Hey, this Democrat is all for finishing the border fence, a subject Patrick Cleburne so well covered in this recent VDARE.com piece, “NY Times Denounces Border Fence. Liberal Readers Denounce NY Times”.
And I loved Ed Rubenstein's point made 5 years ago that finishing this fence would “cost less than two weeks of Iraq War”.
Furthermore, Cleburne joins Peter Brimelow in supporting Michelle Bachman on the long period of immigration sanity from 1925 to 1965 when she was attacked by the lead Washington Post editorial Michele Bachmann’s misplaced immigration nostalgia (September 15, 2011)
However, let’s not take our eyes off the real objective: to make sure that employers only hire legal aliens and American citizens.
That, folks, can only come with making E-verify permanent and enforced throughout the USA.
There is legitimate disagreement on how best to do this. It revolves around the language of the Lamar Smith bill, which gives the Federal Government the right of preemption over the states to enact laws about employer verification.
Not being a lawyer, I defer to others on how to work out this dilemma, but I strongly hope that the differences of opinion can be quickly ironed out and the good folks who support patriotic immigration reform can unite.
This summer, some of the responses from many of our friends about the present language of the Smith bill were as follows:
"H.R.2164 preempts the states from requiring use of E-Verify unless employees work for state or local governments. That's equivalent to giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who are currently employed in our country.
"H.R.2164 forbids the states from using their constitutional power to revoke licenses from businesses that hire illegal aliens unless there has been "a showing by the Secretary of Homeland Security, by clear and convincing evidence, that the employer had knowledge that an employee is an unauthorized alien." There is no likelihood that an Obama Administration will prosecute employers who use E-Verify but fail to fire the illegals, or who contract out part of their workforce to circumvent the system.
"The arguments for Lamar Smith's H.R.2164 are fallacious. We are told that only the federal government can do anything about the immigration issue, but the recent Supreme Court decision provides the definitive rebuttal to that."
"An additional way to get employers to obey the law against employing illegal aliens would be to amend H.R.2164 with Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) proposal to make E-Verify a condition for the employer to take a tax deduction for wages paid, a provision already adopted by Alabama. That would put the incentive on the employer where it belongs, and we would not need prosecutions or deportations.”
My view: this is a moment of huge opportunity. Unemployment stands at record highs, likely to go higher. Americans are becoming increasingly aware that the follies of their political leaders in importing over 100 million unneeded aliens since 1965 has turned America’s melting pot into a bifurcated hourglass, with many more poor, a far smaller Middle Class, and the richest elites in our history.
With one in six Americans in poverty and 25% of our kids going hungry, I bet a lot of Americans of both parties can see first hand what the situation has become.
But I am sorry to say that, on to immigration enforcement, I would rather trust the states than the Obama adminstration. I can only hope this is worked out soon.
Donald A. Collins [email him], a free lance writer living in Washington, DC. , is a long-time board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR). However, his views are his own.
