Sorry, but I ain't buyin' it. Bush's proposal and the Senate bill both allow legalization of those already here, which is just plain NOT ACCEPTABLE. If any legislation offers "a path to citizenship" OTHER than "go home and get in the LEGAL immigration process line", it is bogus.
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Sorry, but I ain't buyin' it. Bush's proposal and the Senate bill both allow legalization of those already here, which is just plain NOT ACCEPTABLE. If any legislation offers "a path to citizenship" OTHER than "go home and get in the LEGAL immigration process line", it is bogus.
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If we presume that a legal immigration process line exists in Phoenix rather than the border, we are talking about a few hundred miles as the only difference. That legal immigration process line can be computerized to accelerate the activity and expand the numbers to arrange that "the back of the line" equates to about 4 hrs of delay.
So given this, do the 400 miles really matter? These people are criminals and are being criminally punished with a fine and strict . . . more or less parole requirements. When they have paid their criminal debt to society, they are just like people who pay a traffic ticket -- lawbreakers who paid the price and are now allowed to continue their lives.
So . . . if the priority is what Bush says it is, Border Security, this seems to work. And don't reply that Bush lied and people died (when your cover slips) because it doesn't matter what Bush's preference would be. If the money is allocated to Border Security, it will get spent and then paranoia would require you to believe that an entire department has no one in it willing to go to the news media and tell them they have been instructed to get paid and explicitly not arrest the influx.
That "legal immigration process line" is the source of our current problems. You think anyone would pay some thug for a trek accross the desert in the summer, or to be stuffed into the back of semi if there was a realistically obtainable way to come here legally? By realistic, I mean in some reasonable length of time, like a year tops. Most of those who come are young adults, or teenagers. At that age, a year is a long time. Those wouldn't have to be, and should not be "citizenship track" entries either.
For all the talk of "high tech fences" and so forth, I would only observe that we haven't had much luck stopping drugs and in some cases weapons, from being smuggled into the country, despite spending condsiderable coin on the effort.
Only the military would stand a chance of blocking the border, and it would have to be greatly expanded to do so.
Fix the problem, even if that means "regime change" in Mexico, don't just try to treat the symptoms.
Everyone rails against Vincinte Fox, but the fact remains that his party is less nationalist, and is not socialist, than either of the other two major parties in Mexico. PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and the farther left PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution which only split from PRI in the late '80s), ismore corrupt, more leftist, and more hostile to the US.