not so fast
haven’t written a letter to the editor in many moons, but after reading an op-ed by Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman in the WSJ this morning i fumed out and emailed in the following (and then went back to the greek passive system : ) :
Messrs Bush and Mehlman presented their talking points on the pending immigration legislation very shrewdly, and refreshingly without the ad hominem ‘xenophobe’, ‘nativist’ attacks that too often are employed to deflect real debate. However, they, as all of their fellow supporters of this gargantuan bill, fail to address directly and in detail the legion substantive concerns and objections of its opponents. To touch on a few, they offer that it will expand the border fence, but fail to account for why the eight hundred miles of fence passed into law six months ago has languished, as well as why this new legislation would mandate less than half of that to actually be completed. If the legislative and executive branches haven’t been able to follow through and implement the comparatively simple bill mandating the fencing, why should three hundred plus pages of additional unwieldy provisions be swallowed by the American people as realistically implementable? Homeland Security and Immigration are overwhelmed to begin with, and no vague “trigger mechanism” provision tacked on to such a massive addition of further regulatory minutiae and compliance burdens, with its facile promise of hiring more federal bureaucrats to administrate this comprehensive vision, will be able to stem the traffic that this debate of yet another mass legalization will bring. It is difficult to understand how the Congress and President could possibly fail to appreciate that conducting this debate before we have secured our borders will serve only as an encouragement to Mexican citizens and OTMs to secure their own, and thus their relatives’, chance at “not amnesty” legal status. The “proof” touted as required to establish a presence in the country before the arbitrarily chosen date is, for all practical purposes, no proof at all. It is yet another example of an unrealistic, federal bureaucratic fraud ridden nightmare waiting to happen. This American security and sovereignty crisis, which six years after 9/11 both branches are suddenly anxious to “fix” overnight, has been compounding for thirty years of willful neglect. It is not going to be solved by the bloated bipartisan slights of hand of a few ambitious Senators and a President whose credibility on this issue is, at best, a tough sell.
Build the fence that has already been mandated, continue to enforce the sanctions against illegal hiring already on the books, prioritize the deportation of illegal criminal aliens – especially MS-13 and other South American criminal gangs terrorizing American cities, step up prosecution of identity and Social Security fraud, continue to fund the development of tamper-proof ID cards, stop unjustly incarcerating our border patrol agents, pardon Campion and Ramos, and if in three to five years some progress on these and similar fronts is evinced, I am sure the American people will be more willing to hear the ideas of our representatives and engage in debate about humanely regularizing those here without documentation. A majority of Americans are in agreement that “doing nothing is not an option,” but want those who represent us to first do what they’ve already promised and already passed into law. We don’t trust you, and you have no track record – especially on this issue – to be expecting our trust.
