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Senate Immigration Bill a Legislative Monstrosity Philip V. Brennan This battle over illegal immigration and what to do about it is the nastiest, most contentious and divisive issue to afflict the U.S. in my long lifetime. We are literally at each other's throats.
As I wrote last week in Illegal Immigration: What a Mess!, when things reach this stage reason and sanity go out the window. Nobody listens to anybody else.
In this sense the deafest people around are, in this order, the Senate of the United States, the president, and the liberal bleeding hearts who spend most of their energies in thinking up ways to give the nation and everything in it away to people who don't like us very much.
Let's begin with this: The most undivided bunch in America are the American people. They want the border to be sealed tight and leakproof. They want an end to the endless parade of illegals marching all but unobstructed across our border night and day. They are single-minded about this, and they turn a deaf ear to all those suggestions about what to do about filling the jobs Americans allegedly won't do and how to address the problem of the millions of illegals now here. First things first is what they want. Story Continues Below
Let's be clear about this. No amount of rhetoric can disguise the fact that the overwhelming mass of the American people agree on the simple proposition that we must strengthen border security and enforce the laws now on the books. They are not interested in being distracted by side issues.
Up on Capitol Hill, in that august body the United States Senate, you would think that some kind of acoustic cordon sanitaire had been erected, shutting out all sound but the words of the members. They seem deaf to the loud voice of the people who sent them to Washington but are now both unseen and unheard.
Seemingly oblivious to the will of the people, these oligarchs are creating a legislative monstrosity that not only runs counter to the wishes of their constituents, but also assaults common sense and decency.
Can you imagine any body of allegedly sane and practical-minded solons allowing miscreants here illegally to collect Social Security benefits to which they are not by the wildest stretch of imagination entitled? Yet the Senate bill would allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment – even if the job was obtained through forged or stolen documents.
In addition to ignoring the wishes of their constituents, the senators are turning a blind eye to anything that might give them pause before they rush headlong into a legislative chasm into which they would carry the entire nation as well as themselves.
Up there in that soundproof world where they live, truth scarcely matters. Rhetoric soars around a gaggle of untruths and blithely ignored – and to them inconvenient – facts.
In his current column, the magnificent Professor Thomas Sowell, perhaps the clearest-thinking human being in these United States, reminds the nation that all is not what the senators and the president would like us to believe. He calls the Senate's immigration bill now being considered a "fraud" based on "a series of glib talking points that insult our intelligence."
Observing that "Some of the most momentous consequences – a major increase in the number of immigrants admitted legally – are not even being discussed at all by those who wrote the Senate bill," he asks, "How many times have we heard that illegal aliens are taking 'jobs that Americans won't do,'" and he asks what those jobs are.
"Even in occupations where illegals are concentrated, such as agriculture, cleaning, construction, and food preparation, the great majority of the work is still being done by people who are not illegal aliens.
"The highest concentration of illegals is in agriculture, where they are 24 percent of the people employed. That means three-quarters of the people are not illegal aliens. But when will the glib phrase-mongers stop telling us that the illegals are simply taking "jobs that Americans won't do"?
He zeroes in on the fallacy that because we cannot instantly find and deport 12 million people, the only choice left is to find some way to make them legal.
"There is probably no category of law-breakers – from counterfeiters to burglars or from jay-walkers to murderers – who can all be found and arrested. But no one suggests that we must therefore make what they have done legal," he wrote, adding that "Such an argument would suggest that there is nothing in between 100 percent effective law enforcement and zero percent effective law enforcement."
He wrote that nobody has even suggested that "we could suddenly find all 12 million illegal immigrants at once and send them all home immediately." the real question, he wrote, "is what we do with whatever illegal aliens we do find," noting that "there are various communities around the country where local officials have a policy of forbidding the police from reporting illegal immigrants to federal authorities."
In their superior wisdom, the members of the Senate simply ignore all this, and I'm not at all certain that they don't know what they are doing. Let's just think about what might lie behind their seeming indifference to the facts and the will of the American people. Let's consider that they are deliberately crafting a monstrosity that cannot ever be enacted into law, and by so doing, avoid doing anything about a crisis they neither can nor want to deal with in a rational manner.
Somebody once said about an apparently insoluble situation, "Let's just leave it alone and let God sort it all out." In this case, God is replaced by the House of Representatives, which has passed the kind of hard-nosed strengthen-the-border bill the American people demand.
There is little chance that the members of the House, all of whom have to face the voters in November, will ape the members of the upper body and simply ignore the wishes of their constituents. Ergo, when the Senate serves up its rotting mess of pottage at the House-Senate conference, it will die. And so, as a consequence, will the House bill ... and then the Congress can simply pass the whole crisis on to the Almighty and allow Him to sort it all out.
That will satisfy the Democrats, who prefer to have illegal immigration remain as a political issue rather than to allow it to be dealt with. There's a Hispanic vote to be considered, you see.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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