www.reason.com/links/links112805.shtml
Incidents like the one involving Soto, who was sent back to Mexico at lea st 17 times by US authorities before his deadly wreck two weeks ago, a re fueling popular demand for actionany actionat the federal, state, a nd local level. Across the nation, reliable weather-vane politicians lik e North Carolina Rep. Sue Myrick are rushing to demonstrate their tough- on-immigration credentials, lining up behind tougher immigration and bor der control legislation.
Fanned by talk-radio, not to mention Republican mania for some kind of wedge is sue now that they've abandoned fiscal conservatism, immigration is shapi ng up as the Us vs. Them issue, certainly for next year's midterm electi on and perhaps 2008 as well.
sniffing around Iowa and has the dreaded and dread-filled potential POTUS candidate's bookIn Mortal Dangeron the way. His Congr essional Immigration Reform Caucus now has 91 members and expects to get actual House floor votes on several of its reform bills when Congress r eturns.
GOP leadership in disarray, there is no telling how many votes the proposal might get. As ever, a clumsy Bush administration move sparked the political firestor m The White House spit out a half-hearted immigration reform plan, the core of which was a conceptually sound but poorly explained guest worker program.
A guest worker has to work somewhere, you see, and work means a job. This is an absolute article of faith among the immigration r eform camp. They believe, for example, that contrary to several decades of experience , there exists a wage rate at which American citizens will claw sweet po tatoes out of the sandy South Carolina soil with their bare hands, Jorge Humberto Hernandez Sotostyle. The reformers also promise harsh penalties on employers who hire illegal labor, a reflection of the certitude that the Bush administration is slo w to act on the issue because "big business" wants cheap labor. You know , those corporate sweet potato buyers who could pay $10 a pound for tube rs, but just like sticking it to the working man in between sipping doub le-scotches and buying yachts. However, nothing reflects the profound shift in congressional thinking ab out immigration than the sudden conviction that "anchor babies" are part of America's immigration problem. Children born of illegal parents in t he US become citizens automatically, thus serving to anchor their pare nts to the country, sucking up entitlements and public school seats in t he bargain. Along with a sturdy border fence, an end to anchor babies ha s become one of the magic-bullet fixes many reformers insist upon. "I'm all in favor of people from other countries becoming US citizens, but I don't know that it is appropriate to become a citizen automaticall y just by having the parents come into this country illegally and then b e born here," Rep.
Shadegg is one of 69 co-sponsors of a bill that would end America's polic y of birth-rights citizenship. At one time advocating this changewhich would seemingly require an amendment to the Constitutionwas mostly for show. But reformers have recently embraced the interpretation of the 14t h amendment offered by Chapman University School of Law professor John E astman.
testimony before the House Immig ration, Border Security and Claims subcommittee by arguing that the amen dment could be read to mean that children born to illegals in the US w ere not citizens precisely because, as illegals, the parents had not sub jected themselves to the jurisdiction of the US government. It is a controversial reading of the amendment, and the change would stil l face many hurdlesnot the least of which would be the Senate even if it were somehow to pass the House. But that such a fundamental change in American law is even under serious discussion underscores the degree to which immigration reform is a salient national political issue, as oppo sed to a state-wide or regional concern. There is no denying that House Republicans, Tancredo especially, intend to run with an immigration crac kdown for 2006 and see where it leads.
|
http://csua.com/feed/