Monday, March 11, 2013

Real Immigration Reform: Will Wisdom or Dishonor Prevail?


Mike Scruggs

The first big mistake in U.S. immigration policy was the 1965 Immigration” Reform” Act, which broadened family reunification preference policy from nuclear family (spouses and minor children) to extended family. The extended family policy, which included an endless chain of siblings, parents, and in-laws, resulted in Chain Migration. Chain Migration changed the character of U.S. immigration from limited and selective to an out-of-control immigration tsunami that made immigration an increasing fiscal and social burden on the nation.

The second big mistake was the 1986 Immigration “Reform” Act, which gave amnesty to nearly three million illegal immigrants. It should not have been surprising that amnesty multiplies illegal immigration, but that obvious bit of reason was ignored. Much of the 1986 Reform Act contained badly needed immigration enforcement provisions to protect U.S. workers and penalize employers who hired illegal immigrants. There were also provisions requiring amnestied workers to pay back-taxes, but after the bill had passed, the very same Democrats who had promised to back these tough enforcement and penalty provisions as a trade for immediate amnesty began to block and undermine them. The enforcement provisions went unenforced by President Clinton and presidents thereafter.

Six supplemental amnesties from 1994 to 2000, giving more than three million additional amnesties subsequently multiplied our immigration problems and mauled the credibility of U.S. immigration policy.

New York Senator Charles Schumer, a sponsor of the current Gang-of-Eight Immigration Reform (and Amnesty) bill was a member of the House of Representatives in 1986 and voted for the bill. However, he immediately began to undermine enforcement of tax penalties. He succeeded by tucking one sentence on page 187 of the 499-page Technical and Miscellaneous Revenue Act of 1988, which barred the Immigration and Naturalization Service from sharing any tax information with the IRS pursuant to amnesty applications.

Schumer and his Gang-of-Eight are making similar border security and enforcement promises now in exchange for a huge amnesty for ten million or more illegal immigrants. Given Schumer’s past record of breaking promises, who outside of madhouse would trust him now on the very same issues?  Yet in addition to the four Senate Democrats on the Gang-of-Eight, there are four Republicans: McCain, Graham, Flake, and Rubio. The Gang’s immigration “reform” plan is almost identical to President Obama’s, and includes immediate amnesty.

Rubio’s backing of the Gang’s plan certainly threatens his reputation as a conservative. Moreover, his career immigration record in the House and Senate (rated 38 percent or C- by NumbersUSA) is scarcely better than Lindsey Graham’s. Curiously, a December survey of 700 registered voters by Public Policy Polling found that among the 90 Hispanic voters, only 24 percent said they were favorable to Rubio, and 42 percent said they were unfavorable to him. This sample is suspect because of its small size, but according to post-election analysis of Rubio’s 2010 Florida Senate victory, Rubio won because of the Republican leaning Cuban vote. He only got 40 percent of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote. 

Illegal and legal immigration were so out-of-control by 1990 that Congress mandated a thorough study of immigration issues. The Jordan Commission, named for Barbara Jordan, its Chair for several years, was a bi-partisan committee, which included several prominent civic leaders and distinguished academics. They studied the issues thoroughly for six years. However, their recommendations, presented to President Clinton and Congress in 1997, were ignored by the President and a majority of Congress. Yet those who have studied immigration issues thoroughly and objectively still consider the Jordan Commission Report an extraordinarily credible and thorough blueprint for desperately needed real immigration reform. Here are the most currently relevant of the major recommendations:

  • Enforce immigration law vigorously with no further amnesties. Enforcement must be internal, especially at the workplace, as well as at the border.
  • Related to the above recommendation: Reducing the employment magnet is the most important linchpin to deterring unlawful immigration
  • Protect U.S. workers from unfair competition and foreign workers from exploitation and abuse.
  • Reduce the total number of legal immigrants to 550,000 annually. Too many legal immigrants can also hurt job prospects and drive down wages for Americans. (Harvard labor economist George Borjas has recommended a 500,000 annual limit to avoid economic and social assimilation problems.) 
  • Strictly regulate nonimmigrant visa programs. Between 40 and 50 percent of illegal immigrants are legal visa violators.
  • They strongly recommended AGAINST Guest-worker programs, which had hurt U.S. workers, taxpayers, and communities in the past, and actually increased illegal immigration. For example, many legal agricultural guest-workers violate their visas and take a better job in construction or retail. In addition, they result in unacceptable numbers of birthright citizenships.
  • Eliminate the Extended Family provisions of the 1965 law.
  • Restrict the eligibility of illegal immigrants from publicly-funded services or assistance except on an emergency basis.
  • Emphasize nuclear family reunification and objectively substantiated skill shortages to prioritize immigration numbers. Avoid accumulations of unskilled labor likely to require public support in the future.

Real immigration reform is being blocked by two principal forces: Liberal politicians who want to import more social-welfare oriented voters and businesses that want more cheap labor regardless of the consequences to the country.  President Obama and the Democrat Party are the best representatives of the first group. The biggest and most powerful lobby for the second group is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) recently said of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

“The Chamber’s primary goal has never been to establish a lawful immigration system and secure our borders, but to get as much cheap labor as possible—regardless of how it impacts American workers, legal immigrants, and taxpayers in general.”


What's the spring-breathing jasmine and rose ?
What's the summer with all its gay train
Or the splendour of autumn to those
Who've bartered their freedom for gain?
No sweetness the senses can cheer
Which corruption and bribery bind
No brightness that gloom can e'er clear
For honour's the sum of the mind
Let virtue distinguish the brave
Place riches in lowest degree
Think them poorest who can be a slave
Them richest who dare to be free
--Dick Gaughan, Scotland, 1979

13 comments:

  1. I've been known to get carried away but I rarely apologize. Heh.

    I posted the poetry and this comment on my Google+ site just now.

    "Posted today by Mike Scruggs, of Hendersonville, NC on the Free North Carolina blog to make the day of this Son of Scotland and WNC. My cup runneth over. Let the corrupting tyrants tremble. We are coming after them."

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    1. Let the corrupting tyrants tremble. We are coming after them."

      Hear! Hear!

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  2. AMartinez no not that one!March 11, 2013 at 1:11 PM

    The destruction of this Republic is at hand, and it is what is sought by all in power. As we have rulers now, and all seek to stay in office, if anyone doesen't think out of at least 20 million illegal aliens that at least 10% didn't vote in our last election, your kidding yourself. And any contractor or landscaper, lumberyard or any business that uses them, Americans should not allow them to work on any project. But cheap labor is what it's all about. We are killing ourselves!

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    1. Yep, cut off welfare and There will be plenty of citizens to labor.

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  3. I think the biggest welfare recipients now may be my old employers, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Alliant Tech Systems, and thus, myself through my piddling retirement check, which wasn't too bad in 1989 but sucks now. Heh. Virtually all the money we give Egypt and Israel is used to buy war materiel from those companies and their suppliers.

    I have supervised many Mexican workers and am served by Mexicans every time I leave home and their work ethic is as great as that of the jobless Kentucky coal miners who were relocated to SW Virginia during the Vietnam War at government's expense to work at the Arsenal. All they had ever known was hard work and we all profited by it. If you want to change the welfare system show up at City Council meetings and State House meetings and flood your Congressmen and Senators with letters, handwritten, nobody reads email. Won't work? Then the Republic is kaput. Oil your sabers.

    The Internet, by an old boss's definition of such things, is nothing but gossip.

    Patrick Henry did not cite a war that was being fought in correspondence, but in the field. Is it there now/yet?

    "It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace; but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?"

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    1. . Is it there now/yet?

      Nope, but our ancestors put up with much until they came for their guns.

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  4. Horace Smith March 11, 2013 at 12:29 PM
    I was born poor but will die Free. My messages from the Great Mystery are coming only minutes apart now. As I get older, synchronicity accelerates. I told my wife yesterday that there was no way I would be able to get to NC again. But that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone. Besides, I, almost single handedly, resurrected "One Day At A Time" living. If, as I do, I ask some invisible Higher Power each morning what its will is for me for that day, does it make any sense that I have predetermined my action and will override any inspired message I get? I think not. For several years, since reading Echart Tolle, I have been adapting to living in the Now. When the vast swarm of head-places in which I had been living finally swirl into sharp focus on the Now, I will be ready to check out, totally free of the past and the future.

    Mike Scruggs, as best I can determine, lives and writes in Hendersonville, NC. Probably my father's best friend was a man named Claude Drake who lived in Hendersonville, NC. I was at his house and threw a baseball with his son many times. Salt of the earth people. The Asheville Airport is actually called Asheville-Hendersonville and I was last in it for my father's funeral in October, 1995 and my mother's funeral in February, 1996. Take me home, United Airlines.

    Oh, the poem above is today's message no. 2 and message 1 was from Gene Anderson, of Sun City, AZ, also a retired USAF veteran, who, in response to my asking Gabby Gifford's so-called Astronaut husband, "Have you no shame, Astronaut" gave me a phrase I had not heard before, "Integrity Gap."

    The debate performance of the Colorado State Senators over Friday, all night, and into Saturday, made me feel 40 years younger. Their performances were Founders Grade. I think I'll switch my voter registration back to Republican, (Colorado only). I will not vote for the likes of John McCain or any Bush, so even if I'm still here in 2016 I just won't vote in the Presidential election. Like one vote out of a hundred million is significant.

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  5. Horace, that "one vote in 100 million" is why we have a second term of B.H.O. There are two many of the 100 million that stayed home. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and cast a protest vote against a candidate even when the person you are voting for is a stinking dead fish. We (conservatives) don't have to attract so called centerist voters to win. We just have to get our voters to vote. I understand your feelings but sometimes the ends do justify the means.

    Our problem is that we vote from a principled positon while the other side votes simply to win any way they have to do it. I hope my admonishment does not offend you. It is not intended to.

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    1. Our problem is that we vote from a principled positon while the other side votes simply to win any way they have to do it.

      Agreed.

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    2. I proudly voted for Gary Johnson. Previously on the site I have related my mother telling me in 1946 that voting for the lesser of two evils was voting for evil. I won't do it knowingly. To this day I don't know if mom voted to legalize the Asheville ABC stores and run her bootlegging brothers to Florida to sell Cuban Bolita or not. The stores came in and the high-class bootleggers went out and their drivers went to Daytona Beach with Bill France.

      Mom tended bar on Saturday nights at the Plantation Dance hall in Biltmore on the Swannanoa River, where soldiers being staged for re-assignment came to dance and drink the quart bottles of Pilsner beer, which was all they could get. I always showed up there after my dad's softball games. She'd drag us out early on Sunday to chant the Baptist covenant before communion, wherein we swore to not sell or use alcohol as a beverage. And you wonder that I was screwed up? Heh.

      Note. A North Carolina cousin of mine told me just recently that Bill France was never in Asheville but what he and Joe Littlejohn came to their house for spaghetti. I have never known more honest, generous, God-fearing people than those lawbreaking uncles of mine. I really miss them.

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    3. I wrote in Ron Paul here for the second time. Can't remember if I mentioned this before or not, but my grandfather was a big boozer and gambler. Once he was drinking and playing cards with his cronies when the subject of the election for the Raleigh Police Chief came up. Somehow, my grandfather took a bet that he could win it, which he did. However, he resigned after only 18 months, because he said he couldn't keep arresting his best friends, the bootleggers! This was in 1917.

      My father gave me a picture of my great grandfather once of his family in front of his large house with all concernedbeautifully dressed, he in white looking quite the aristocrat. When I asked my father what he did, he stated a bootlegger and he made a fortune.:)

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  6. An elected police chief? I think the elected sheriffs are the only thing that will save us from appointed police chiefs. In Asheville, the Chief was a high school friend of my uncles and on their payroll. I suspect the sheriff and his deputies were too but I know from many things that all the police profited from bootlegging. I never heard for sure that any county sheriff profited from moonshining but the moonshiners were known to all. I do get tired of explaining to people that moonshining and bootlegging are entirely different occupations. Heh.

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