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More New Talk of Illegal Alien Shamnesty

Posted by Playful Walrus on Wednesday, December 30, 2009 6:00:00 PM
Just like I said recently, we are being prepped for another shamnesty push. A couple of recent pieces in the Los Angeles Times make that clear. The other day, they ran this editorial.
Comprehensive immigration reform emerged from the shadows last week when Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois and a group of Democratic congressmen submitted a 600-page bill to jump-start the process.
Hey, why not? In addition to National Health Control and the Pretend Climate Control, why not? Elections have consequences, after all.
The Gutierrez bill is a testament to the growing exasperation felt by many champions of reform.
That would mean people who want shamnesty for the sake of having more Democrat voters and people who want cheap labor that the rest of us subsidize (schools, medical care, infrastructure, law enforcement, fire protection, public transit, and other public amenities and programs).
Proponents of legalizing the status of undocumented immigrants, many leaders in the Latino and other immigrant communities, and some business interests such as the agriculture and hospitality industries had hoped for a speedy and seismic shift in U.S. policy under Obama.
The writers at the paper simply can’t bring themselves to use the legal term of "illegal alien". Almost none of these people are undocumented. Quite a few have forged documents with stolen identities.

Some good news:
Federal immigration prosecutions jumped 16% in 2009. A record number of people were deported in the last 11 months -- 287,000, including 136,000 criminals. More than 1,500 companies had their employee verification forms audited by Homeland Security -- a 1,000% increase over last year. And instead of halting a controversial program in which local law enforcement partners with Homeland Security to catch undocumented criminals, Obama revamped it to minimize abuses, while expanding it to more departments.
Keep up the good work.

Here's a story from today’s paper, written by Peter Nicholas and Tom Hamburger.
Senior White House aides privately have assured Latino activists that the president will back legislation next year to provide a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.
Let's be sure to screw over all of the people who are trying to do things the right way, while encouraging more illegal aliens to stay here!
In an effort to enlist the kind of business support that helped drive its healthcare initiative, for example, administration officials have reached out to the National Restaurant Assn., which represents an industry that employs thousands of immigrants.
A lot of businesses – especially ones that are location-dependent and thus can't relocate to third world countries - would love more cheap labor, while the rest of us pick up the tab, having to pay more in taxes for more programs to help the "poor" employed in these jobs.

Democrats are going to try to create new (legal) voters with this. Republicans should fight to make sure that we have 1) demonstrated, lasting, effective border protection, and 2) a more libertarian system of government – before any widespread new "path to citizenship" is implemented for illegal aliens. Republicans need to appeal to legal immigrants, and their children and grandchildren to shore up resistance to rewarding lawbreakers.

Previously: On Illegal Aliens
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Illegal Alien Facility Not Glamorous Enough

Posted by Playful Walrus on Thursday, April 02, 2009 4:16:23 PM
The ACLU of SoCal and the National Immigration Law Center have filed a lawsuit against federal authorities over the use of a detention facility in downtown L.A.  I found this LATimes.com blog entry from Anna Gorman.

According to the lawsuit...
The center is "regularly overcrowded, causing violence, safety hazards, and humiliation," while detainees are denied access to attorneys and courts and are rarely provided drinking water or a change of clothing...
Maybe the feds are just trying to make them feel at home?
Detainees are held at the center during the day and then shuttled to local jails at night and on weekends, which the suit said "effectively cuts detainees off from contact with the outside world" and deprives them of their basic needs.

"They are detaining people in inhumane conditions, grossly unsanitary and disgusting conditions," said Marisol Orihuela, a staff attorney at the ACLU.
The places most of these people are from are just like that.
During a tour of the processing center several months ago, Los Angeles assistant field office director Eric Saldana said the agency was doing its best to keep detainees there for just 12 hours at a time and quickly move them into facilities designed to hold them for longer periods. Sometimes, however, he said, detainees are kept longer or brought back for several days because of delays in accessing travel documents for deportation or because of limited space at local jails.
Nowhere in the text of the blog entry will you find anything about these people being illegal aliens or otherwise being criminals.  That is why they are there.  The piece makes it look like they are "immigrants" – not even "illegal" ones.  Immigrants are people who come here legally, with the intention of staying.  These people are illegal aliens.  That is the legal term, at least until Obama changes it.  We can solve our problems by simply relabeling them, you see.  Just like with terrorists, wars, and genocidal maniacs.
The processing center holds up to 250 detainees. There are six large holding cells surrounding a central area with desks, where the detainees are photographed, fingerprinted and interviewed. Each cell has a phone, a bathroom and a bench around the edge. There are also smaller cells for families or juveniles.

Detainees have access to medical staff and can ask to see a judge, Saldana said.
In all seriousness, we do have a responsibility to those we take into custody. Of course, if the ACLU was not already so meddlesome, these people could probably have been processed faster in the first place and sent back home more quickly.
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On Illegal Aliens

Posted by Playful Walrus on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 12:15:50 AM
We were successful in killing the shamnesty legislation, and then we ended up with two candidates for President who had both supported it, and the issue dropped off of the 2008 election radar.

The experts say shamnesty for illegal aliens is now a certainty.  We will see.  I think more Americans would be willing to consider another amnesty program if we see our borders realistically secured.

We don’t want a repeat of what happened after the 1986 amnesty, where border security was promised but not delivered.

We need to have a reasonably secured international border to the sake of security.  As long as we have taxpayer-funded welfare programs, education, and infrastructure, we also need to control immigration for our fiscal health.  I would be more in favor of libertarian-style wide open borders if we had a libertarian employment, education, infrastructure, and social welfare system.

Dropping this issue in an effort to get Latino votes has proven futile.  Instead of pandering to people by national origin or ethnicity, we should stick to the rule of law being important.  Plenty of Latinos respect that, and the ones who don't won't vote our way anyway.

Here are some of my previous entries on illegal alien issues:

Truly Comprehensive Immigration Reform

How to Get Us to Stop Caring About the Illegal Alien Issue

Three Red Herrings in the Illegal Alien Fight
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