The outrageous claims and behavior of those protesting proposed immigration legislation this past week are a direct result of a "deer in the headlights Congress" and White House that have effectively traded border and national security for an increase in political support from Hispanics. End of story.
In the four plus years since the terrorist attacks Congress has squandered an opportunity to fix immigration for national security reasons – and won’t have the opportunity again until America is attacked by terrorists for the second time. Its hard to play the race card against national security but Americans are already forgetting 9-11, so the race card is out again.
Liberals and Mexican activists in effect want America to turn a blind eye toward those whose first act in entering the US is to break the law. Employers want the labor supply, so they paralyze GOP members of Congress. The situation is a crisis and a mess. Inaction will only heighten the problem and tensions in society are sure to rise with these protests.
We must utilize technology to fix our system of tracking immigrants before we establish a guest worker program. No progress has been made in this area at all despite available technology and intellectual capital, along with a virtually unlimited budget to revamp our systems. As a matter of fact, the worst institutional technology in the world belongs to our federal government, which has trillions to spend on such projects but cannot even get to first base. The federal government is the only thing keeping the cathode ray tube industry in business.
Without the ability to track immigrants, background check all entering the country, and streamline the process to weeks versus years, illegal immigration will not slow down. We need to greatly increase the number of work visas but cannot because identifying and tracking those that are granted visas is utterly hopeless.
For now, the rule of law must prevail no matter what the consequences to the labor pool. Over 155,000 border crossings were made in 2004 by non Latinos – do any of us care to lose a few thousand more lives for the sake of appeasing business and leftist immigration activists?
March 26th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Apparently no one in the Bush Administration, certainly not Bush himself cares. Why, it’s all part of Karl Rove’s BRILLIANT plan to capture the Hispanic vote, build a future voting bloc, and keep big (corrupt) business in the Republican column.
Because everyone knows that the big government, compassionate conservative GOP is the only way to run government. All at the cost of our principles, and national security.