Immigration – What Is Needed

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Well, it’s a slow season in an election year, which always seems to bring out the Whiners. Sure enough, the Immigration issue has come up again, which is reasonable, but has brought along with it a raucous caucus of panic peddlers and People Insanely Selfish & Stubborn. Nowhere is this more obvious than when the issue is soberly discussed.

In the main, people in the United States are agreed that as a nation of immigrants, we have a responsibility to accept the people who wish to come here, following reasonable conditions. Obviously, the laws and written and the actions practiced by the U.S. Government are inappropriate to the present need, for which a reform and repair is badly needed. To my mind, the mindless attacks from both Left and Right against president George W. Bush only prove once again how thin his support can be, even when he proves his credentials over and over again. Such frivolous desertion of the President by so many so-called ‘republicans’ is why I fear the Democrats could one day retake Congress and the White House.

George W. Bush, for the record, is not only eminently sane in his perspective, but as a former Governor of Texas, he certainly knows about the border problems and is acutely interested in finding a serious and permanent solution. For that matter, Ronald W. Reagan was a former Governor of California, and like Bush well aware of the border situation and intent on resolving it. The brayers against Bush might do well to notice that Reagan’s record on Immigration Reform, even in terms of programs submitted to Congress, was not especially better than Bush’s; in fact, I would go so far as to say Bush has tried harder on that front.

It needs to be understood that there are multiple forces at work. On one end is the White House, which must balance the noise from the Justice, Labor, DHS, State and other Departments, and on the other end are the Federal courts, which have a history of wreaking havoc on attempts to reform laws.

The other two major groups are the House and Senate, which is bad enough, but even then they are split into many sub-groups, including new members versus veterans, those coming up for re-election, border states versus high-demand labor states, and you get the idea. It’s easier to wrestle a pit full of pythons than get a comprehensive immigration reform bill through Congress, to say nothing of what the final product would look like.

Frankly, Bush is doing as well as any sane person can expect, with strong increases in budget and numbers for the Border Patrol, Customs, and border-defense. The problem of compliance with the existing law is on another order entirely, and while some have wrongly claimed that Bush is ignoring these aspects of the problem, it will have to be addressed separately. Those morons who think we can simply round up the illegals already in the country have obviously not considered their response to any number of past initiatives, to say nothing of the complications in trying to find and remove more than ten million of any type of person who does not wish to be found. God grant we put saner heads in charge of future discussions than what gets printed in the papers now.

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