01/11/2014
Politico reports that the powerful Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte believes he has the “solution” for the problem of 11 million illegal aliens living openly in the shadows.
Note to clueless Republicans: illegal aliens don’t cross the burning Arizona desert so they can become citizens to vote in US elections. They come for American jobs that normally pay substantially more than employment in Mexico and points south.
A December Pew poll found that exemption from deportation is more important to illegals than citizenship. No surprise there.
Even many legal immigrants are not that interested in becoming citizens. They want the financial benefits without the responsibility of political participation or unhinging from their homeland.
In addition, only 40 percent of the 1986 cohort of amnesty recipients became citizens by 2009, as noted by the Wall Street Journal.
But back to the millions of illegals who cause so much head-scratching in Washington, what should be done with them is the big question vexing the big important brains.
How about … nothing. Leave them exactly as they are because they are getting along fine as is. (Of course, if they are caught drunk driving or shoplifting or engaging in document fraud, they should be deported after serving appropriate sentences.)
Life “in the shadows” must be quite agreeable since many illegals manage for years, as illustrated by Pew research from the paper Unauthorized Immigrants: Length of Residency, Patterns of Parenthood, December 2011. It found that “nearly two-thirds of the 10.2 million unauthorized adult immigrants in the United States have lived in this country for at least 10 years.”
The illegals would prefer to have the threat of deportation removed so they can continue to work at their stolen jobs, and legalization with its associated work permit would do that immediately, or as soon as the rubber stamps can be produced. Then they would have been rewarded for lawbreaking by getting everything they came unlawfully to get. For that reason:
Legalization IS Amnesty.
Congressman Goodlatte has been dreaming up enforcement strategies that can be made into legislation, but he may have forgotten that actually carrying out laws is the job of the executive branch. And the current President is arguably the biggest friend open borders ever had and will not enforce sovereignty after an amnesty any more than he has thus far. A Rasmussen poll from last October found only 5 percent of voters believed that an amnesty would include genuine border enforcement.
The majority of skeptics are correct.
Bob Goodlatte pushes immigration solution, Politico, January 9, 2013
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) says he sees “no reason” why current undocumented immigrants shouldn’t gain legal status as long as Congress enacts tougher border-security and enforcement measures.
In a Telemundo interview set to air Sunday, Goodlatte addressed the set of immigration principles that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said earlier Thursday is expected to be released in the “coming weeks.”
While not delving into specifics of the document, Goodlatte said the principles are meant to show the broader House Republican Conference how all the pieces of immigration reform would fit together and ultimately “galvanize” support among lawmakers.
Though reform has essentially been written off for dead this Congress, Republican leaders in the House have said they want to get an overhaul done and many lawmakers in the chamber are eager to pass a rewrite of current immigration laws.
Goodlatte outlined three pillars of an overhaul — ensuring border enforcement, fixing the legal immigration system and determining a legal status for immigrants already in the country illegally. He stressed that interior enforcement was a major point of focus for Republicans, noting that as much of 40 percent of undocumented immigrants did not cross a border illegally, but overstayed a visa.
“If we can have a way to get [enforcement] up and operating, I see no reason why we can’t also have an agreement that shows how people who are not lawfully here can be able to be lawfully here — able to live here, work here, travel to and from their home country, be able to own a business, pay their taxes,” Goodlatte, a veteran lawmaker who was an immigration lawyer before coming to Congress, said on the Telemundo show “Enfoque,” according to a transcript of the interview.
The principles effort is spearheaded by House GOP leadership, but key Republican lawmakers such as Goodlatte and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida have been consulted during the drafting stage. It’s not expected to be a long document; Boehner told reporters Thursday that the “standards and principles” would “guide us in a common-sense, step-by-step approach to dealing with immigration.”
While the leadership is taking charge on writing up the principles, other quiet conversations and meetings are occurring among Republican lawmakers who are amenable to immigration reform.
For instance, to that end, California Rep. Jeff Denham hosted a slew of fellow House Republicans in a meeting Wednesday to talk about immigration. During the session, which was attended by about 20 lawmakers, Republican consultant Frank Luntz discussed some polling and messaging on immigration. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, was also at the meeting, Denham’s office said.
Goodlatte’s committee passed four reform bills last year that each dealt with one different section of the current immigration system. But none addressed the issue of what to do with the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
In an effort separate from the drafting of principles, a small circle of House Republicans, including Diaz-Balart, have been writing a bill that would establish a pathway to legal status for current undocumented immigrants. Though the bill has not been released, it’s expected to combine border-security and interior-enforcement triggers with a legalization track, as well as some sort of a probationary period for immigrants on the path.
Another concern among Republicans is ensuring that President Barack Obama — who has repeatedly rankled the GOP by making changes to the health care law, such as a delay of Obamacare’s mandate for employers he issued last summer — actually enforces whatever laws that Congress may write.
Republicans are trying to work on solutions to address that issue. For instance, Goodlatte told Telemundo that one way to remove some discretion from the administration is that until security measures such as E-Verify or an exit-entry visa system are “up and operating effectively,” no current undocumented immigrants could become legalized.
GOP lawmakers also believe that state and local governments, not just the feds, need to be involved in enforcing the law, Goodlatte said.
“When you talk to people about doing immigration reform, you have to assure them and you can’t just do it with words,” said Goodlatte. “You’ve gotta do it with legislative language. Assure them that this president will not have the authority to simply flip a switch and say, ‘I’m not gonna enforce this. I’m not gonna enforce that.’ And that is hard.”
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