Bacon's Rebellion

Senator and Presidential Candidate Allen on Illegal Immigration

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Got an email memo from Sen. George Allen on Illegal Immigration to Mr. and Mrs. Virginia (April 7, 2006).

“The legislative priority should be to secure our borders and stop the flow of illegal entry. A country that cannot control its borders, cannot control its own destiny. I have advocated and supported measures to address this neglected responsibility with more border patrol personnel, detention centers, sensors and virtual and physical fences where necessary to stem the flow.”

This is key to fixing the problem and a wedge issue to winning the GOP nomination and the election in 08.

No policy on what to do with the 11 or 12 million or who knows how many illegal aliens in the U.S. is worth anything until we, as a Nation, decide to close and control the border or not. Nothing matters until that problem is solved first.

Our current Republican President has failed in his Constitutional duty to protect the Nation.

I’m one of the voters looking for a candidate who will enforce the borders – immediately. Then, we can consider the alternatives for illegal aliens in country.

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9 responses to “Senator and Presidential Candidate Allen on Illegal Immigration”

  1. Virginia Centrist Avatar
    Virginia Centrist

    George Bush’s policies are designed to bring more illegals across the border.

    He announces an amnesty program every 4 years, knowing full well that it won’t be passed and the only result will be millions of illegals streaming across the border looking to beat the clock on amnesty.

  2. Scott Avatar
    Scott

    A country that cannot control its corporations, cannot control its own destiny.

    If the politicians were serious about slowing or stopping illegal immigration, they would go after the corporations and employers that exploit them.

    This country is as addicted to illegal immigration as it is to oil.

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Illegal immigration is a huge problem and it needs to be fixed.

    However, it’s part of a larger issue which is Free Trade.

    If we truly want free trade,(which I am not sure we really do) we are going to have to understand that it not only includes goods, but goods & services.

    Labor is a service.

  4. Charles Avatar
    Charles

    Bush didn’t push for amnesty. He wanted a guest worker program — not something that lead to citizenship.

    The illegals are here now working. Those that are working can’t all be sent home tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be better to establish a program where we track those here, and control how many come and what jobs they can do.

    I’d much rather close the borders first, and find the illegals and remove them, and during that second phase figure out how many workers we really need and what skills they should have.

    That “Critically Thinking” guy wrote a column Wednesday in the Potomac News about illegal immigration. PNews isn’t updating their on-line opinion pages yet (they seem behind since Alfred left), but Charles has kindly posted his article on his opinion-page blog Critically Thinking.

  5. Charles Avatar
    Charles

    I forgot the “shameless plug” alert on the last post. Sorry.

    Charles R.

  6. Toomanytaxes Avatar
    Toomanytaxes

    One of the bigger problems associated with today’s “close-our-eyes” approach is the shift of many costs for illegal immigrants and their families to local and, sometimes, to state taxpayers. Take K-12 education for example. There are good policy reasons why children should be permitted to attend K-12 schools regardless of their immigration status. But educating these kids, many of whom are not literate in their native language, is very costly to local taxpayers.

    A fair program would include an employment tax levied on employers of all guest workers. This tax should be paid to local governments to cover the higher costs of services provided to guest workers and their families. In order to achieve full compliance, the government should permit taxpayer suits against employers who fail to remit the employment taxes, along with the payment attorneys fees by any employer failing to pay the tax. We’d have good compliance in no time. The tax would also help to equalize labor costs between immigrant and native labor, especially at the unskilled worker level.

    Along with this tax, several other measures should also be part of a plan, including a liberal grant of guest worker status to anyone without a criminal background or other disqualifying characteristics. It should be relatively easy for a foreign worker to register before entering the US and to obtain guest worker status. A person with this status should also be covered by all U.S. labor laws, including wage and hour provisions, in order to prevent exploitation of these workers.

    Concomitant with the introduction of a liberal guest worker plan would be the introduction of very strict controls against the employment of non-guest worker aliens (i.e., illegal aliens). A business employing illegal aliens should be prohibited from deducting wage payments from taxable income and should also face fines and, even, jail time.

  7. Jeremy Hinton Avatar
    Jeremy Hinton

    Hmm, a quick look at a map seems to show that our border with Canada is significantly larger than our border with Mexico. And yet, it’s people coming across the Mexican border that seems to cause all the fuss. Is the North being flooded with Canadian illegals, taking all the low paying jobs? No you say? Perhaps this is too “big picture”, but it would seem to me that working with Mexico through fair and equitable trade agreements to improve the quality of life of its citizens is a definite way to “disincentivize” them to travel here (see Canada). On the flip side, we could adopt monitary policies that so widen the gap between the rich and the poor in our own country, that poor mexicans are better off staying at home; indeed, maybe we’ll start losing our poor to better jobs in mexico.
    (end hyperbolic rant).

  8. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    I have been reading “Bacon’s Rebellion” for a few months now and have found it well-reasoned even when I disagreed with a posting. A large number of recent posts have had to do with traffic, living patterns, etc – all greatly affected by population. Is anyone aware of the fact that the bills discussed in the Senate would push US population from around 300 million later this year to 500 million in 2050? Sen. Specter even admitted that they had not conducted any studies that would indicate what the population increase might BE, let alone what effect it might HAVE on the US. Keep in mind that 200 million – the amount to be added in 45 years – is about the population of the entire US around 1970 – 36 years ago.

    I supported the 1986 amnesty. It was to be a one time only event that would grant amnesty to 1-2 million – less than 1% of the population then. What we got was closer to 3 million and a fraud rate estimated to be 70%. If a person is willing to commit “serial fraud” to get into the US and work here, we shouldn’t be surprised that he’d commit fraud in order to be allowed to stay here. One of the 1993 WTC bombers and the man who shot 5 people, killing 2, outside of the CIA in 1993 made it through the 1986 amnesty. Who knows what awaits us this time? The agencies that will be tasked with handling the investigations of immigrants both here now and coming later are clearly not up to the job.

    We then got “family re-unification” meaning that the newly legalized got to start bringing in family members in a massive chain migration. The single largest source of LEGAL immigration is family re-unification – migration via nepotism, if you will – not “needed” workers, skilled or unskilled. If we go with one of the the Senate’s plans (including GWB’s), it is likely that we will almost instantly add tens of millions of minor children of all ages to the schools in the US. Many if not most of these children will have had little schooling in their native country and most will not be speaking English. Since ESL is mandated but good science and math classes are not, which do you think will get priority?

    Toomanytaxes’s plan to have those who profit from guest workers pay for things like schooling and health care is a great idea – I’ve suggested the same thing on other blogs; but we all know that quality education is not just about money. How can we both bring these students into the mainstream and promote the science, math, and technology that we are told is necessary to prevent the US from falling behind in the world?

    The simple truth is that we have next to no idea what the effects – short or long-term might be of the plans being hastily put together in the area of immigration. Taxes can be raised or lowered fairly quickly. Once you have granted an immigrant legal status it is next to impossible to do anything about it. And population increases are the gift that keeps on giving.

    Deena Flinchum

  9. NoVA Scout Avatar
    NoVA Scout

    The recent immigration discussions in Congress and elsewhere have mostly fallen into a kind of Dubai Ports cesspool of public ignorance and denial of reality. Allen’s statement seems to be pure politics and patently inadequate as a statement of immigration policy. It’s a pander to one not particularly constructive part of the debate. To be sure, significantly improved controls on the southern border are a necessary element of addressing the situation. But it is only one element that, by itself, solves little.

    There must be a mechanism to encourage those here to come into the systems of taxing, counting, registering, licensing etc. that all of us should be part of. Where illegals are paying taxes (and they are in many forms, including sales, property and fees) they ought to get benefits. Where taxes are not paid (i.e., income tax evasion through cash compensation), we need to get that regularized. I doubt if there’s much tax dodging on something like public school costs (mentioned frequently and in this thread). Immigrants, legal or illegal, pay rent, the rent covers the property tax costs of the landlords. I would think the greater societal costs would be for uninsured vehicle operation, uninsured emergency and hospital care and similar services that require a transparent system of deduction from payroll taxes. In all the furious discussion of these issues in the blogs, even a commendably wonkish one such as this, I rarely see data. This leads me to believe that reliable data are very much lacking.

    It is very much in the economic and security interests of the United States that we have an inviting immigration policy. We sorely need immigrant skills at the high end (engineering, science, medicine). Whatever our policy is, it should emphasize welcoming and quickly assimilating immigrants with these skills. If our approach to immigration at the low end is fraught with demeaning rhetoric, it sabotages our efforts to build an overall policy that works in our national interests. One of the hallmarks of successful national economies in the 21st century will be a willingness and creativity to attract the best and the brightest from all over the globe. We don’t want these people to come here just to be guest workers, we want them to come here to be loyal, productive, enthusiastic American citizens who will stay, have chldren and become part of the American ethos. No way we can do that while railing at the lower end of the socio-economic scale about possible arrests and deportation.

    Even were it not in the vital national interests of the U.S. to be an immigrant-attractor, it is very much in the political interests of the Republican Party to find creative ways to get control of the immigration issue. The tone and substance of a lot of the rhetoric coming from our end of the spectrum (“Make undocumented immigration a felony!” “Deport them!” “Let local police arrest them for illegal entry!” “Down with day laborers!” etc., etc.), unless dramatically modulated and revised, pretty much ensures that the Republican Party is dismantling itself as a political force in coming decades in America. We will soon go the way of the Whigs, who, for failure to deal constructively with key issues of the mid-19th Century, became irrelevant, ineffectual and unwelcome.

    The President’s program is not a bad one. It can be improved and refined. For both practical and political reasons, border security can be given more attention. But a program that does not emphasize regularizing the status of those who are here, and attracting badly needed emigres from other countries, will fail us. And we all need to cool our jets on the anti-foreigner atmospherics that so often attend this discussion.

    Politicians like Allen (whom I support) need to be slapped around a bit by their own crowd when they issue statements as shallow as the one posted here. It’s not even senatorial, let alone presidential.

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