May 18, 2007

Another Conservative's View on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill

Yesterday I came out and somewhat agreed with my mentor Hugh Hewitt on his view of this bill, calling it Amnesty Lite. I actually just gave him voice here, which is a partial agreement at least.

Fred Thompson's reaction showed a great deal of wisdom. He doesn't say the bill is bad, he said the American people are not convinced it is good.

"With this bill, the American people are going to think they are being sold the same bill of goods as before on border security. We should scrap this bill and the whole debate until we can convince the American people that we have secured the borders or at least have made great headway."

This blogger is trying to decide whether this is partly knee-jerk on the part of myself and other conservatives because we can't believe they will actually do anything worthwhile on the border...I mean they did promise to build a fence already and they haven't built 5 miles of fence. So far only Michael Medved is the only conservative talk-show host that seems to support this bill. The rest completely bashing it, in spite of the fact they haven't read it yet.

Also anything that make it easier to become a citizen if you are illegal BEFORE BUILDING A FENCE will most certainly draw more illegals immediately.

Shutting down the border leak is really all most conservatives want and this bill is certainly wanting in that department. What part of stop the flow do they not understand. No I don't want to deport them all, but I do want it to stop now. In three years if we have to process another 15 million illegals, then we are just spitting in the wind.

Captain's Quarter's Blogger Ed makes great points and shares my questioning the reasoning behind current conservative blog and talk radios complete rejection of this bill;

Argument 1: Congress will never enforce the border-security provisions/triggers.

Many people firmly believe that Congress (and George Bush) will ignore the border-first, employment-first triggers and skip right to normalization. In this regard, they use the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty plan, but they forget that Simpson-Mazzoli didn't have any border-security provisions. Congress promised to add them later, and never did. That's why Jon Kyl and other Republicans insisted on security-first triggers before any of the rest of the plan can proceed.

Some say that Congress will just ignore the law anyway. If so, then you can't trust Congress to do anything, so even if they passed a border-security-only plan, you still can't support it. That's an argument for futility, where one does not believe in the legislative system any more.

Argument 2: It will prompt a flood of illegals....read the rest of his points
 

|