Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Immigration, Debunking the Talking Points

Bordering on Fraud
Thomas Sowell takes on the politician's glib, fraudulent statements on immigration. Of course we all know how important illegals are to our agriculture. Why, without them we'd be paying $10 for a head of lettuce. Wait, Sowell says
The highest concentration of illegals is in agriculture, where they are 24 percent of the people employed. That means three-quarters of the people are not illegal aliens. But when will the glib phrase-mongers stop telling us that the illegals are simply taking "jobs that Americans won't do"?

It's seems that 75% of the those agriculture jobs are done by American's. Are those other jobs being mostly done by American's? What's next? Oh, that amnesty that's really not amnesty. Sowell:
Another insult to our intelligence is that amnesty is not amnesty if you call it something else. The fact that illegals will have to fulfill certain requirements to become American citizens is supposed to mean that this is not amnesty.
But let's do what the spinmeisters hope we will never do -- stop and think. Amnesty is overlooking ("forgetting," as in amnesia) the violation of the law committed by those who have crossed our borders illegally.
The fact that there are requirements for getting American citizenship is a separate issue entirely.

We have to make those illegals citizens. After all, it's impossible to deport 12 million people. Heh, I really like Sowell's answer to this:
There is probably no category of law-breakers -- from counterfeiters to burglars or from jay-walkers to murderers -- who can all be found and arrested. But no one suggests that we must therefore make what they have done legal.
Such an argument would suggest that there is nothing in between 100 percent effective law enforcement and zero percent effective law enforcement

If the politicians are going to grant amnesty to law-breakers, I need to start robbing banks. So, if we were to attempt to deport all these illegals, the economy will take a dive down. Not so, says Sowell:
The reverse twist on this argument is that suddenly taking 12 million people out of the labor force would disrupt the economy. No one has ever said -- or probably even dreamed -- that we could suddenly find all 12 million illegal immigrants at once and send them all home immediately. This is another straw man argument

Ohh, I really like this question. Sowell asks:
Why are people who are so gung ho for punishing employers so utterly silent about needing to punish government officials who openly and deliberately violate federal laws?

It's not only the violation of laws, the government blatantly ignores the laws. It's as if they never existed. And lastly, the issue of getting the border protected.
Putting unarmed national guardsmen on the border is another cosmetic move, a placebo instead of real medicine. The excuse is that it is not possible to train more than 1,500 border patrol agents a year. Meanwhile, we have trained well over 200,000 Iraqi security forces while guerilla warfare raged around them.

President Bush and the Senate need to realize that we aren't being fooled by them. I don't want to hear about "comprehensive immigration reform". They are selling us on the idea that to secure the border we need this huge new complex of laws, and that's a lie. It could be done today, if there is a will to do it. The volunteers already showed that it can be done. If they can't, or won't, secure the border, why should we trust them with immigration reform?

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