12/18/2010
Further from Mickey Kaus, who seems to be taking this seriously:He’s got more, including the point that there’s a middle ground between the Open Borders types and "Those who actually want to deport those here illegally, the faster the better. They tend to see Position 2 as a wimpy acceptance of de facto "amnesty" for 11 million people who shouldn’t be here." There are not a lot of people out there calling for more deportations, but I’m one of them — see Chingo Bling Is Wrong–We Can Deport Them All, for one example.DREAMageddon Is Here
Last day to call your senators.
It looks as if the Senate vote on the "DREAM Act" partial immigration amnesty will actually happen on Saturday, though it also wouldn’t surprise me if Majority Leader Reid puts it off yet again or cancels it at the last minute.
You can voice your views to swing senators by using this pagethis page (from pro-DREAM America’s Voice). (from anti-DREAM Numbers USA) or
I’m anti-DREAM. The key point to make, at this moment, is that nobody who is reasonable in this debate wants to deport the appealing would-be beneficiaries of the proposed law: those brought across the border when they were young, who've known no other country–the high-school valedictorians, the law student who calls himself "a typical American kid who grew up in Brooklyn and roots for the Yankees," and "dreams of becoming a J.A.G. officer to defend the country I love." The DREAM "kids" like these that you read about are clearly carefully selected for their appeal, and they lay it on a bit thick, but I assume their stories are real and there are tens of thousands of other stories sufficiently like theirs.
Many DREAM opponents also want take care of these "kids" (or former kids) by making them legal. Mark Krikorian, the anti-amnesty advocate whom I cite most, wants to take care of them. Even Roy Beck of Numbers USA seems to want to take care of them. But there is a way to do it that minimizes the unwanted long-term side effects of encouraging future illegal immigration from parents now living in other countries (who'd understandably like their kids to be made Americans, too), which would set the stage for another amnesty, which in turn would build up a constituency for the next amnesty in a cycle that doesn’t seem to have any end point.
And there is a way to do it that maximizes those long-term effects, by maximizing the number of immigrants who would be covered by DREAM, by offering no effective way to combat fraudulent applications, by creating rules so complex they'll collapse of the own weight, by passing the bill in a wave of ethnic passion and recklessly including no additional enforcement measures. That’s the bill they'll vote on Saturday.[More]
But the point about the middle ground is this — Congress doesn’t have to legalize all these people, and they don’t have to deport them all, either. They have the option of doing nothing.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.