Importing What We Don\’t Need
December 14th, 2008 by 
Kevin
Earlier this month, Senator Ted \”Drunk Driving\” Kennedy left the Judiciary Committee to concentrate on healthcare legislation. Aside from the irony of someone who left their own secretary to die wanting to concentrate on health care, this undoubtably means that Democrats will not be pushing for \”comprehensive immigration reform\” this session. With one of their leading Democrats essentially swearing off the immigration issue, their Republican leader (McCain) essentially neutered and the White House CoS not included immigration as one of their priority items, the immigration issue is likely to remain sidelined for the next two years at least.
That\’s good and bad.
Good because we don\’t have to worry about McCain and his merry band of Democrats essentially making Mexico the 51st state.
On the other hand, if the immigration issue is to be sidelined that means further enforcement measures are likely to get sidelined as well. The authorization for the fence expires soon and very little of it has been built, regardless of what the Department of Homeland Security claims. The authorization for E-Verify, one of our most effective enforcement tools, is set to expire on March 6th, 2009. And our open borders policy, in practice if not officially, continues and the hordes continue to flood.
The economy is sliding downward and layoffs continue. In November 533,000 jobs were lost. So far in December we\’ve lost 115,000. Yet in November we imported 140,000 more foreign workers.
One of the big arguments by the open borders crowd was always that we needed foreign workers because we didn\’t have enough people to fill all the jobs we have. We had jobs Americans won\’t do. We can\’t even employ the people we already have. What possible reason would we have to continue to allow foreign workers to flood across our borders and take jobs from Americans? Especially when removing those foreign workers improves working conditions for the Americans that will fill those jobs instead.
We can\’t wait for Obama and the rest of the Democrats to decide that they have time for immigration now. Let\’s lean on them now to make a move that will help save American jobs, rather than just spend us into oblivion.
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3 Comments »
December 15th, 2008 at 9:19 am
If your analysis is correct, and it may well be, the most effective thing we could do would be to demand that e-verify be extended to “protect American jobs.” If other states follow what Arizona and Oklahoma have done and require the use of e-Verify on all new hires, the “magnet” of US jobs will disappear and the problem of illegals will be solved by the good old “laboratories of democracy in the states.”
December 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
That’s only part of it. Playing offense only gets you so far. It reduces the magnet, but we still need a fence.
The fence acts as a force multiplier for our border agents and makes them more effective. By reducing the magnet, it means we can control our border with less agents, ultimately reducing our expense.
It’s about more bang for your buck. And that requires both enforcement and a fence.
December 15th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Dang, you’re right. I was thinking that e-Verify had been highly effective in the states that mandate it, creating a wave of “self-deportation” of existing illegals and, one assumes, removing the attraction for new ones. I was also thinking about the political ease of selling a “preserve American jobs for Americans” meme.
But the same can be said about the fence. We can say “Congress wanted a fence, it’s still not built; build it.” If we have to paint the Democrats as anti-fence, not protecting American jobs, it’s all good. The “positive alternative” already exists, and it’s pre-sold to the public.