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No Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Lowell Ponte A revelation struck me last Thursday as I watched President George W. Bush near Yuma, Arizona, doing a media photo op riding in a Border Patrol dune buggy. I was witnessing the second coming of Michael Dukakis in a tank. In 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, rode in an Army tank for press photographers to demonstrate that he was tough on national defense. Grinning beneath a military helmet, he looked ridiculous, and the universal laughter at this pseudo-intellectual liberal playing soldier sank his campaign. In 2006, President Bush seemed equally silly as he played Border Patrolman. Every American, right or left, now recognizes that Mr. Bush is only pretending to oppose, but has no intention of stopping, the flood of illegal aliens across our southern border. This cheap Latino labor is too profitable to business campaign contributors, and key Republican lawmakers are afraid of alienating an emerging pivotal constituency of Hispanic voters. Republican leaders would rather risk alienating aging conservative voters, assuming that conservatives have no place else to go and can be herded like sheep back to the polls in November by invoking their fear of liberals taking over Congress. Mr. Bush last week promised to send 6,000 National Guard reservists to the border, but he spoke only after assuring Mexican President Vicente Fox that these reservists would be temporary, unarmed and kept away from direct enforcement roles.
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Few praised the president's disingenuous speech to the nation, but Dick Morris, former political strategist for Bill and Hillary Clinton, called it brilliant. As NewsMax reported on May 4, however, Morris apparently is now on the payroll of term-limited Vicente Fox's conservative PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon in Mexico's upcoming July 2 presidential election. (See: Dick Morris Helping Mexican Candidate Surge?) According to polls, Calderon recently has pulled ahead of long-leading leftist presidential candidate Andres Manual Lopez Obrador by using ads that show Obrador's links to Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, ally of Cuban Marxist dictator Fidel Castro. President Bush clearly wants to do or say nothing that could help Obrador, whose chief cultural adviser openly calls for "reconquista," the reconquering of former Mexican territory that is now the southwestern United States. Imagine having a Marxist regime like Cuba's or Venezuela's just across our porous border. Polls show that what Americans – including a majority of Mexican-Americans – want, above all, is government action to stop the flood of illegals crossing our border. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has offered a "tough" bill to build 700 miles of fence, while the GOP-run Senate's "comprehensive" bill would build only 350 miles of fence – but neither would cover much more than a third of this 1,998-mile-long border with Mexico. (As liberal Democrat Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball," noted, after even a few miles of fence was built to wall off San Diego from Tijuana, crime in San Diego fell by 56 percent.)
The U.S. Senate last week passed two amendments, one declaring English the "National Language of the United States," the other declaring English our "common and unifying language." Neither prohibited the growing use of Spanish by government as America's second language. To prohibit this would require a law mandating English as America's "official" language, which no lawmaker seems eager to propose. "I really believe this amendment is racist," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic minority leader. "I think it's directed basically to people who speak Spanish." But Spanish, like English, is spoken by blue-eyed blondes and blacks, and "Hispanic" is a term describing ethnicity, not race. Reid's was the latest effort to play divide-and-conquer politics by America's racist political party – the Democratic Party of the slave owners, the Klan, Jim Crow, the segregated South, Bull Connor and Al Sharpton. Its favored races change, but its race baiting never changes. The president's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, in an interview the day after the language vote, blurted out that Mr. Bush "has never supported making English the national language." The president, said Gonzales, favors "English-Plus," that Americans have proficiency in more than one language, as Mr. Bush does (if one counts doubletalk as a language). Last week the U.S. Senate voted on an amendment by Senator John Ensign, R-Nev., to deny Social Security benefits to any illegal alien who used a false number. The amendment was tabled into oblivion by a 50-49 vote. Five Democrats supported it, all coincidentally up for re-election this year: Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Bill Nelson of Florida and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. But eleven Republicans voted to kill the amendment – and apparently favor guaranteeing Social Security (already shaky as Baby Boomers near retirement) to millions of illegals who have broken American law twice. The Republican senators who killed Ensign's amendment are: Sam Brownback of Kansas, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Mel Martinez of Florida, John McCain of Arizona, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Ted Stevens of Alaska and George Voinovich of Ohio. Of these, only Chafee, DeWine and Lugar face voters this November. In 1986, Americans were assured that a new reform law with tough penalties for employers of illegals would solve this immigration problem forever. As many as 16 million illegals have arrived since then, and the promised employer penalties have never really been enforced. It's clear that Republicans and Democrats both intend to turn the 2006 bill's "path to earned citizenship" into easy amnesty but that government efforts to halt the flood of new illegals will cease one minute after this November's election, just as in 1986. "Fool me once, shame on you," the American people are now screaming. "Fool me twice, shame on me. We won't get fooled again. Take control of the entire border with a 30-foot-high wall NOW! Anything less is a sham and a betrayal of the oath our lawmakers and president took to defend America."
Editor's note:
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