[Red Badger]

Deja vu all over again............

[skeeter]

Two things give lie to Barone's thesis.

One, it wasn't our lack of capability to control the flow of illegals over the border, it was our lack of political will. With the growth of the hispanic population here there appears to be LESS of that will now.

Two, entitlements. There're more benefits available to illegals now and they're easier to get. As long as thats true the flow will continue.

So its true things have changed since 86 - if solving the problem is the goal there's less reason to offer amnesty now.

[allendale]

Politicians are silly. There are 200 million people living in cesspools with little or no economic opportunity in Mexico, Central and South America. When the economy in the US improves and there is a demand for low skilled labor, they will come regardless of US law.

[Da Coyote]

Put “dead and buried” next to the Repulsican Party’s grave should they actually bend over and get Obama’d on this.

[TADSLOS]

The difference from 1986 and now is one of magnitude that registers off the scale. 11 M illegals is the sales figure the proponents use to soften the pitch to Americans. The real figure is more than twice that amount and will balloon as soon as the green light is given.

Big government never makes things better for the good of the nation or resets itself that would risk giving up power, especially when the temptation of a huge "new" voting block of teat suckers stand at the ready to bolster that power.

[stuartcr]

It ain’t 1986 because circumstances and people change

[griswold3]

Once bitten, twice shy

[kabar]

The eight senators’ framework called for an “entry-exit system that tracks whether all persons entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.”

The 1996 US-VISIT ACT already addresses this problem. It was passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, but it was never fully implemented.

I have challenged Barone face to face on some of his arguments a number of years ago. He was and is an amnesty supporter. What really needs to be done is to change our legal immigration policies. Basically we need to go to a merit based system like Canada and Australia have vice the kinship system we have now and we need to reduce significantly the number of legal immigrants from 1. 2 million a year to around 300,000.

[zeestephen]

After listening to Rush interview Rubio, I think the political debate is over.

The GOP led House will narrowly approve Amnesty after worthless “guarantees” are written into the law.

Rush had no fire, no passion.

Conservatives have lost their last national leader on this issue.

Conservatives are literally assisting in their own political suicide.

[Georgia Girl 2]

With all due respect to Michael Barone who I usually agree with he is wrong on this subject.

Our problem is that the failed Narco state of Mexico has and is asking us to absorb their entire underclass. No nation can do that.

The border is still poruous and illegals cross at will along with the drug cartel. The border is not secure and nobody at the top level of our govt has any intenion of securing the border for the reason listed above. They have an agrement with Mexico. If we shut off the money that the illegals here send home to Mexico the Mexican GDP would decline by 40%.

No legislator will mention that we already have at least 4 guest worker programs in place to allow people to come in the US work and then go home. These programs have been in place for decades.

No legislator will tell you that approx 75% of the people who pick our crops are already US citizens.

No legislator will tell you that previous polls have shown only about 20% of the illegals are interested in coming out of the shadows and becoming US citizens. An amnesty will not bring the majority of illegals forward.

We need to vigorously enforce the immigration laws on the books and encourage as many illegals as possible to self deport while we increase the border security. At some point we may have to let a few of them stay but not 11 million or 20 million. Nobody knows the number for certain and we likely never will.

[showme_the_Glory]

Olly Olly, in come free.

[SeminoleCounty]

Michael Barone: Amnesty Liberal

The Rubio-Obama Amnesty is much worse than the 1986 Reagan Amnesty. And, where does Barone think the money is going to come from to fund Rubio-Obama?

[Will88]

Barone seems to miss the mark more and more these days.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

Click the keyword Aliens to see more illegal alien, border security, and other related threads.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

The means are there.. but is the will? Yes? OK. How about 1986 (again!)? During the Clinton years take a look.

This may not come through it is linked to a google "quick view" and is

FIGURE 1: STATUS OF THE EARNINGS SUSPENSE FILE (Tax Years 1937-2000) in CONGRESSIONAL RESPONSE REPORT Social Security Administration Benefits Related to Unauthorized Work, A-03-03-23053 (March, 2003 PDF), shows some interesting things about the Earnings Suspense File (ESF).

Notice the rocketing that occurred during the Clinton years. It represents millions and millions of people working on SS numbers that do not match Social Security master files for one reason or another. The mis matches are saved in a suspense file (the Earnings Suspense File, ESF).

They will never be deleted until they are transferred to the master files and credited to someone. Data are there from day one of SS. The ILLEGALs will all get SS credit for work done once they are legal and the suspended data are move to SS master files. That appears to be what happened following 1986.

Notice how the data dropped following the 1986 "reform". Then shot up and still blasting upward until the economy itself seems to have leveled it off (not shown).

[rmlew]

Barone is a wealth of information. He forgets nothing, but has not learned anything on immigration. Certainly not from the 1968 act, where Reagan was rolled by the left and there was no funding for enforcement. Obama has already made it clear that he wants no enforcement. Rubio has been forced to admit that the commission is not an enforcement-first approach. This is worse than the promises in 2007. This is not 1986. In 1986 we had a growing economy and low unemployment. Neither is true today. Between 2000 and 2010, we lost 400,000 total jobs while importing over 13 million people legally. No one knows how many illegals are in America. There is no rationale for this bill other than as dane geld to the Hispanic Lobby, who will thank Obama and blame Republicans. It is bad policy, bad politics, and suicide for the country. But rational thinking is all but a crime in DC.

[moonshinner_09]

Originally published April 03, 2006...Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants?It used to be that only open-borders activists said it. Now the entire political leadership of the United States is saying it. President Bush is saying it. Sen. Specter is saying it. Even Sen. Bill “enforcement-only” Frist is saying it:

“We are a nation of immigrants built upon the rule of law.”

Of course, that cute little addition about “rule of law” is nothing but boob bait for the Bubbas (a category of persons that, in the minds of our leaders, seems to constitute about three-quarters of the country); our leaders have as much intention to enforce the immigration laws as I have to fly to Mars next week. The part of the statement that counts is the business about “nation of immigrants.” To see the entire political leadership of our country pronouncing in unison this slogan, all as a part of an effort to push through the most catastrophic open-borders scheme in our history, is an Orwellian experience. If we’re a “nation of immigrants,” how can we be a nation of Americans?

To say that America is a “nation of immigrants” is to imply that there has never been an actual American people apart from immigration. It is to put America out of existence as a historically existing nation that immigrants and their children joined by coming here, a country with its own right to exist and to determine its own sovereign destiny—a right that includes the right to permit immigration or not. No patriot, no decent person who loves this country, as distinct from loving some whacked-out, anti-national, leftist idea of this country, would call it a “nation of immigrants.” Any elected official who utters the subversive canard that America is a “nation of immigrants” should, at the least, find his phone lines tied up with calls from irate constituents.

Of course, at first glance it seems indisputable that “we are a nation of immigrants,” in the sense that all Americans, even including the American Indians, are either immigrants themselves or descendants of people who came here from other places. Given those facts, it would have been more accurate to say that we are “a nation of descendants of immigrants.” But such a mundane assertion would fail to convey the thrilling idea conjured up by the phrase “nation of immigrants”—the idea that all of us, whether or not we are literally immigrants, are somehow “spiritually” immigrants, in the sense that the immigrant experience defines our character as Americans.

This friendly-sounding, inclusive sentiment—like so many others of its kind—turns out to be profoundly exclusive. For one thing, it implies that anyone who is not an immigrant, or who does not identify with immigration as a key aspect of his own being, is not a “real” American. It also suggests that newly arrived immigrants are more American than people whose ancestors have been here for generations. The public television essayist Richard Rodriguez spelled out these assumptions back in the 1990s when he declared, in his enervated, ominous tone: “Those of us who live in this country are not the point of America. The newcomers are the point of America.” Certainly the illegal-alien demonstrators in Los Angeles last week agreed with him; America, they kept telling us, belongs to them, not to us.
more@ http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=4976

[Altura Ct.]

Why This Is Not 1986 : Reagan tried this already, But it may indeed be different this time.

Charlie! Lucy swears she will not move the football...

[Fledermaus]

E-verify won’t work if you can’t enforce it’s usage. In 1986 we got the I-9 form. It was a joke and still is a joke. It’s never audited and requires some clerk in HR to just “look” at documents.

It’s like a Chinese menu...one from column A, one from B or C.