By Allan Wall
11/21/2013
Scott Walker is governor of Wisconsin and a possible GOP presidential contender. The 24Ahead.com website reports that Scott Walker supports mass immigration, probably including amnesty (24Ahead.com : Immigration and Politics, Nov. 20, 2013). Here are some excerpts from this useful report:
As usual for those in the Koch family sphere, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker supports large-scale immigration. That is, a system where many more people could come here legally than do so currently.
Walker is also not a strong and vocal opponent of mass legalization (aka amnesty, aka a path to citizenship). Earlier this year he made a comment suggesting that he supports mass legalization, but now he’s attempting to dance around that comment but without ruling out mass legalization. Walker clearly isn’t an ideologue on immigration nor does he make it a priority. But, based on my long history of being right about who actually opposes mass legalization and who doesn’t, all Walker is waiting for is the right set of circumstances to openly support mass legalization. Those circumstances might include things like a major donor wanting amnesty, or Walker thinking it would get him votes for his next election.
Here’s what Walker said in an interview:
If people want to come here and work hard in America, I don’t care if they come from Mexico, or Canada, or Ireland, or Germany or South Africa or anywhere else, I want them here. To me, if people want to come to live the American dream, if they want to work hard, self-determination and have their kids have a better life, that’s what folks like my brothers-in-law who immigrated a generation ago from Mexico or people like my ancestors who came from places like Ireland and Germany and other parts of the world many generations ago. I mean, there’s a similar pattern there people who risked a lot whether it was traveling across the ocean or across a national border … Not only do they have to fix things for people already here, find some way to deal with that, there’s got to be a larger way to fix the system in the first place because if it wasn’t so cumbersome, if there wasn’t such a long wait if it wasn’t so difficult to get in you wouldn’t have the other problems that we have with people who don’t have legal status here in the first place. [Huh?]
As 24 Ahead.com aptly puts it
1. Walker is a typical fiscal conservative in that his only concern is economic: he’s not concerned with the political and cultural impacts of immigration. What if, for example, immigration from one country gives that country political power inside the U.S. (see Mexican governmen)? Walker doesn’t care.
2. Walker’s idea that today’s immigration is like yesteryear’s is the immigration tradition fallacy …
3. Walker is using the system is broken canard.
4. The idea that more legal immigration would dry up illegal immigration is absurd. There’s a huge supply of potential illegal aliens, and loosening our immigration laws even more would send a message to them that they should try to come here one way or another. Increasing legal immigration would increase the network effect, encouraging more people to come here one way or another. It would also give more power to the groups that currently support massive and/or illegal immigration.
In another interview, asked about a pathway to citizenship, Walker responded thusly:
Well, I think you've got to fix the front door. Before you talk about who came in, you've got to fix the front door. My ancestors came from Germany and Ireland. My wife’s family came from Sicily. My in-laws — my brother’s in-laws, I should say, came from Mexico. And in every one of those cases, they came here as immigrants. But we also are a country not only of immigrants, but of laws. And right now, we don’t enforce the law for legal immigration on the front end. You could fix all these other problems if we had a successful legal immigration system in — in the United States.
It sounds like Walker doesn’t know much about immigration and just repeats the usual slogans. Plus, that’s where the money is. Here’s more bad evidence:
Note also that in December 2012, Walker backed away from his earlier support for an Arizona-style immigration law in his state …
Maybe our Wisconsin readers could help us out here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.