NY Times Editorial -- The Fence Campaign:
President Bush signed a bill to authorize a 700-mile border fence last week, thus enshrining into federal law a key part of the Republicans’ midterm election strategy. The party of the Iraq war and family values desperately needs you to forget about dead soldiers and randy congressmen, and to think instead about the bad things immigrants will do to us if we don’t wall them out. Hence the fence, and the ad campaigns around it.Read the entire Editorial here.
Across the country, candidates are trying to stir up a voter frenzy using immigrants for bait. They accuse their opponents of being amnesty-loving fence-haters, and offer themselves as jut-jawed defenders of the homeland because they want the fence. But the fence is the product of a can’t-do, won’t-do approach to a serious national problem. And the ads are built on a foundation of lies:
Technorati tags: New York Times, Immigration, Senate, Bush, Republicans, Border Security, news, commentary, editorial
2 comments:
The linked NYT editorial is full of highly misleading statements. Let's look at a few:
A. Whatever they want to call it, the Senate bill would be perceived as an amnesty by millions of prospective illegal aliens around the world, and they'd come a-running. Saying "it's not an amnesty" doesn't mean a thing if everyone else thinks it is.
B. Those "immigrants" wouldn't get to the back of the line: they'd still get to live here and they'd be ahead of those in foreign countries who've been (legally) waiting to come here.
C. The MSM has been quite successful in painting those who support our laws as "extremists" and those who want to reward law-breakers with "comprehensive" "reform" as "moderates" (e.g., Giffords). If you actually look at what, for instance, the Senate bill would do, it's clear that those who support it are in favor of a truly radical policy that would do tremendous damage to the U.S.
The Senate Bill is only "perceived" as "amnesty" because the Republicans tell them -- erroneously -- that it is. It is far from amnesty (definition: an official pardon for those convicted of an offense). Note: "In May, the Senate passed a bill that had a fence. Not only that, it had money for a fence. It also included tough measures for cracking down on illegal hiring. It demanded that illegal immigrants get right with the law by paying fines and taxes, learning English and getting to the back of the citizenship line. It went overboard in some ways, weakening legal protections for immigrants and hindering judicial oversight. But it went far beyond the fence-only approach. Its shortcomings and differences with the House bill might have been worked out in negotiations over the summer. But instead, House Republican leaders held months of hearings to attack the Senate bill. And all we were left with was the fence."
The crux the Senate bill was the tough provisions for cracking down on illegal HIRING. The reason immigrants pour across the borders is because the government ignores the laws that criminalize hiring them. If the government stopped illegal hiring practices, there would be no MOTIVE for immigrants to cross our borders, i.e. no jobs to be had.
You miss the point of the article completely. Whatever your solution to the illegal immigration problem, the earlier bill had some teeth as opposed to the bill pushed through (FOR POLITICAL REASONS ONLY) which basically says build a partial border fence while not providing the funding and while knowing full well that no fence can really keep anyone out. It's simply a waste of money and time and doesn't begin to solve the problem.
As long as Republicans control congress, Illegal immigration will continue for one reason: their coffers are filled by the industries and businesses that want to illegally hire them for below minimum wage jobs -- and have the politicians look the other way.
There is no convincing factucal-based case, by the way, that illegal immigrants are hurting our economy, and historically, there never has been.
That said, I do believe the problem should be addressed -- not for the ridiculous xenophobic reasons touted by Republicans, but because the current situation is not fair to those who immigrate legally and because it allows for laws already on the books to be ignored.
Most of the problem could be solved, as I said, by penalizing and/or jailing those who hire illegals -- but it will take a Democratic Congress to do that.
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