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July 30, 2004
 Immigration:
The Line Holds In Congress
By
Joe Guzzardi
With Congress safely adjourned until
Labor Day (phew!), now is a fine time to evaluate how the
immigration reform movement is doing on Capitol Hill.
I’m happy to report that the news
from the Hill is quite good. We’ve hung tough and stood
off furious attacks by our foes.
Most helpful to our cause is that
arguments for more immigration or more
non-immigrant visas are intellectually barren.
This is not to suggest that these
arguments were ever particularly persuasive. But now
so many immigrants have
waltzed into America that the Establishment can no
longer ignore the negative consequences.
Hold onto your hats, now! Even the
New York Times’
Bob Herbert admitted, in a carefully worded July 23rd
Op-ed entitled “Who's
Getting the New Jobs?,” that “new immigrants”
(in which Herbert includes illegal aliens) are taking
jobs away from Americans.
No doubt Herbert has been reading
VDARE.COM’s own
Ed Rubenstein. He
reported the same findings more than two weeks
earlier.
Here are the two biggest Hill
accomplishments over the last few months:
-
Despite intense pressure this
spring from the
hotel and tourism industry to pass the
Save Our Summer Act 2004 that would have increased
H-2B visas from 66,000 to 106,000, the bill never came
up for a vote. Since summer businesses have continued
to operate normally—VDARE.COM has not received word of
any failures—claims by some small business owners that
they might have to close shop turned out to be
alarmist.
-
The AgJOBS bill, despite having a
filibuster-proof majority of 63 cosponsors was not
voted on either. Senate Majority leader
Bill Frist, presumably acting on
instructions from the White House, maneuvered to
kill the bill for this Congressional session.
Do not underestimate the
significance of “no vote” on either the Save Our Summer
Act 2004 or the
AgJOBS bill. It’s a huge triumph.
I asked
Roy Beck, Executive Director of
NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation, to
comment.
Regarding the failure of the tourism
lobby to increase the H-2B visa cap, Beck told me:
“Nothing came to floor of either house. Nothing
possible until September, after official summer
vacations!
“Some of the resorts got around the H2B problem by
exploiting loopholes in the J visas. But I'm not sure
they will brag about that. It seems to me that we won a
gigantic public relations victory after calling their
bluff.
“Where was summer cancelled or even impeded
because of lack of H2Bs?”
And as
for the even bigger score regarding the
stalled AgJOBS bill, Beck continued:
“It really is remarkable that AgJOBS did not come to
the floor of the Senate after getting 63 signers,
including the majority of Republicans.
“The Washington Post [“Bush's
Retreat on Immigration Reform,” By Harold
Meyerson, July 21, 2004] has made it clear that it
believes the reason was that the White House got a huge
message from the American people (especially Republicans)
after
Bush’s January amnesty announcement. Bush doesn't
want anything coming up for a vote that might remind his
base how much he abandoned it. In addition, Senators
(particularly the GOP signers) got such a loud outcry on
AgJOBS that many of the signers privately begged Frist
not to bring it up for a vote.
I can't think of a much bigger or clearer example of
the power of public opinion to stop the power of elite
lobbies. The public’s opinion aced the combined power of
the
AFL-CIO,
Chamber of Commerce,
Catholic Church,
most Jewish groups, the
liberal Protestant establishment, the ag business ,
the
open-borders ethnic lobby, the majority of
major newspaper editorial boards that took a stand
and the Mexican government.
The AgJOBS coalition passed the magic 60 number of
co-sponsors in March and applied every bit of lobbying
muscle it could muster to get a Senate vote that month.
We will enter September with nothing having been done on
it.
Every wave of protest against Bush last winter and
against Senators since then has culminated in this
victory thus far.”
The bill’s sponsor, Idaho Republican
Senator Larry Craig, confirmed Beck’s analysis. In a
July 12 Roll Call story by Emily Pierce, headlined
“Frist Blocks Craig’s Immigration Measure,” Craig
was quoted as saying:
“There is a strong effort on the part of my leadership to
block my effort in coming to the floor with a strongly
developed, bipartisan piece of legislation. I surely
thought the underlying bill, with 60-plus cosponsors and
my amendment with 63, ought to be something that can come
together. Apparently, it can't, or it won't."
In the end, Craig was undone by the
fear among aware Republicans that no matter how
vehemently he denied that S.1645 is an amnesty, the
people weren’t fooled.
Craig’s home -state colleague
Senator Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) correctly argued that
S.1645 would reward illegal immigrants by giving them a
direct path to permanent residency.
Said Crapo:
"Larry
believes this does not provide amnesty, but whatever word
you use, I'm concerned about those who come to this
country illegally getting in line ahead of those who
stayed home and tried to get in legally."
Numbers USA’s Beck sees these two
Hill wins as part of a continuing pattern of significant
victories by the immigration reform movement.
Summarizing, Beck told me:
“Five
amnesties were passed by Congress in the 1990s. But
since 2000, not a peep of an amnesty has been able to get
through. The open-borders folks have not even tried to
push the Section 245i
de facto amnesty for more than a year after being
beaten so badly and repeatedly on it.
“Don't get me wrong, the amnesty lobby will keep
coming back over and over. We cannot let up. But the
fact that we are going into conventions without an AgJOBS
amnesty, without a
DREAM amnesty, without a Section 245i amnesty,
without an H-1B increase, and most amazingly of all
without an
H-2B increase, is an incredible victory for the rag
tag army of loosely organized, modestly funded national
and local organizations.”
The
immigration reform message—“Enough is enough!”—
has come across to Congress loud and clear. This success
is heartening.
As
VDARE.COM keeps
saying, a journey of a thousand miles starts with
single steps.
Joe Guzzardi [email
him], an instructor in English at the Lodi
Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column
since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM. |
