“Day Without Immigrants

Republicans plan anti-Reid ads on Spanish-language radio
By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2006/apr/13/041310264.h...
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Ads criticizing Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid for "playing politics" with immigration reform legislation are scheduled to air on Spanish-language radio stations in four Western cities with large Hispanic populations next week.

The ad campaign targeting the Nevada Democrat is funded by the Republican National Committee and will air in Las Vegas, Reno, Tucson and Phoenix, GOP officials said Thursday.

The ads are part of the continued political fallout from the collapse of compromise legislation forged last week by Senate leaders. The deal was scuttled when Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., rejected a series of Reid's procedural demands for voting on politically charged amendments.

"Harry Reid is not an honest broker in this debate and has proven he will manipulate the issue at any cost," RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said. He would not disclose how much the group spent on the radio campaign.

The 60-second spot says in Spanish that Reid "blocked our leaders from working together" and blames Democrats for legislation that passed the Republican-controlled House that would make illegal immigrants subject to felony charges.

"Reid's Democrat allies voted to treat millions of hardworking immigrants as felons," the ad says, "while President Bush and Republican leaders work for legislation that will protect our borders and honor our immigrants."

The reference is to a House vote on an amendment that would have reduced the proposed penalty to a misdemeanor. Many Democrats, including members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, voted against the amendment, arguing they did not support criminal penalties. Nevada Republicans Jon Porter and Jim Gibbons also voted against the amendment, which failed. The felony provision remained in the bill, H.R. 4437, and it passed the House on a largely party line vote.

A similar ad, paid for by the New Mexico Republican party, is to run in Albuquerque and Las Cruces.

"No amount of spin by the Republican leadership can alter the fact that the House bill, including the felony provisions, were authored by Republicans and ultimately passed by Republicans," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said.

Reid also is fielding attacks from local Republicans. In a statement Thursday, the Nevada Republican Hispanic Coalition, a group affiliated with the state and Clark County GOP, called Reid "a rich Anglo" and accused him of "using Latinos as a pawn for political gain."

Pilar Weiss, political director for a Las Vegas union that represents hotel and casino workers, said her group thinks Reid made the right call. And although few of her members, more than half of whom are immigrants, understand exactly what happened in Washington, they're willing to be patient, she said.

"We have a lot of faith in Sen. Reid's judgment," the Culinary Union official said.

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How inappropriate is that title considering the same people who agree that it is okay to break our immigration laws use the argument that we are a nation of immigrants? The distinction here is legal versus illegal. How dare these people disregard the legal immigrants in our country, whom I fully support? How dare the same people disregard the descendants of legal immigrants that contribute to our economy in a much larger way with their education and specialized skills?

Are the same people that support illegal immigration of hispanics in this country also in support of illegal immigration by people from the middle east?

What happens to the millions of illegals underbidding low income Americans if they gain legal status? My guess is they will no longer be desired by their employer much like low income citizens because the employer will then be required to follow employment and labor laws now that these workers are 'documented'. They are already saying this is about fair labor treatment. My guess is there will always be illegals to underbid anyone and take their place. This will continue to occur as long as employers are allowed to get away with it and as long as our borders are open. The only result will be more people receiving entitlement benefits at the further expense of the tax payers.

The appropriate title is "an undocumented day off for illegals". May they chose to take an extended vacation back in their own country. While they are back home, perhaps they could invest as much energy protesting to their own governments for change instead of trying to coerce ours.

Immigration is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally -- in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric.
We can't even call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants." The politically correct evasion is "undocumented workers."

Do American citizens go around carrying documents with them when they work or apply for work? Most Americans are undocumented workers but they are not illegal immigrants. There is a difference.

The Bush administration is pushing a program to legalize "guest workers." But what is a guest? Someone you have invited. People who force their way into your home without your permission are called gate crashers.

If truth-in-packaging laws applied to politics, the Bush guest worker program would have to be called a "gate-crasher worker" program. The President's proposal would solve the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing it after the fact.

We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?

Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry, rather than serious arguments that will stand up under scrutiny.

How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.

Another variation on the same theme is that we "need" the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States. "Need" is another word that blithely ignores prices.

If jet planes were on sale for a thousand dollars each, I would probably "need" a couple of them -- an extra one to fly when the first one needed repair or maintenance. But since these planes cost millions of dollars, I don't even "need" one.

There is no fixed amount of "need," independently of prices, whether with planes or workers.

None of the rhetoric and sophistry that we hear about immigration deals with the plain and ugly reality: Politicians are afraid of losing the Hispanic vote and businesses want cheap labor.

What millions of other Americans want has been brushed aside, as if they don't count, and they have been soothed with pious words. But now the voters are getting fed up, which is why there are immigration bills in Congress.

The old inevitability ploy is often trotted out in immigration debates: It is not possible to either keep out illegal immigrants or to expel the ones already here.

If you mean stopping every single illegal immigrant from getting in or expelling every single illegal immigrant who is already here, that may well be true. But does the fact that we cannot prevent every single murder cause us to stop enforcing the laws against murder?

Since existing immigration laws are not being enforced, how can anyone say that it would not do any good to try? People who get caught illegally crossing the border into the United States pay no penalty whatever. They are sent back home and can try again.

What if bank robbers who were caught were simply told to give the money back and not do it again? What if murderers who were caught were turned loose and warned not to kill again? Would that be proof that it is futile to take action, when no action was taken?

Let's hope the immigration bills before Congress can at least get an honest debate, instead of the word games we have been hearing for too long.

Thomas Sowell is the prolific author of books such as Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Applied Economics.

Bogus arguments are a tip-off that you wouldn't buy the real reasons for what someone is doing. Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy.
It starts with a refusal to call illegal aliens "illegal aliens" and ends with asking for "guest worker" status for people who are not guests but gate crashers. As for the substantive arguments, they are as phony as the verbal evasions.

What about all those illegal workers that we "need"? Many of the illegals are working in agriculture, producing crops that have been in chronic surplus for decades. These surplus crops are costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars in government storage costs and in the inflated prices created by deliberately keeping much of this agricultural output off the market.

Do we "need" illegal workers to produce bigger surpluses?

In California, surplus crops grown and harvested by illegal immigrants are often also subsidized by federal water projects which charge the farmers in dry California valleys far less than the cost to the government of providing that water -- and a fraction of what people in Los Angeles or San Francisco pay for the same amount of water.

Surplus crops grown with water supplied at the taxpayers' expense and raised by illegal workers can be grown elsewhere with water provided free of charge from the clouds and raised by American workers paid American wages.

Naturally, when the real costs of those crops have to be paid by the farmers who raise them, less will be grown -- that is, there will not be as much of a surplus going to waste in government-rented storage bins.

With some crops, we don't really "need" any of it. If the United States had not produced a single grain of sugar in the past 50 years, Americans could have gotten all the sugar they wanted and at lower prices, simply by buying it on the world market for half or less of what domestic sugar costs.

Sugar has been in chronic surplus on the world market for generations. It can be grown in the tropics far cheaper than it can be grown in the United States. All the land, labor, and capital that has been spent growing sugar here has been one huge waste.

We don't "need" to grow sugar, with or without illegal workers.

Many people are understandably sympathetic toward Mexican workers who come across the border illegally, not only because of the poverty which drives them from their homelands but also because their willingness to work makes them in demand.

When you see beggars on the street, they are usually white or black, but almost never Mexican. But American immigration laws and policies are not about whether you like or don't like Mexicans, though some demagogues try to play the race card.

For too long, we have bought the argument that being unfortunate entitles you to break the law. The consequence has been disastrous, whether the people allowed to get away with breaking the law are Americans or foreigners.

Legalizing illegal actions is the easy way out, so it is hardly surprising that politicians go for that.

One of the ways of legalizing illegal acts is by the automatic conferring of American citizenship on babies born to illegal aliens in the United States.

The law that made all people born here American citizens made sense when people crossed an ocean and made a commitment to become Americans.

Today, it is just another way of essentially legalizing illegal acts by making it harder to deport those who broke the law.

One of the most bogus of all the bogus arguments for a "guest worker" program is that it is impossible to find all the millions of illegal aliens in the country, so it is impossible to deport them.

If tomorrow someone came up with some brilliant way to identify every illegal alien in the country, it would not make the slightest difference. Right now, those who are identified as illegal, whether at the border, in prisons, at traffic stops or in any of our institutions, face no penalty whatsoever.

Identification is not the problem. Doing nothing is the problem.

Thomas Sowell is the prolific author of books such as Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Applied Economics.

Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com

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If they are legal then OK it is not an issue.
It is the thousands of ILLEGAL immigrants that is the
issue. It is time now for our elected officials in
DC to take a stand and toughen the immigration laws.
If they are here illegally then they do not deserve the
right to have a say in what our Representatives or
Senators should or should not do. Illegals should be
sent back to their home land and not given any
extension or reprieve on staying in the USA. Tighten
the US boarders now and let's stop giving those who are legal not
US Citizens and/or registered voters a say
in how this country should be run. I'm tired of them
(illegals) moaning about how they are treated and
how things should be done. Well, the buck should stop
here and now.

.....themselves to be gulled into accepting "supply side (voodoo) economics" in immigration. Hands-off, market driven solution. And it is working as poorly as it always has in economics.

My solution, with rationale:

Enforce the laws against hiring illegal aliens and do it vigorously and fairly, big and small business...and no foisting responsibility off on "subcontractors"...if you find illegals working at an establishment, the owners are as liable as the subcontractor....(see Wal-Mart's weaselly cop-out). If a corporation is found to be a repeat offender, the SEC would suspend trading of the corporation's stock for a period of time, duration proportionate to frequency and scale of the offense.

Deport any illegal who commits a felony in the US. After serving the required sentence. If the nation of origin won't accept them back, then a surcharge of, say, 50% of the sentence is added for the additional crime of illegal entry.

Illegals who can document their residence in the U.S. for at least 3 years may register for citizenship.
They must:
Have no felony convictions.
We need citizens who are contributors to the common good, not those disposed to criminal behavior.

Be competent in English, US History, and Government.
We need to have something that binds us together, and it shouldn't be race, religion, culture, but it should be language, as it allows for us all to do the vital democratic duty of communicating and contending our ideas in means that are politic. It also removes a major element of the idea of "alienness", of being just too different, too incomprehensible, too different to be ONE OF US.

Successfully complete public service proportionate to the length of time in the U.S. Those with the longest residence get first consideration, but also have to perform the most public service.
The concept here is that they have transgressed against public good by coming here illegally and should be punished, but they have also been of value, their works and contributions should be a mitigating factor. So, public service is a sensible punishment, since they will become citizens and so there is no need to deter them from ever again breaking immigration law, as they can't ever become "illegals" again.

The illegals get a provisonal or probationary citizenship for a period of years that is inversely proportionate to the length of residence in the U.S.
This, coupled with the process initiation encourage long time residents to own up to the length of time in the U.S. and to accept the longer period of public service. The idea being that the longer you have been here, the more negative impact the illegal would have had. Balancing the carrot and stick.

"Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear."
William Gladstone, 4-time Prime Minister of Great Britain.

"Many liberals who don't know me call me a racist when I'm trying to make my points on this issue."

That should give you pause, yes?

"But that is hardly the case my husband is a very legal American citizen who is Mexican and from Mexico."

There are people of every race in Mexico..."Mexican" isn't a race and so being married to a Mexican in no way excuses you from bing capable of racism.

"So is his mother and they both are appalled at these illegals. They worked very hard to follow the legal steps to become citizens and now they feel totally screwed over. "

Why? What they do in no way diminishes them, or affects the quality of their citizenship. It isn't a zero sum game.

"This frustration has lead us to research and ask questions such as .... Why is there so much News coverage (BTW with a very positive spin) on the illegal immigration issue? In the years since the Iraq war started why has there hardly been any News coverage (few if any) of the anti-war protest? Which my husband and I have been to several local protest. Why is it that any network that has reported on any anti-war protest report it with a negative spin? Not to mention that war protesters are only allowed FREE SPEECH ZONES, get harassment from police, and fear getting arrested by simply carrying a sign or wearing a t-shirt, or being out of the FS ZONE."

Plenty of questions, got any answers or any opinions?

"Mean while the illegal immigrant protesters seem to have tons of News coverage. Headline news in fact not to mention total freedom to march any where they feel ... blocking streets, jamming cities with little if any repercussions."

Don't you think that it's unusual enough to have that many prople protesting at once to warrant a news story, even a poorly researched and reported one?

"Now in light of these things I think the big question is ...Who is funding and promoting the illegal immigrants protests/boycott? RICH MEN and the MEXICAN GOVERNMENT! I don't speak or understand much Spanish but my husband and mother-in-law do and they tell me that the Spanish media is inundated with propaganda and some of it is pretty unfriendly. La Raza is a group that my family fears."

Ok, and so what now?

"These protest and boycotts go deeper than just this but its a place to start your own research behind the NEWS we're all force fed due to the media control. From both sides American and Mexican. We're all being mislead in some way."

Ok, and so now what?

"There are few RICH MEN (if any) willing to promote the anti-war issues because there is no money to be made from it. In the end MONEY always wins. They wanted a War they got it despite all the world wide protest which were rarely covered! Amazing don't you think? Look out Iran! And now unfortunately the illegal immigrants are mislead suckers to a RICH MANS WORLD of manipulation. I fear most of us are manipulated, and side tracked on so many issues world wide. "

Ok, and so now what?

"When I read, study, hear about how America has caused the problems in Mexico I know this is true but I will also say few voting American citizens had much to do with what our SO CALLED representatives (after elected) have done along with the Mexican government to create the low quality of life style in Mexico."

Ok, and so now what?

"Although I have yet to see one immigrant (illegal) who looks like they have missed many meals. The food in Mexico must be pretty damn good judging by all the very healthy looking illegal immigrants I've seen in the media clip as they come across the border."

Ooooooooooo, fat equals healthy looking? If you're not starving, you have no business trying to better your life? Sheesh....

"Guess the mainstream missed that aspect of the spin. If we're talking "starving" then that is a serious issue but I think we're talking more about wanting a Lexus instead of a Kia."

Then why aren't they DRIVING over the border in their Kias and trading them in for Lexus'? Jeeeeezusss, what a cynical piece of work YOU are!

"All cars are just a means of transportation its just a matter of quality. Hell we'd take a Lexus if they're giving them away but we're not interested in doing the EXTRA WORK and giving up precious time to pay for a car so we will just drive a car we can afford."

Do you figure it would take more, or less, work for a Mexican migrant worker to buy a Kia compared to the amount of work a middle-class American would have to do to buy a Lexus? How much sweat has dripped off YOUR brow lately, as you did stoop labor to produce food for America?
And what the hell is with this automobile fixation???

"My family and I are not going to steal one then protest and demand rights after we broke the law to get the car in the first place."

I don't even need to point out how pinheaded this analogy is, do it for yourselves, kiddies.

"The issue in Mexico, unlike other countries, isn't about starvation it's about materialism, living a certain life style. Which it is understandable to want better things ... they, like my family, just need to go through the LEGAL steps and become a citizen and stop expecting to be accommodated by this country and the legal (immigrants) citizens instead of having this country and citizens accommodate illegals and their culture."

So, would you then allow anybody who was starving to immigrate without waiting? How about if they are sick? Or politically oppressed?

And when the issue to change Mexico by protesting there the answer is that they can't protest in Mexico, well you're not allowed to protest in America either unless it promotes the RICH MAN agenda (just ask any anti-war protester or WTO protester, etc ... or better yet go to a protest) which judging by the total headline news coverage and positive spin it receives this whole immigrant issues reeks of RICH MAN manipulation of the masses. So I will say again these are simply human beings who have been mislead and inadvertently leading many of us to the slaughter."

Rich folks have input, and poor folks do, too...and so do the illegals. I agree that reform has to take place in Mexico, but you won't get that from the PUDS, who don't even think we need reform HERE!

Enjoy the victory though because I have NO DOUBT what-so-ever that everything these protesters are calling for will be met. All one needs to do is drive down your city streets and notice how many signs are already in Spanish. I say be careful what you put your energy and time into because when the other shoe drops I don't think any of us are going to like it.

And we have a lot of signs in Hawaiian, Portuguese, Chinese, English, Japanese, you name it. We still get to where we need to go. The McDonald's menu in Waikiki is in English and Japanese. So friggin' what????

"Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear."
William Gladstone, 4-time Prime Minister of Great Britain.