The Rocky Mountain News has the reaction to President Bush’s immigration enforcement plan. Here are a few of the highlights:
Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver: “I still disagree with the president on the use of the National Guard, but I completely agreed with him on the other things he was saying. It may be the first time I agreed with the president since he was elected. We need to have a strong enforcement of the border, and I think we need to increase funding for the Border Patrol and surveillance. I think it’s important to have a guest worker program. I think we have to have some road to citizenship for people who have been here a long time.”
Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Fort Morgan: “Putting National Guard troops on our border and ordering them to use little more than their binoculars is not a long term solution to our illegal immigration problem. I applaud President Bush for focusing on more border security; however, I would like to see him push the Senate to pass permanent solutions that close our porous borders, utilize emerging surveillance technologies, crack down on employers that knowingly hire illegal workers and fund local law enforcement so they have the ability to enforce current immigration laws. The House is focused on these concerns and I would like to see the president push the Senate hard to drop any amnesty plans and pass a tough border enforcement bill.”
Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Littleton: “It appears that the Administration has begun to understand the breadth and depth of frustration with our open borders, and I welcome the president’s support of increased enforcement. But if the president thinks by taking one step forward with enforcement the House will follow him two steps backwards with amnesty, he’s confusing us with the Senate. The American people understand that blanket amnesty is not a pre-requisite for border security.”
Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Denver: “I am deeply concerned that the militarization of our borders, both to the north and to the south, is a shortsighted strategy which has far reaching repercussions on our relationships with nations throughout the Western hemisphere. We do not need another short-term fix to the immigration problem, but a long-term, comprehensive solution to securing our borders, enforcing our laws and dealing with the human and economic reality of the millions of undocumented workers currently living in the U.S.”
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Bill permits 193 million more aliens by 2026
By Charles Hurt
The Washington Times
May 16, 2006
The Senate immigration reform bill would allow for up to 193 million new legal immigrants — a number greater than 60 percent of the current U.S. population — in the next 20 years, according to a study released yesterday.
“The magnitude of changes that are entailed in this bill — and are largely unknown — rival the impact of the creation of Social Security or the creation of the Medicare program,” said Robert Rector, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who conducted the study.
Although the legislation would permit 193 million new immigrants in the next two decades, Mr. Rector estimated that it is more likely that about 103 million new immigrants actually would arrive in the next 20 years.
rest:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060516-125016-4401r.htm
Sen. Salazar clearly sees himself as the Hispanic Senator, not the senator from Colorado.
He’s putting his political career in the hands of law breakers and those who support porous borders, not to mention the farmers who eagerly hire illegals and exploit their vulnerabilities.
The question for Sen. Salazar is: Whose side are you on, Senator? America’s or Mexico’s?
At this point, even though your heritage is Spanish, not Mexican, as I understand it, you’re siding with America’s enemy, which is unforgiveable.
Isn’t it ironic that the left wing is promoting illegal immigration and the illegal hiring of illegal workers who are treated like slaves, given no access to decent health insurance coverage, unprotected by labor laws or our criminal justice system. How can a lawyer, a former attorney general of the state of Colorado be so dissmissive of our laws and legal system.
How can a good Catholic like Salazar be so willing to take from the poor rather than to help poor, under-employed Americans whose wages are depressed by illegal immigration? I thought Catholics were focused on helping the poor learn to earn money, not on taking work and money from them by backing illegal immigration?
Is political opportunism at work? Shallow thinking? Racism?
That’s how it looks to anyone who’s paying attention.
Sen. Salazar is climbing the political power ladder on the backs of the poor.
What a disgrace to Colorado.,
Remarkable…I was going to post the same article you beat me to it.
This is insanity. Our state legislature has failed us; and the US Senate is ready and primed to sell us all out. Nearly all elected officials and those that were appointed that are in a position to have a backbone and do something about this, have failed miserably in upholding our Constitution and the laws already on the books.
Lefties and Righties–when the heck are we going to march on our own and stop this madness? They MUST be held accountable.
I am so close to switching to independent it hurts…
The “193 million more aliens” number is just nonsense!
I don’t know where Charles Hurt pulled that 193 million number from, but they just don’t add up.
Let’s do the numbers, shall we?
The vast majority of the illegal aliens today are citizens of Mexico. It’s very hard to say what percentage of the estimated 11 million illegal aliens we have today are Mexicans, but let’s say about 7 million of them are Mexicans. Mexico is also by far the most populous Spanish Speaking country, as its neighbors to the south in Central America are very sparsely populated and numerically not primary contributors to our pool of illegal immigration. South American countries like Brazil, Peru etc contribute but the length of the trip keeps the overall numbers down, so this seems to be a reasonable assumption.
There are about 92 million Mexican citizens out there, 7 million of which are already here illegally. (This doesn’t count the Mexican citizens that are here legally). That means that if every man, woman and child in Mexico packed up and moved here illegally, we would still have only 85 million additional people. Of course, even with an open border, a majority of Mexicans are going to stay right where they are today — many don’t have the money to make a trip like this, and others are too well-settled where they are to want to make such a trip. I can’t even imagine a scenario where more than about a third of the Mexican population chooses to permanantly migrate to the U.S., leaving us at only about 26 million additional Mexican citizens illegally in this country. But, just for the sake of argument let’s move the whole country of Mexico to the U.S. for another 85 million people here in this country.
Where do the additional 117+ million illegal aliens come from? Not from Latin America, certainly — we’re already assuming that Mexico has been completely depopulated. Presumably, the author must be assuming some kind of unprecedented wave of immigration from Asia — Africa simply doesn’t have the population base to contribute that many people, and Europe has never been a big contributor to illegal immigration. However, there are simply not enough airplanes, ships, etc to bring that many million Asians to this country, even if we dedicated whole navies of container shipping just to carry all of those people over here full time! 150 years of Asian immigration has only given us a total Asian-American population today of 11.8 million people. Does the author seriously think that somehow the Asian population is going to be able to jump 1000% in that short a period of time? It’s not going to happen.
I’m not saying that illegal immigration isn’t a problem, but this kind of editorial makes me wonder if these outspoken opponents of immigration might need a little bit of remedial arithmetic. Anyone with with a back of an envelope can figure out that this number was just pulled from thin air — and THAT, my friends, doesn’t do much to help the credibility of immigration opponents.
The Bible strictly forbids treating illegal aliens as criminals. Deuteronomy 10:17-19.
Redfox, I’d agree that the number out of that study could be way off. Then again, if anyone can think of ANY estimate dollarwise or whatever that the feds or those in the system have estimated, that turned out to be correct. It is usually a much larger number.
Regardless, based on your own estimates (which is fine for the sake of talking about this), we’re still talking about tens of millions of people. Even if we just took the mccain/kennedy proposal>>when you look at the details ie once they’re granted amnesty, or are now legal, they can bring up to __number of people up here with them, then you have the explosion. If they procreate more rapidly than american born citizens do (which they do), it won’t take long to have people that came from south america (not just mexico by the way), be the largest block in the country.
Daisycutter,
Well, my point is that when one side’s numbers are that skewed, it’s hard to trust anything else they say, but…
I agree that having tens of millions of new illegal aliens in a short-period of time isn’t the best outcome. However, my point is that EVEN WITH a totally open border, the incremental number of new aliens is not really all that high relative to our 300 million population. So, we can conclude several things by this fact. First, we can conclude that current policies aren’t that effective in deterring illegal immigration. Second, a guest-worker program isn’t likely to alter the total numbers of resident aliens very much one way or the other; it would just make more of them legal.
I would also say this, let’s just assume that the end result of the Senate bill as that there will be 30-40 million more people here bu 2026 that would not otherwise be here, only a portion of whom are from Mexico/South America. That’s only 10-13% of our total population. Doesn’t really sound like the end of the world, does it? Natural population growth by US citizens of our various races (through births) will far exceed that number. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that that’s the goal we should shoot for — but if that’s really the worst-case scenario it’s pretty hard for me to get too scared by it.
Oh, by the way, PLEASE stop talking about immigrants having lots of babies and increasing Hispanic populations. I don’t need to remind you that Hispanic-Americans of any race are valued members of our society and as American as you or me. In fact in a free country they are welcome to have as many babies as they feel appropriate, just like you or me. Last time I checked it’s a free country. Also, remember that just because someone’s parents are illegal aliens doesn’t mean that they are, or that they should be tarred and blamed for what their parents did. I’m sure you’re decent and not prejudiced, but when you start talking that way, it’s easy to sound like it.
I never said anything about white…it’s not about colors. The fact is though that hispanic, latino, ‘south american’ folks have kids at nearly twice the rate american families do. While we’re at it, so do muslim’s (see France). Birth rates and life expectancy numbers are serious numbers to consider.
I don’t have any issues at all with ‘hispanic’ or whatever, but when you put millions of people into a country, and many of them don’t assimilate enough to learn the language and all of that, you end up with a block of people who happen to be living in america but don’t feel like their americans…again see France.
The other big issue here is that these illegals drive down wages of the jobs citizens once had. Just like H-1b’s drive down wages for IT workers who are citizens. I’m in the business of staffing, and even back in 99 and 2000, in IT’s prime, there still was NEVER a job requirement given to me that I could not find a citizen who was qualified. We have qualified people, but the companies lobby for cheap labor, and they get it. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: A meat cutter 10 years ago averaged 19/hr. Today that same job averages 9/hr. Why? Go to any meat packing facility and you’ll find the majority of workers are day labor types that get paid weekly, some daily.
You should read the writings and comments about the 14th ammendment. The “anchor” provision was not meant for people from other countries to come here and make citizens of their kids….it was intended as a move to force the welcoming in of children of slavory survivors. Canada even changed their laws regarding ‘anchor babies’.
Senator “Hold the Door Open” Salazar’s comments about the Bush Plan are almost identical to Mexico President Vicente Fox. I guess we know where the Senator got his talking points from.