigration industry. Under those circumstances, what lawyer worthy of the appointment would agree to serve on this bench? They would interrupt their practices, only to be assured of unemployment seven years later. The only attorneys motivated to accept these appointment will be those with axes to grind on this debate — hardly a recipe for good jurisprudence.
Nor is this the only stealth bomb in the compromise. Kobach notes that Dick Durbin slipped in an amendment enacting the DREAM Act. This amendment will render moot the prosecution of nine states for giving in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens. This means that California can offer illegal aliens better tuition rates than it does for Arizona residents — you know, actual US citizens. Kobach has sued California and Kansas for violating a 1996 federal prohibition on such actions. Durbin’s amendment will ensure that both states and the seven others who have defied the law can continue granting privileges to illegal aliens that it doesn’t afford to American citizens.
What doesn’t the immigration reform compromise do? It fails to adequately fund or structure the government agency responsible for processing the guest-worker applications that will flood the government. The CIS cannot keep up with demand now, even with no amnesty of any kind facing them. Now the bill divides illegals up into two categories based on their time of arrival in the country and dictates that the CIS will have to determine the validity of these claims, using whatever evidence the illegals can supply. It apparently doesn’t give them extra funding or specific guidelines to accomplish this rather Herculean task, meaning that applicants will either be approved or denied more or less on the whim of the civil servant doing the processing. With millions of applicants ready to flood the already-overwhelmed CIS, how effective and sane does this sound?
The more one hears about this compromise, the more one realizes that the only things compromised are our national security, our border control, our common sense, and our pocketbooks.

Immigration Reform: Less Is … Well, Less

In the hours after the announcement of a compromise on immigration reform, it seems that details have been might scarce — never a good sign when legislators announce an agreement. If the deal actually satisfied anyone, the politicians would have had the wonks out in force in an attempt to impress the media and calm the passionate. The lack of detail signals that the compromise may be little more than an easy way out of a contentious battle.
The Washington Post and the New York Times both cover the story but neither has much on the particulars of the deal. The Post notes that the compromise keeps the temporary worker program and the path to citizenship:

The compromise would give illegal immigrants who have been in the United States for more than five years a chance to legalize their status and, eventually, to become U.S. citizens if they pay a fine and meet a series of requirements. Other rules would apply to those who have been in the country less than five years but more than two years. Illegal immigrants who arrived after Jan. 7, 2004, the date of a major Bush speech on immigration reform, would be required to return to their home countries, where they could apply for temporary worker visas. …
Like previous bills, the agreement would authorize the hiring of 12,000 new border patrol agents, deploy new technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles, require tamper-proof identification cards that would replace easily forged Social Security cards used now to obtain work and ratchet up penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Why that date? Did the speech suddenly replace English and actual legal entry as the primary requirement for citizenship? And while we’re dissecting this plan, does anyone notice that they seem to have forgotten something in this compromise? Perhaps the New York Times can shed some light on this:

Mr. Frist was swiftly confronted by angry conservatives who threatened the prospects for the compromise, which had been carefully cobbled together after days of difficult negotiations. They were particularly angry that Democrats were blocking efforts to get votes on several amendments.
One amendment would require the Department of Homeland Security to certify that the border was secure before creating a guest worker program or granting legal status to illegal immigrants. Another would have the legalization program bar illegal immigrants who had deportation orders or had been convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors.
Democrats said those amendments would gut the legislation, and added that they still needed detailed assurances from Mr. Frist and others that Republicans would defend the agreement in the face of strong conservative opposition when House and Senate negotiators sit down to reconcile their bills.

Let me get this straight. Blocking entry to felons and securing the border will “gut” this immigration “reform” act? It’s hard to imagine a worse set of circumstances than what exists now, but actually endorsing the entry of felons into the country while deliberately blocking efforts to secure the borders manages to soar far over that threshold. It moves the entire agreement from satire to farce.
And, I note, nowhere in either paper does the word fence get mentioned.
Let me be very clear on this point. I have no real problems with a program that identifies existing migrant workers and puts them on a citizenship track, assuming they pay their back taxes and a fine for breaking the law, once the border is secured. But security has to come first. It’s the primary reason for government to exist! In aan annual budget of $2.77 trillion dollars, it is beyond embarrassment that we cannot muster the political will to enforce our own law at the border. Then again, I suppose that building roads to replace railroads that we just built must take priority over silly little things like, oh, ensuring that terrorists don’t stroll across the Rio Grande.
The House has to stand firm on this point. Securing our border has to be the prerequisite of any reform effort. If the Senate cannot rise to the defense of American sovereignty and the security of our borders during wartime, then let the entire Congress come to a standstill until they discover their testicular fortitude. Nothing they will consider jointly has any higher priority than this issue, and if they cave this badly on this, God help us on any other part of the conservative agenda.
I guarantee you that Republicans who vote for this compromise can consider retirement, because none of them will ever advance to higher office after this. Why would we trust Bill Frist or John McCain with the presidency when they roll over on security and sovereignty as Senators?
UPDATE: Mark at RedState says this is where he gets off. Power Line has a poll up; be sure to cast your vote.

Boycott For Illegals On May Day

The traditional Communist holiday of May Day has been selected for a boycott protesting the push to secure the southern border of the United States, the Washington Times reports this morning. The timing is not coincidental, as the Stalinist sympathizers International ANSWER has led the effort to stage the economic protest:

Immigration rights organizers today will call for a nationwide boycott of work, school and shopping on May 1 to protest congressional efforts to clamp down on illegal aliens as part of pending immigration-reform legislation.
he “Great American Boycott of 2006” is only one in a series of large-scale events the protesters hope will sway lawmakers to put millions of illegal aliens on track toward permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.
“The massive March 25 march and rally in Los Angeles of well over one million immigrant workers and their supporters — along with protests and student walkouts throughout the United States — is irrefutable evidence that a new civil rights and workers’ rights movement is on the rise,” said Raul Murillo, one of the key organizers and president of the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. …
The Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) coalition, which organized the Los Angeles march to win “full rights for undocumented workers,” is confident its new “national action” will prove successful.
ANSWER’s steering committee includes the Free Palestine Alliance, the Partnership for Civil Justice, the Nicaragua Network, the Korea Truth Commission, the Muslim Student Association, the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It denounces as racism attempts to criminalize illegal aliens.

The selection of May Day as its target date reveals much of the philosophical underpinning of the illegals movement. They wish to deny the United States sovereignty over their own territory and control of its own borders. It follows from their political ambition to recreate the Communist hegemony that died in Europe from its own internal rot and to fuel the notion of mob rule in the name of a rising proletariat. Workers of the world, unite! and all that.
Someone should have warned them about the obvious nature of the date, but then again, the I-ANSWER crowd has always worn its love of Stalinism on its sleeve — right next to the Che Guevara images it wears on its chest.
It seems like a rather stupid idea, anyway, and one almost guaranteed to backfire on its promoters. For one thing, May 1 is a Monday, traditionally the worst day of the week for retail business anyway. Travel will be light, and restaurants more or less empty regardless of the boycott. Most travelers will have checked out of their hotels the previous day. If one could pick a day with the least amount of impact on the traditional job categories for illegals and their interaction with the public, May 1 has to rank in the top three this year.
And besides its watered-down economic impact, the notion that people who entered the country illegally will now obstruct American citizens and legal residents from conducting their business will generate as much sympathy as the sea of Mexican flags did during last week’s protests. It will backfire and polarize the immigration debate, generating more calls for strict enforcement and undercutting reasonable compromise. Why? Because most Americans will not back down when confronted with unreasonable demands, and the demands of the I-ANSWER crowd for unlimited and unfettered border crossings, complete with automatic qualification for the entire range of government safety-net programs, is completely unreasonable.
The proponents of illegal immigrants have continued to tie their own shoelaces together as a political strategy, and this will provide yet another embarrassing stumble.

Demostrations For Illegals Are No Civil Rights Movement

The demonstrations this week do not have any relation to the American civil-rights movement, Joe Hicks writes in today’s LA Times Op-Ed section. Hicks, a former director in the West Coast contingent of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — Martin Luther King’s organization — has spent his life working for civil rights but makes clear that those who cross the border illegally are, well, criminals by definition:

THE DEBATE over illegal immigration has reached a vigorous boil, with contrasting bills in the House and Senate and hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrating nationwide. The complexities of this debate seem lost on many of the protesters. Many claim that what lies beneath reform efforts is raw racism, leading to the view that the recent protests signal a new civil rights movement.
It’s simply not true. This nation’s civil rights movement of the 1960s broke the back of white supremacy that prevented black Americans (who were citizens) from enjoying the rights guaranteed to them under the Constitution. Undeniably, the freedoms codified by civil rights-era legislation have made life better for all Americans — regardless of skin color, gender or national origin.
Now, many Latino immigrant-rights organizers and their sympathizers seem to be saying that there is some inherent right being expressed when people sneak into the country, thumb their noses at the law and make fools out of those who wait patiently in foreign lands for visas to come to the United States.
It is quite clear that many of those participating in the demonstrations have adopted the stance of the beleaguered victim, perceiving frustration about illegal immigration as racism. Some comments have been painfully ignorant. One protester said: “I’m here to make sure that Mexicans get their freedom, their rights.”
During the student protests, the American flag was only occasionally on display, while the Mexican flag was omnipresent. A student said he was waving the latter in support of La Raza (the race), while another asked why illegal immigrants were “treated like criminals.” Perhaps he wasn’t aware that crossing the U.S. border without the required visa is now, and always has been, against the law.

Hicks brings a center-left perspective to these massive embarrassments, noting that the wave of illegals creates a downward pressure on wages in all entry-level areas of the market. Hicks writes about the stunning ignorance of teens who turn out for these protests, both in their lack of sophistication about the issue itself and their failure to grasp that the illegals compete for jobs that normally would have been filled by themselves and their friends. He also notes the irony of the demonstrations taking place on a day that honors labor leader Cesar Chavez, who fought against the use of illegals in the fields by agribusiness as a means to break the strikes he called.
Hicks has it exactly correct. These demonstrations did not occur to promote civil rights, but instead to demand an entitlement from the United States. The protestors want an entitlement to violate border laws, to use government services without paying income taxes, and to ignore American law in general. The fact that officials who rely on the social contract that springs from this rule of law to execute their official duties welcomed these protestors with open arms (he specifically mentions LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa) should embarrass the people who elected them.
We can debate how we want to handle the people who have already crossed the border after securing it against further incursions. Reasonable people can differ on this complicated issue. However, the basis for any practical resolution has to be the security of our southern border, as no program can succeed until we effectively stop the flood and establish credibility in our efforts. It isn’t a matter of civil rights, but a matter of law enforcement and wartime security. The fools out waving Mexican flags in the streets and asserting that “the border crossed us” only shows how much credibility we have to regain.

Was He Looking For Applicants?

Today’s USA Today headline: “Bush stumps for ‘guest worker’ program in Cancun”
He might find it more effective to stump for the program while in the United States. Do we really need an advertising campaign in Mexico calling for even more border crossing?
In the meantime, here are the images that the Mexica Movement want to promote from the anti-border enforcement rallies held earlier this week:
senns-march.jpg
Yes, American legislators as Nazis. Nice. Of course, the anti-Semitism of their own movements wouldn’t be germane, would it?
Here’s another sign they proudly display at their site showing how much the reconquitas love the United States:
if-you-think-im-illegal.jpg
That matches up with a description provided with another image that shows American flags held by marchers. Do they point to this to show their love of their adopted country? Not exactly:

One of the more negative parts of the march was when American flags were passed out to make sure the marchers were looked on as part of “America”.

Being part of “America” — note the scare quotes — is negative. And in case you really miss the point, we have this:

It’s the “Europeans” who are the illegals and should be driven out. At least no one can say they didn’t tell us exactly what they want — and it sure isn’t assimilation and a desire to become part of the American dream.

The Background On Reconquista

I’m in the middle of another e-mail meltdown, so I’m going to send you over to Brant at Strange Women Lying In Ponds, who reports what Southwesterners have known about the reconquista movement for years. It hardly argues for assimilation but instead demands a separatism that makes any effort on our part to enable it self-defeating. And as Brant notes, it has a healthy streak of anti-Semitism — as if we need any more of that than we already have.
Back when the e-mail works ….

George Will: Ich Bin Ein Ost-Berliner?

George Will makes his conservative case for the moderate approach to immigration reform, giving enough room for hard-line enforcement while arguing for eventual absorption of the illegals already inside the US. However, he starts out with an almost unforgivable analogy that will have border-enforcement readers seeing red before they ever get to the rest of his arguments:

America, the only developed nation that shares a long — 2,000-mile — border with a Third World nation, could seal that border. East Germany showed how: walls, barbed wire, machine gun-toting border guards in towers, mine fields, large, irritable dogs. And we have modern technologies that East Germany never had: sophisticated sensors, unmanned surveillance drones, etc.

East Berlin? Perhaps George doesn’t quite recall the purpose of the Berlin Wall, but I guarantee you it wasn’t to keep West Berliners out of East Berlin. The East German government and its Soviet masters built that wall to keep people from fleeing the despair and poverty imposed on the unfortunate half of the city and killed anyone they caught trying to cross it. It wasn’t part of an overall interdiction effort that promised to stop illegal immigration, drug traffickers, and terrorists from entering Communist territory; it formed the prison wall for the Gulag State and its inmates.
Israel’s border with the West Bank and Gaza provide a much clearer analogy. First and foremost, it’s built to keep people out, not create a nation of prisoners. It also provides deterrence from illegal crossings, forcing Palestinians towards well-manned checkpoints where security reaches maximum efficiency. The idea is not to kill Palestinian crossers, but to keep them from trying to enter Israel illegally at all. And, by the way, it works; it has been the single most important tool the Israelis had in ending the intifadas. (And by the way, it’s hard to argue that Israel isn’t a developed nation, that the Palestinian territories aren’t a Third World area, or that their border is less significant to Israel’s national defense than our southern border.)
The rest of Will’s column fares better, although I disagree with his emphasis on what will be an amnesty program in practice, if not in name. Will writes that security must come first, no matter what plan one has for the aftermath. No immigration reform will do anything to stem the flood of illegals coming across the border without effective and robust barriers to entry. Failing to provide such a system only encourages local landowners to protect their property themselves, an impulse which will lead to tragic outcomes.
Will favors the approach taken by the Senate on the rest of its bill on transforming 11 million illegals into citizens by forcing them to pay fines and back taxes, learn English, and register with the government. Had the Senate taken the border issue seriously, that may have been a reasonable follow-up. However, until we secure the border, all of this is smoke and nonsense. No illegal will enter a program that costs him significant fines and back taxes when all he has to do is stay quiet and keep crossing the border in both directions as he sees fit. As for learning English, that would certainly be a novel approach; we don’t even make our legal immigrants do that any more, as evidenced by ballots in a plethora of languages and government-sponsored translators at all level of public services.
At least Will sounds a reasonable note in the immigration debate, and his column is well worth a read — once you get past the implied analogy of America transforming itself into a prison state.
UPDATE: Fixed the title of the post. As Xrlq noted in the comments, it initially translated to “I leg an East Berliner.” I try to avoid doing that, actually. Xrlq thinks that Will just wanted to demonstrate that walls can be effective, but Bithead sees it more along the same lines as I do.

Illegals To Americans: We Hate America

It’s hard to imagine that the schoolchildren who engaged in a pro-illegal immigration rally yesterday helped their cause much, except to harden the polarization already felt on both sides of the issue. While our politicians in Washington talked about how the illegals came to the US to enjoy the American dream, their actions speak much more towards the reconquista that, as Michelle Malkin has written, lies at the heart of the triumphalism that they now espouse. The Los Angeles area school districts allowed 22,000 students to protest border security and the enforcement of immigration law Monday, and it produced moments like this one:
upsidedown004.jpg
That is a Mexican flag over an upside-down American flag on the flagpole behind the students that raised them. Note the display of unbridled patriotism of these American students — for Mexico.
Of course, the schools themselves see it differently. They say that the Mexican flag doesn’t demonstrate disloyalty to the US, but rather allows the students to show “unity”:

But UC Irvine professor Frank Bean said the flag doesn’t signify loyalty to Mexico but rather loyalty to one another.
“They are saying, ‘We are together in fighting against these people who are trying to make felons out of us,’ ” said Bean, co-director of UC Irvine’s Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy.

No, Professor Bean, by flying American flags upside-down under the Mexican flag, they’re showing a loyalty to Mexico that overrides their loyalty to the US. And then they have the temerity to demand that we allow them to live here without following our laws governing entry into the US as well as continue to provide government services to them. In the meantime, people who come here legally and wish to stay wind up having to go home and reapply for permanent residency. Joe Gandelman has a guest poster from Britain who cannot avoid leaving the US after coming here legally and showing nothing but loyalty to his new home.
The rallies in Southern California only ripped the lid off of a well-known dynamic in the culture that mixes native guilt with radical illegal-immigrant activism to fuel the La Raza dream of Aztlan, the reconquest of the the Southwest and its return to Mexico or existence as a separate nation. This radical notion has been around since 1969 and plays a part in the fringe politics of the Southwest. However, the increasing sense of entitlement for illegals in the area has led this impulse out of the shadows and into the forefront of the amnesty movement by enabling people to argue that the illegals are returning to their own land and that the US lacks the sovereignty to declare otherwise.
If the illegals and their support groups think this will win over the American people, they are very much mistaken. If they think they can intimidate Congress into action with these demonstrations … that may be another thing entirely, I’m afraid.
CORRECTION: Changed a typo from “American” to “Mexican”; thanks to several CQ readers for pointing out the mistake.

A Virtual Wall Brings Virtual Amnesty

The Senate will begin debate tomorrow on the new immigration-reform plan voted out of the Judiciary Committee earlier today. The comprehensive bill will create another pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens twenty years after the last time the government thought that we had illegal immigration licked and waters down the stringent border security that the House demanded:

Under the Judiciary Committee bill, illegal immigrants who pay a $1,000 fine and back taxes would be able to apply for a three-year work visa, renewable for a second three-year period. In the fourth year of work, the visa holder could begin a five-year path toward citizenship. A second guest worker program would open up legal agriculture jobs to 1.5 million undocumented farm workers.
The measure would also add as many as 14,000 new border patrol agents by 2011 to the current force of 11,300 agents and would authorize a “virtual wall” of unmanned vehicles, cameras and sensors to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border.
Unlike the House bill, it would not make illegal immigrants and those who assist them into felons, nor would it authorize the construction of massive new walls along 700 miles of the southern border.

As I have written repeatedly over the past two years, we simply cannot throw out 12 million people overnight, so some sort of guest-worker program is inevitable, if for no other reason than to get an accurate accounting of the aliens in our nation. Either that, or we will have to herd people into concentration camps, a solution that will never pass political muster even if were remotely possible logistically. That program could form a basis of a comprehensive immigration “reform”, if properly written.
That being said, the bare minimum necessary for such a program to succeed is border security successful enough that it forces those who want to enter the US to do so through either legal immigration or the guest worker program. And that is precisely where the Senate bill fails, and fails miserably. Rather than build barricades along the border that will force illegals to easily-monitored crossing points, the Senate wants to build a “virtual” wall instead of the real thing. They make it sound very high-tech, and they back it up with a little more than double the current number of border-patrol agents, but in reality all they provide is cameras and sensors to note the passage of ever-more illegals across our border.
Without real security at the southern border, any guest-worker program will fail. Why should the illegals register and cough up so much of their pay when they can easily cross over and keep everything they earn?
Immigration stalwarts might hope that the House approach will prevail in the joint conference committee that will reconcile the two bills, but that hope appears fading at best:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that he hopes the Senate will pass what he called “a responsible border security bill,” but he indicated he is willing to rethink the House approach. After meeting with ranchers and law enforcement officers on the U.S.-Mexican border, Boehner said those living on the frontier did not believe the House-passed border wall would work.
“If the people on the border don’t believe that the wall will have the effect that people here think, then we ought to reconsider it,” he said.

The Israeli wall works pretty darned well — so well that their entire national-security policy relies on it for protection against the terrorists that want to destroy their country. Such a border barrier would relieve the agents of the necessity of being everywhere at once, and they could instead form rapid-response to attempted incursions before they actually succeed instead of tracking illegals once they’ve crossed the border. It appears that Congress has not learned from the Israeli experience at all.
Recent demonstrations in Los Angeles and elsewhere seems to have rattled the Republican majority, but they have taken the wrong lessons from these spectacles. The message given by the massive demonstration is that when the government fails to take action in enforcing its own laws and securing its borders, those who break the law start believing they have an entitlement to continue doing so. And why not? They learned that lesson in the amnesty program of the mid-1980s, when the Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress decided that offering those already here an easy path to citizenship would somehow deter further illegal immigration. They also promised strict border enforcement, but somehow Congress never really got around to implementing it. Twenty years later, we’re talking about giving a free pass to the next generation of illegals.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Congress appears ready to establish itself as the 109th Asylum, with its fantasy walls and their insistence on granting amnesty while pretending it doesn’t exist … again.

Marching For Lawbreaking

I grew up in the Los Angeles area, and while I enjoyed the area for its diversity and its many fine choices for living, working, and entertainment, it has always had an aura on unreality. Angelenos literally demonstrated this yesterday by rallying a half-million people in favor of unsecured national borders in a time of war:

A crowd estimated by police at more than 500,000 boisterously marched in Los Angeles on Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall along the U.S.’ southern border.
Spirited but peaceful marchers — ordinary immigrants alongside labor, religious and civil rights groups — stretched more than 20 blocks along Spring Street, Broadway and Main Street to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting, “Sí se puede!” (Yes we can!).

Well, that description doesn’t show any reportorial bias, does it? “Ordinary immigrants”? Believe it or not, this is a news report and not the start of an editorial. (I should mention that this is the Los Angeles Times.)

Attendance at the demonstration far surpassed the number of people who protested against the Vietnam War and Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that sought to deny public benefits to undocumented migrants but was struck down by the courts.

Less than a half-million people demonstrated in California during the entirety of the Viet Nam War? Not only are Hector Becerra and Teresa Watanabe biased, but they can’t write worth a damn either.

“There has never been this kind of mobilization in the immigrant community ever,” said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “They have kicked the sleeping giant. It’s the beginning of a massive immigrant civil rights struggle.”

I’m sure they think of it this way, but illegal immigrants have been getting a free pass in California for decades. The state has never had the will to actually do anything about cracking down on illegals and their access to government services. Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly but got hijacked by the Ninth Circuit, and successive state governments have washed their hands of the problem ever since.
The problem isn’t immigration or immigrants — and they know it. The problem is illegal immigration, an uncontrolled wave of people flowing into the country. Even in peacetime this creates a huge problem for law enforcement and a host of government services, including education, welfare, and health care. In an era where Islamofascist terrorists seek entry to the country in order to attack it, the notion that our borders should be thrown wide open and immigration laws go unenforced is suicidal beyond imagination.
This country has always been the most welcoming of legal immigrants. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side came here from Italy and Eastern Europe, and three generations before that my father’s great-grandparents escaped the Potato Famine. In all cases, they managed to enter the country legally, respecting our laws from the outset of their relationship with America. No one is entitled to enter this country unless they follow those laws and meet the requirements.
I have some sympathy for the idea of guest-worker plans, but those only work once the borders have been secured. In truth, the marchers in LA don’t believe in borders at all; the leaders of the “immigrant” community still believe that the southern border is illegitimate and that the Southwest was stolen from Mexico, and that they have an entitlement to cross them at will. That’s what lies behind the march yesterday and the activism in Southern California that fights every effort to enforce border control. I have no sympathy for people who refuse to respect our borders and our laws, regardless if they march in the hundreds of thousands or not.