Posted on 11/22/2011 9:18:40 PM PST by TBBT
...The Immigration Bill could have succeeded if the political class in Congress and the president had listened to the public and addressed the four distinct problems. Namely, secure the borders convincingly, expand the temporary worker program for skilled legal immigrants, establish a reliable legal immigrant identification program and then propose a reasonable program for the 12 million (and counting) illegal persons who broke our laws to get here, but not amnesty...
Interested in all views...
For the purist - from what I'm reading - Newts views aren't much different from Cain's or Palin's
Palin's: http://mothersagainstillegalamnesty.com/?page_id=15
My view as I posted elsewhere:
An idealistic view: Collect them all up, put them in buses and send them home.
Realistic view: That’s just never going to happen.
Better to close the border, enforce the laws already on the books, remove the incentives for coming here, and allow the numbers to fall via attrition.
Sign your life over.
Rush Limbaugh solution: 11 m illegals- let’s try deporting 1m and see how that goes. The other 10m or most of them will self-deport.
Yup. Cain and Newt have basically the same position:
Partial deportation, not blanket deportation. Only Bachmann is running on blanket deportation.
Cain’s immigration plan = Newt’s immigration plan, roughly. that’s the truth.
Simply bringing back the bracero program would probably be a good move.
Cain listed the most important point first - secure the borders first.
So, I guess Newt and others are saying they'd try to ram their plans down the throat of Congress and the nation that does want want their plan, just as Jorge did in 2006 and 2007.
All that would do is weaken the party, plus these plans will cost Republican presidential candidates votes in the primaries and in the general election - votes from the base. And the plans won't win any Hispanic votes.
1. Newt stated tonight about the amnesty of 1986: “We thought there were 300,000 and it tuned out there were 3 million.” Does anyone think the current number is actually 12 million?
2. The idea of determining winners and losers (who gets deported and who stays)is nothing more than a wet dream. If Republicans and Democrats can't agree on a budget, how can they agree on this? It's going to end up either everyone goes or everyone stays.
Newt realizes this (I am not sure Cain does) and, if elected President, I am as sure Newt will push for a blanket amnesty as I am that the Colts aren't going to the Super Bowl this year.
Newt has betrayed conservatives before and, given the opportunity, he will do it again.
Ask anybody with a home to take down the fence in their back yard. Bet you get no takers.....
Ditto!!
Newt or Mitt won’t fix the problem if they are elected.
Newt also stated that in tonight's debate.
So did Perry.
It's all so bogus. Everyone already knows the solution to the illegal alien Mexican invasion problem - target the employers and the benefits.
Arrest and fine the employers.
Cut off all the government benefits, including anchor baby status.
Problem solved - they'll rush back to Mexico.
“Collect them all up, put them in buses and send them home.”
Consider the logistics. Let’s say 50 people per bus. Perhaps a little more.. For 1,000,000 people that would be 20,000 buses. Then gathering them someplace, feeding and sleeping, sending them where? To Mexico, first need permission of the Mexican Government. Guatemala, El Salvador and points south. Again, need permission of Mexican government. It is several days to Central and Southern Mexico where many Mexicans come from. Feeding and sleeping along the way. For 10 million they would need at least 200,000 trips. How much would each deportation cost, collecting with law enforcers, legal proceedings to prove illegality, housing, transport, etc. Let us guess $5,000. So $5 billion for the first 1 million. How many others come from other places. South America, Europe, Asia, etc. Cost a lot more to send them back. No buses—ships, airplanes, etc. “It’s just never going to happen.”
A county in the greater DC area, Prince William Co., had a strong crackdown on immigrants who fled to nearby counties. Ruined the economy of the county. Housing worse than anywhere in the area, many businesses folded, tax base shrank bigtime, etc.
How much clearer does he have to be?
The whole article:
_________
Immigration Bill: Lots of Bad Ideas, and No Fence
June 11, 2007
By Herman Cain
The Comprehensive Immigration Bill debated in the Senate last week was dead on arrival because of too many competing agendas. Liberals wanted to keep illegal families together, conservatives passionately rejected amnesty, some businesses wanted more low-skill workers, other businesses wanted more skilled workers with a new temporary workers program for legal immigrants – and most regular folks kept screaming, “Where’s the fence?”
Comprehensive has become congressional code for: Let’s put a lot of agendas and stuff in the legislation and maybe the public will not notice the details. This time it backfired miserably, because people did notice the details and all groups dug in their heels for their key agenda item and their respective regular folks screamed loud and in great numbers.
Not since the outcry against the failed Hillary Care plan for universal health care in 1994 has there been such a broad revolt by the public. People have disagreed with proposed legislation before. It happens all the time. Usually Congress is able to smooth over the public objections during debate, pass the legislation and then hold a press conference and tell the public how great it is, and how hard they had to work to get good compromised legislation.
A well-known example was the passage of the Prescription Drug Bill in 2003. Democrats loved it because it expanded social spending. Republicans loved it because they thought it would buy votes from senior citizens, which it did not. And once again, the taxpayers had to pay for good compromise legislation that will cost over $900 billon instead of the original estimate of about $300 billion over 10 years.
The Immigration Bill was supposed to be another episode of good compromise legislation, even though Congress has no idea what it will cost. It is just bad legislation with different agendas glued together, while not emphasizing enough of the public’s number one priority – the fence! Not just wire, wood and concrete, but all the technologies we have available to stop the rampant inflow of illegal aliens into this country.
We have the technology to identify one mad cow and a chicken with the flu when they threaten our food supply. We can track one potentially contagious tuberculosis patient half way around the world when he threatens the health of thousands of people. And we can capture a crystal clear picture of a driver, his tag number and who is in the car with him going through an intersection a fraction of a second after a traffic light turns red.
But yet, Congress is reluctant to use that technology to shut down our borders, which threaten our national and economic security.
Just as the proposed bill was going down in flames, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the ever-liberal Ted Kennedy were asking for President Bush’s help in trying to persuade Republicans to support this bill to nowhere. Now that’s interesting. Where were they and the Republicans when the president was leading the charge with a good solution (personal retirement accounts) to the oncoming crash of the Social Security system? Nowhere!
The Immigration Bill could have succeeded if the political class in Congress and the president had listened to the public and addressed the four distinct problems. Namely, secure the borders convincingly, expand the temporary worker program for skilled legal immigrants, establish a reliable legal immigrant identification program and then propose a reasonable program for the 12 million (and counting) illegal persons who broke our laws to get here, but not amnesty.
The one positive out of this legislative disaster is that people should now see that if enough of them scream loud enough and often enough, they can influence their senators and representatives on ill-constructed legislation. We should not have to scream, but, unfortunately, that’s what our information-overloaded, frenzied media, overwhelmed and leaderless legislative process has come to.
Congress has allowed this problem to fester and grow for over 20 years, and for once in a few times the voters have refused to accept a bad solution to an even worse situation. Maybe next time they will listen to the voters before they try to pass glued together legislation.
Maybe next time, Congress will start with the fence!
The next week - he wrote this:
Political Class Tells Working Class: Here’s Your Immigration Bill
June 18, 2007
By Herman Cain
President Bush’s latest attempt to salvage the Immigration Bill has made it crystal clear that there is indeed a political class of those we elect, who blatantly ignore the wishes of the electorate. Despite the overwhelming outcry against the bill in its present form, the president and many members of Congress seem determined to pass a collection of glued-together agendas, which are far from being a comprehensive solution.
The Senate responded to the outcry by voting to not end debate, which prompted Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, to pull the bill from the floor for the time being. That time being until the president can twist enough Republican arms to change their positions to vote with the Democrats. The president’s attempt to do so in spite of the public feedback has alienated and disappointed many people who have supported him through thick and thin, especially the thick disagreements about the war in Iraq.
When the president and Congress seem to defy the public’s outcry, people are doubly frustrated and feel that it’s the political class against the working class, namely, those of us who work to pay taxes, which fund government, out-of-control spending and ill-constructed public policy.
The more we say no amnesty, the more they say it is not amnesty. The more we say border security first, the more they say we are working on it. The more we say no shortcut to citizenship, the more they say the Z-visa is not a short-cut. And the more we object to this version of the bill, the more they say we have to do something even if it is not perfect.
There is a big difference between not perfect and not acceptable.
It is not acceptable to not enforce current laws. It is not acceptable to not properly secure the borders first. It is not acceptable to catch and release illegal criminals because local, state and federal authorities are not working together. It is not acceptable, with the technology available today, to not have a temporary worker identification system that employers can rely on against fraud.
It is not acceptable to allow millions and millions of illegal immigrants to add additional strain to our already strained health care and Social Security systems. And it is not acceptable to pass a bill that will be an incentive for others to sneak into this country and wait for the next amnesty bill that’s not amnesty.
Our only practical response against the continuing abuse by the political class on the working class is to vote them out of office. But that takes time and we must be patient and persistent. The good news is that, within the political class, there are more partisan disagreements than agreements on other issues. This causes potential legislation to move very slowly through the process, while we try to elect candidates who will not disregard us once they are elected.
In the mean time, the working class has to continue to scream loud and long to at least mitigate some of the negative and unintended consequences of ill-constructed legislation. The public wants an immigration bill, but not one that appears to make a bad situation worse.
Maybe we did not scream loud enough in 2003 about the Prescription Drug Bill, which is now going to cost us over three times the original 10-year cost estimate of $300 billion. And even though the costs of Social Security and Medicare are growing exponentially, reducing benefits and raising taxes on the working class are the only band-aids that seem to gain traction in Congress.
Maybe we are currently not screaming loud enough about completely repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax. When it was passed in 1969 it was intended to punish less than 200 of the very rich for finding all the loopholes in the tax code. Today, unless Congress does something, over 20 million working-class families will have to pay additional taxes just for following the rules.
There is a long list of laws, regulations and programs that could have been better constructed. History has shown that Congress is very slow to correct mistakes and laws that have produced serious unintended consequences.
The working class obviously sees some serious imperfections in the proposed Immigration Bill that the political class chooses to ignore.
And once again, those imperfections would be at our expense.
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