Memo to the U.S. Senate
HispanicVista, Commentary, Raoul Lowery Contreras, Posted: Jan 19, 2006
“No one’s life, liberty or property is safe when the legislature is in session,” stated wise man, Samuel Clemens AKA Mark Twain.
James Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House of Representatives, marginally carried the day in the House to criminalize a large portion of the country’s population for going about their everyday activities of working and hiring others to work.
The Sensenbrenner bill instantly turns millions of people into felons. There’s the estimated 11 or more million mostly Mexican illegal aliens in the country plus the people who know and or employ them, as well. It builds a wall on the border with our second largest trading partner, representing more than $200 billion in trade that accounts for millions of jobs on both sides of the border.
It grows the Border Patrol, the most ineffective branch of the federal government, a group that has been expanded five times in the past decade. It increases the border control budget by millions of dollars even as the instant budget has grown several times over and already costs billions of dollars. Despite the budget and personnel growth, illegal immigrants keep coming in record numbers.
More importantly, the Sensenbrenner effort shows that he is not an independent thinker or lawmaker, even in his role as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
He is a front-man for the immigration radicals in the Republican Caucus that are led by Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, an otherwise ineffective and ostracized back-bencher who has no formal leadership role in Congress.
Lurking behind Tancredo are Dr. John Tanton’s various front groups, including the virulently anti-Mexican Federation of Americans For Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA.
Prominent California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa has demanded that Tancredo be expelled from the Republican Party for his support of racist congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist in the special election held in Orange County in December. Gilchrist was the candidate of the American Independent Party (AIP), a racist party founded in 1968 by then Presidential candidate former Alabama Governor George Wallace.
One Congressman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, labels Tancredo an out-and-out racist.
At least one elected Republican Colorado state official has refused to appear on the same platform with Tancredo, who we now know evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by claiming to be mentally ill.
Nonetheless, Sensenbrenner has fronted Tancredo and his allies in promoting the most odious House bill in decades. No single House bill has ever in U.S. history produced millions of instant felons of otherwise innocent people.
Question: Will this House bill make it through the United States Senate to become law?
Answer: No…It must not.
Problem: The number and status of illegal aliens in the country needs to be addressed by something other than criminalization. After all, many of these people are otherwise solid citizens with jobs, who pay taxes, own their own homes and have children who are American citizens. In a phrase, most of these people are contributing members of society.
Problem: The nature of many jobs and wages repel Americans. These jobs need filling because they number in the millions and are the employment foundation of the nation’s economy. In other words, the illegals generally do jobs that Americans won’t do, at any price. One does not need studies to see that few Americans toil in the agricultural fields of the West.
Question: What are the political, economic and social ingredients needed to stabilize and regularize the number of illegal immigrants in the country?
Solutions:
The United States Senate must craft a bill that legalizes the hiring of foreigners by employers who are willing to work in our fields, factories and cities at jobs American won’t do. That bill would allow people to apply for the jobs at American offices in specified countries while they work permits allowing them to work in the United States for a period of time. That bill will allow those workers to come and go, allowing for seasonal work without fear of arrest and deportation. Several bipartisan bills in the Senate address this problem.
The Senate must also craft a bill that specifically addresses the current number of illegals who are in the country. Critics call such attention “amnesty.” We grant amnesties all the time at all levels of government to people who commit crimes far greater than violations of administrative rules and regulations that constitute most immigration offenses.
The Senate must craft a bill that the House can support and the President can sign into law or there will be no immigration bill forthcoming. If there is no bill, immigration chaos will continue, thanks to Sensenbrenner and Tancredo.
Will such a program relieve the current immigration mess? Mostly, it would.
The only opponents of such a bill would be Tancredo’s rump congressmen and the few people they represent. One can easily see religious leaders of all faiths, organized labor and business organizations uniting to support this approach. One can also see the majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, supporting such a bill. Every survey taken by responsible survey takers conclude that this is the case.
At the ballot box level, no vigorous anti-illegal alien candidate has received many votes: Pat Buchanan, for example, received less than one percent of the Presidential vote. Minuteman Jim Gilchrist managed to excite only five percent of Orange County eligible voters enough to vote for him in a special election in December.
The United States Senate is tasked with producing solutions to the problems of illegal immigration. The House of Representatives has abdicated its responsibility to make sense of immigration of any sort by passing an unworkable anti-illegal immigrant proposal.
The Founding Fathers created the Senate to temper emotionalism and hysteria in government. We are thankful when the Senate does its work properly. We are thankful that the Senate stands between a racially populist dictatorship, a dictatorship Congressmen Tom Tancredo and James Sensenbrenner represent, and the people.
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