Excerpt Of The Day: Tom DeLay Gets The Message On Illegal Immigrants

22 Jul, 2005 by John Hawkins

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“House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that the House will produce another immigration and border security bill this Congress and will have to pass that bill before turning to a guest-worker program.

…He said the House has received the message that immigration is “an incredibly important issue to the American people.”

…Mr. DeLay said more security measures are needed and that the government has to prove it can enforce immigration laws before voters will be willing to accept a guest-worker program. He said the House will act on the issues in that order.

“We’ll probably have a law-enforcement-type bill, working with the Senate and the administration,” he said. “Once we convince the American people we can secure the borders and enforce the law, we can discuss what is also important in this mix — and that is how to accommodate people from other parts of the [world] that want to come here, work temporarily and go back home. Some people call that a guest-worker program.”

…Mr. DeLay said he supports an eventual guest-worker plan and said a consensus is developing in Congress on the need for one.

“Even Tom Tancredo has said we need a guest-worker program,” Mr. DeLay said of the Colorado Republican who is a leader in the immigration control movement.

But Mr. DeLay has said such a program should apply only to workers who register from their home countries, not to illegal aliens already in the United States.” — The Washington Times

Bingo! The only long-term solution to the illegal alien problem is to get our borders under control and to put a reliable system of enforcing of immigration laws into place. If that’s not done first, it won’t get done because the truth is a lot of people up on Capitol Hill don’t want our immigration laws to be enforced.

A lot of Republicans want illegals as cheap labor for their business supporters and many Democrats want illegals to become citizens because they believe, correctly I might add, that they’ll vote for Democrats in disproportionate numbers. So we’ve got to staunch the flow of illegals into the country FIRST, before a guest worker program is set up, or there will be no strong motivation for the soft on illegals crowd to support enforcement.

Now some people don’t buy that, they think that if laws are on the books, they’re going to be enforced. When it comes to illegal immigration, that’s absolutely incorrect because both Republicans and Democrats have deliberately thwarted immigration law in the past. Mark Krikorian explains:

“In ninety eight, the border patrol noticed that the work force picking onions in the vidalia onion fields of Georgia appeared increasingly to be illegals, so they did some raids, arrested a few dozen illegal aliens, and all the rest of them ran off. So the farmers were there stuck with onions in the ground and no one to pull them out. It was all their own fault, they knew what they were doing, but nonetheless, they were outraged. They called their Congressmen, and by the end of the week, three of Georgia’s Congressmen and both Senators, Republicans and Democrats, wrote a joint letter to the Attorney General demanding that the Immigration Service stop enforcing the law. Because they said the INS does not understand the needs of American farmers. Which in ordinary English means, “let them pick the onions, then arrest them. Preferably before we have to pay them”. Well, the INS got slapped down and stopped.

So what they tried as an alternative to raids, was something called Operation Vanguard in Nebraska. It was sort of the first effort at something like this to see if it worked. They didn’t do raids anywhere, all they did was subpoena personnel records. And they didn’t just pick one or two employers, they did all the meatpacking plants in all of Nebraska, so that no one of them would be inconvenienced while the others benefitted. They took the personnel records back to the office, checked the Social Security numbers, and came back with a list of people who seemed to be illegal, who did not have authorization to work. They said “we know some of these people are legit and the records are wrong. We want to fix those people’s records and the ones that are illegal, have to leave of course”. They came back with four thousand names. One thousand people showed up and got their records fixed and three thousand were never heard from again. They were illegal aliens. It worked really well and it was intended to be repeated every two to three months so as to wean the whole industry off of the use of illegal aliens.

After one effort like this, the political and business elite in Nebraska went insane. The ranchers and the meat packers teamed up with the governor. The governor’s predecessor, now Senator Nelson, was hired as a lobbyist to put an end to this initiative. Senator Chuck Hagel made it essentially his mission in life to see that this was never repeated and it wasn’t. And the Senior INS official who thought it up in the first place was invited to retire early — and he did. If you’re a bureaucrat and you have kids in college, you’re going to take the hint: Congress doesn’t want you to enforce the law. So the Immigration Service essentially gave up enforcing the immigration laws inside the country. They focused on the important, but narrow, issues of criminal aliens and smugglers. I’m all for that, criminal aliens and alien smugglers are the scum of the earth, but there’s a lot more to the issue than just that. But, going after those parts of the issue doesn’t get you in trouble politically. So that’s what they did, they gave up because Congress told them to stop doing their jobs. They really haven’t changed that much such 9/11.”

Until we control our porous borders and put some teeth in our barely functional immigration laws any guest worker programs should be DOA in Congress…