www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17649
com | April 8, 2005 More than 1,500 of our soldiers in Iraq have given their lives to ensure Americas safety. An emergency military spending bill to keep their comra des supplied with bullets and gasoline passed the House of Representativ es last month with the addition of several important domestic security m easures, including national standards for state drivers licenses. The Senate will debate the bill next week, and is considering an addition of its own: amnesty for illegal aliens. Ted Kennedy to relentlessly push the AgJobs bill (the Ag ricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act, currently S 359 ), which would grant amnesty to most illegal alien farmworkers, and thei r families (plus admit many, many more through a harmful temporary worke r program). Estimates are that as many as three million illegals could t ake advantage of this amnesty. Craig has said he intends to offer his amnesty as an amendment when the military spending bill is considered next week on the Senate floor. His hope is that if his amnesty is added to the Senate version of the bi ll it will be too difficult for pro-borders Republicans in the House to kill it when the two bodies meet to reconcile the different versions of the bill. Theres so much wrong with this its hard to know where to start. Firstly, regardless of the merits of bill, its simply irresponsible to hold up an emergency spending measure for an extensive debate on something as mome ntous as an illegal alien amnesty and equally irresponsible to pass such an amnesty without extensive debate. And theres little merit to the Craig-Kennedy amnesty anyway. Supporters o f the bill tell the soothing fairytale that this measure will help solve the illegal immigration problem, but this is a fairy tale weve heard be fore. Congress passed a one-time-only amnesty in 1986, and it supercharg ed illegal immigration, giving us an illegal population that is now twic e as large as before the amnesty. There was a farmworker component of that 1986 amnesty, too, which turned out to be possibly the most fraud-ridden government program in history. The story of that earlier amnesty would make you laugh if you werent cry ing.
claiming to have harvested purple cotton, or dug cherries out of the ground, or picked watermelons from trees. But the political pressure to grant amnesty to as many peop le as possible was so intense, that only a handful of applications were rejected. In the end, the number of farmworkers legalized exceeded the t otal number of actual farmworkers in the whole country. We would be guaranteed more of the same this time, because the Craig-Kenn edy amnesty has even fewer safeguards than the 1986 amnesty. And this isnt just an abstract matter of following the rules.
Mahmoud The Red Abouhalima, an Egyptian illegal alien cabbie in New York. It was only after he got his green card in the 1986 amnesty that he had the ability to travel to Afghanistan for terrorist training and then return to help plan the first World Trade Center attack, for w hich he is serving life in prison. Do we really want to find out what ki nds of bad guys the next amnesty will legalize, enabling them to work an d travel freely, preying on our society? And, last but not least, the Craig-Kennedy amnesty would cost the Treasur y billions.
a net cost to the federal government alone of $10 billion per year. Whe n they get amnesty, their incomes (and thus tax payments) go up a little , but their use of government services balloons, because they are now el igible. Our estimate is that amnesty for all illegals would nearly tripl e the cost to Washington, to $29 billion per year. The same measure that would enable our soldiers t o defend the borders of a newly free Iraq would also undermine our own b orders.
|
http://csua.com/feed/