The Page - by Mark Halperin - TIME
Thompson Announces Plan to Secure Border, Enforce Existing Immigration Laws
This is great! As Mark Krikorian says:
* A politician finally gets it:
Dems don’t like to admit this - hell, RINOs don’t like to admit it, either, but one of the biggest hammers a GOP candidate can wield in the upcoming election is the one used to pound illegal immigration into the ground. That’s the single issue the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with - and Thompson is by far the best-positioned GOP candidate to make use of it.
UPDATE: I wouldn’t normally do this, but I want to see this get wide circulation, so I’ll print most of the TIME article here:
• No Amnesty: Amnesty undermines U.S. law and policy, rewards bad behavior, and is unfair to the millions of immigrants who follow the law and are awaiting legal entry into the United States.
• Enforce Existing Federal Laws: Enforce the laws Congress has already enacted to prevent illegal aliens from unlawfully benefiting from their presence in the country including:
A. End Sanctuary Cities by cutting off discretionary federal grant funds as appropriate to any community that, by law, ordinance, executive order, or other formal policy directs its public officials not to comply with the provisions of 8 USC 1373 and 8 USC 1644, which prohibit any state or local government from restricting in any way communications with the Department of Homeland Security “regarding the immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of an alien in the United States.”
B. Deny discretionary Federal education grants as appropriate to public universities that violate federal law by offering in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens without also offering identical benefits to United States citizens, regardless of whether or not they live in the state, as required by 8 USC 1623.
C. Deny discretionary Federal grants as appropriate to states and local governments that violate federal law by offering public benefits to illegal aliens, as prohibited by 8 USC 1621(a).
• Increased Border Security: Doubling Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handling interior enforcement, increasing the Border Patrol to at least 25,000 agents, and increasing detention space to incarcerate illegal aliens we arrest rather than letting them go with a promise to show up later for legal proceedings against them.
• Attrition through Enforcement: Reduce the number of illegal aliens through increased enforcement against unauthorized alien workers and their employers. Without illegal employment opportunities available, fewer illegal aliens will attempt to enter the country, and many of those illegally in the country now likely will return home. This course of action offers a reasonable alternative to the false choices currently proposed to deal with the 12 million or more aliens already in the U.S. illegally: either arrest and deport them all, or give them all amnesty.
• Maximize Legal Immigration Program Efficiency: Reduce the backlogs and streamline the process for immigrants and employers who seek to follow the law. Also, simplify and expedite the application processes for temporary visas. Caps for any category of temporary work visa would be increased as appropriate, if it could be demonstrated that there are no Americans capable and willing to do the jobs.
• Modernize Immigration Law/Policy: Change the nature of our legal immigration system to welcome immigrants who can be economic contributors to our country and are willing to learn the English language and reduce the scope of chain migration by giving family preference in the allocation of lawful permanent resident status only to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, and no one else (no siblings, no parents, no adult children, etc.).
• English as Official Language: Make English the official language of the U.S. to promote assimilation and legal immigrants’ success, and require English proficiency in order for any foreign person to be granted lawful permanent resident status.
• Preference for American Military Service: Place those foreign persons who are lawfully present in the country and who serve honorably in the Armed Forces of the United States on a faster, surer track to U.S. citizenship.
I don’t see anything here I’d disagree with, or would hesitate to support.
What say you, Giuliani, Romney, and Shamnasty McCain?
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
It’s about damned time someone took a stand like this. And, it’s very interesting that this is one of the first things, if not the very first, Thompson is so thoroughly laying out his position on. Shows he knows what Bill says is true.
Where will we get our cucumbers and cherries?
Heartless bastards.
Import them from Mexico?
I don’t think you are quite getting the point. According the neo-compassionate orthodoxy, we are now required to eat only “locally-grown” foodstuffs, in order to reduce our “carbon footprint.”*
This requires that we import labor instead of food, and compel the labor to grow here what they could just as easily grow there. Theoretically, this will reduce our “carbon footprint”**, although there is some dispute as to which consumes more energy: trucking a load of cucumbers from Mazatlan to Oregon, or providing all the services that “guest workers” require, including law enforcement, health care, and electricity for their blenders.
* A “carbon footprint” is the damp black impression left on your brain by pseudoscientists who confuse short-term temperature fluctuations with long-term climate patterns.
** In this context, a “carbon footprint” is the long smoking black skid mark left on the highway by an unlicensed driver driving an uninsured pickup as it swerves to avoid a law enforcement roadblock.
Oh, yes. I forgot about that. Probably because I try to order as much of my food as possible from places on the other side of the country, at minimum. Or online, so I can
have it delivered by big, smelly trucks.
From Florida.
Tonight at my house we’re having white rhino steaks, preceded by an appetizer of seal pup sushi served over a bed of crushed genuine arctic circle ice.
Then we’re going to turn on all the showers at full heat — it’s “Rain Forest” night, which the kids always love. It usually takes all six air conditioners about two hours on maximum cool to get the temperature back down below 90 degrees before bedtime.
Thompson’s proposal doesn’t go nearly far enough. I didn’t see one word about flamethrowers or alligators.
We’re having a panda liver pate for appetizer and bald eagle breast for the main course. We barbecuing the eagle over old-growth redwood charcoal. And stewed monkey head for dessert. (And not that pastry monkey head from last time - these are mountain gorillas. Not technically monkeys, but close enough.)
An excellent proposal, Mr. President.
A glitch in the “buy local” campaign. Damn Gummint!
Thanks, Ray, for that pinpoint puncture of the fantasies of the visionary by the realities of Big Government.
“Here’s what we want — and we dare you to try.”
We will just cook some ‘gator. Not only good eating but we can make luggage as well.
God, Nemo makes me laugh. Out loud.
You guys have inspired me, I think I’ll dust off the rod’n'reel and fish across the street, it’ll be local, but I’ll impale a worm, then filet the fish alive…
I’ll be having some of this.
Oops, that’s Shamnasty McClown.
I can’t disagree with anything in the proposal, but there are a couple other measures that are needed to make it more effective.
One is monitoring of people with temporary visas so immigration knows where they are at all times. Many illegals originally came in on temporary visas and never left. If they can be tracked throughout their visit, it’ll be harder for them to disappear.
The other is a crackdown on pro-illegal document mills. Forgery for the purpose of undermining federal law should be stamped out with vigorous prosecution. We can’t have efficient immigration enforcement with a flood of fake documents floating around.
On a side note, we should be wary of turning gators into a delicacy. They’re in a battle with pythons for control of the Okefenokee, and reducing their numbers could hand victory to the pythons. Non-native species and all that.
Which species can eat more weight in politicians over a given period of time?
A good point, but it may be addressed by Thompson’s proposals anyway. His program is two-fold: Make it difficult to physically come across the border illegally. And then make it unattractive for illegals to be here in the first place, by removing metro “sanctuaries,” strictly enforcing current laws, and making it economically and legally problematic for US firms to hire illegals. Visa jumpers do so because they see opportunity here. Lessen that opportunity, and fewer will jump - just as, in a process of attrition, fewer illegals already here will choose to remain here.
Thanks, Nemo. I admit to being torn, however, between a desire to indulge my Schadenfreud at the prospect of Barbara Kingsolver being hauled away by flak-jacketed thugs of a Hillary administration in thrall to Big Organic, and despair at how close to reality that scenario actually is.
The added irony is that, in general, I’m supportive of “buy local” campaigns, both as a market-based mechanism for “saving the family farm”, and a rational self-interest in better tasting produce – everything from vegetable varieties chosen to be grown for their flavor, not their ability to hold up under shipment, and the increased availability of artisan cheeses and hams. At the same time, I love being able to get tables grapes from Chile and Clementine oranges from Spain in February at the local Wal-Mart for a little over a dollar a pound. And none of this has anything to do with “carbon footprint” or “sustainability.”
Who is John Galt, anyway?
I have nothing against “buy local,” except when it is presented as without alternative, in the name of someone’s idiotic assertion that it is somehow immoral to ship bananas from Ecuador.
That’s an interesting question. Someone should apply for a multi-million dollar grant to do a study. I’d personally guess the gators, but they tear them limb from limb and leave pieces strewn about. Pythons would swallow them whole and leave nothing behind except python turds.
Which would, in large part, be indistinguishable from the original politicians. So is there a net gain here, or not?
Both good reasons not to buy local. Unsanitary facilities, hogs that probably carry trichinosis, and no telling what you could get after 2 days from unpasteurized milk. One of my uncles had a dairy farm, they didn’t drink any milk that they had not pasteurized. Another uncle had pigs, absolutely no pink pork for me, fully cooked or in the trash.
Side questions. Do pythons taste good? And how many pairs of boots could you make from one?
Valid points, genes. Still, the Anglofilic foodie in me salivates at the prospect of an unpasteurized stilton.
DocOb: Rescued. Sorry it took so long. And might I say, that is truly depraved. *sniff* I’m so proud!
Once upon a time Gerber was forced to design new labels to sell their baby food in a third world country. Due to the low literacy rate the locals believed that the picture on the jars label showed the contents. The moral of that story is research your market. And most third world people don’t like pureed babies.