Sensenbrenner Says "Pathway To Citizenship" Will Queer Any Deal On Immigration

And he says it is amnesty, which it is, of course.

Although reasonable people may disagree on this, I think the main problem with the immigration plans offered by Bush and the Senate is this:

Most Americans saw the words "immigration reform" as meaning enforcing border security and allowing some legal guest-worker immigration. The idea, we thought, was no to increase the numbers of immigrants working in America, nor to increase the numbers of legal immigrants, but to regularize, legalize, and recognize some fraction of the immigrants working here already.

I didn't think "immigration reform" was going to be an amnesty, or a bonanza of new legal immigrant citizens, or a huge new number of legalized immigrant workers.

Bush and the Senate seem to think the only problem with illegal immigrants is that they're 1) illegal and 2) immigrants. So they have a solution-- we'll just make them all immediately legal, and in a couple of years, non-immigrant citizens.

Well, that does solve the problem, in the sense you won't have illegal immigrants anymore. You'll have legal citizen workers.

But that's not the way most of us were looking at the problem. We sort of thought the main problem was that we had too many low-skilled workers coming into America, displacing Americans who would otherwise be doing those low-skill jobs (as they historically have), and furthermore creating problems with public services, as they simply don't pay nearly enough in taxes to reach the break-even point as far as public services. I trust most conservatives understand that it's the rich who pay the lion's share of the taxes, federal and property and so forth; importing millions of people who pay little to no taxes, while having a great need of public services, just means that everyone else has to pay more.

I don't understand Bush's and the Senate Amnestyites' driving ambition to subsidize Mexico and Latin America by forcing the American taxpayer to pick up the tab.

Bush promised to reform Social Security and Medicare. His amnesty plan would make it worse. If legal immigration increases, that's just that much more of a drain on the already soon-to-be-bankrupt system. Young workers will pay into the system, and get paid out a bit more than they put in; you'll be paying the difference. That's bad enough, but the law generally allows every citizen to bring over his family members and then they, too, can become citizens, with all the rights of citizens. So grandfathers and grandmothers can be brought over, made citizens, and begin drawing expensive medical benefits for the elderly without having ever donated a dime to the system. Fathers and mothers can be brought over just before they reach retirement and similarly begin drawing benefits within a few years.

Furthermore, of course, Hispanics vote 60-40 Democratic. And that includes longtime Americans in the mix, who vote more Republicans. Among recent Hispanic immigrants, the numbers are probably 80-20 Democrats, at least for the first two or three generations. So, for every 1,000,000 new Hispanic immigrant citizens, we generate 600,000 or so net Democratic votes.

And don't give me that jazz about Hispanics being more "socially conservative." Fine. They're also more economically liberal, coming from nations with a socialist tradition. Anyway you slice it, they break heavily in favor of Democrats.

This is Bush's plan for a permanent Republican majority? Simply importing in millions of fresh Democratic voters every year?

Pretty soon the votes of current Americans won't count for all that much.

posted by Ace at 07:12 PM

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