Bush proposal an insult to America's citizens - Articles - CAIR - Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform

"The rich will always require an abundance of the poor."
- Voltaire

Six weeks and five days ago, our president brought forth to this nation a new amnesty proposal, conceived in political cynicism and dedicated to the propositions that public opinion and American workers don't count, the rule of law is passé, and future generations should suffer for today's political expediencies. Now we are engaged in a great civil war of words, testing whether this proposal, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Immigration lawyers say that the most often-heard question is, "When's the next amnesty?" That figures, because we've already had seven amnesties since the "one-time-only" 1986 amnesty, a fraudulent free-for-all that legalized 3 million people - among them Mahmud Abouhalima, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

With Texas-sized chutzpah, the president said his "not-an-amnesty" amnesty would be backed by "strong workplace enforcement," the same claim made for the '86 amnesty. Cesar Chavez, a foe of illegal immigration, knew his struggling farmworkers' union couldn't compete against wage-undercutting illegal workers. Only after promised adequate workplace enforcement did he acquiesce to the '86 amnesty. But the U.S. government double-crossed Chavez and the American people: Real enforcement never arrived. In the following years, illegal immigration increased dramatically, giving us between 8 million and 13 million illegals from all over the globe.

As Americans digest its implications, support for Bush's mega-amnesty has fallen to as low as 30 percent, consistent with public opinion on immigration in general. Results from a Roper Poll, for example, show virtually all Americans consider illegal immigration a "serious problem," and 67 percent of those polled agreed with imposing mandatory detention and forfeiture of property, followed by deportation if necessary to lower the number of illegals to near zero.

Contrast that poll with a survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations of "opinion leaders," including members of Congress and the administration, as well as business and media leaders. It showed that a majority of the public views our high immigration totals as a "critical threat to U.S. vital interests," but only 14 percent of the elites agreed, a telling 46 percent disconnect.

On Jan. 18, former Gov. Dick Lamm wrote in Perspective of political elites: "Both political parties have been captured by special interests and corrupted by their large donors." In the immigration game, the capturing, corrupting players are rapacious big business and the open-borders and race-identity lobbies, each awash in money. That's why Bush's cynical adviser, Karl Rove, reportedly told Bush he could comfortably advance his unwanted amnesty proposal, because "they have nowhere to go" for redress. "They," of course, means We the People.

With workers being imported and jobs exported, our 14.5 million people who are underemployed and unemployed are hit with a double whammy. Bush's grand plan to "match willing [foreign] workers with willing employers for jobs Americans won't do" has no limit on the number of those workers, with at least minimum-wage pay the only criterion. Billions of the world's impoverished would find that to be the chance of an otherwise-bleak lifetime, and the stampede would begin. These for-sale jobs include most income levels, what a Bush spokesman called "non-category-specific" jobs - those held by most of you reading this.

An annual $7 billion to educate their children and a conservatively estimated $9 billion in health care for illegals are some of the high costs of cheap labor. These costs will explode if the president is allowed to cram tens of millions into an already crowded American lifeboat. Legalizing millions who, under the plan, may bring in their families could mean up to 50 million additions - 11 times the population of Colorado - to our malignant, immigration-driven population growth. Just to keep up with current growth, 150,000 new jobs a month are needed. Last December, there were just 1,000 net new jobs.

Because of overpopulation pressures, 25 percent of our underground aquifers are not recharging at their natural rates, a portentous trend that predates the current drought. Since 1970, we have degraded and urbanized more than 39 million acres of land, including prime farmland, to make way for the immigrating tens of millions, forcing us to import more and more food.

Even with no increase in our current immigration levels, left unchecked, those high levels will still cause a doubling of our population within the lifetimes of kids born today. That's important to understand, because it is your children and grandchildren who will be fighting for scraps - perhaps held hostage by an OPEC-like food cartel. There are no advocates, no lobbyists for their special interests, while their parents and grandparents remain in denial and keep dodging the issue. If realized, the proposal would be tantamount to committing a hate crime against future generations.

After their initial crime of breaking and entering, illegal aliens commit multiple misdemeanors (driving without licenses) and felonies (document fraud) to stay. Bush would reward that behavior with the option of eventual citizenship.

Terry Anderson, a black mechanic from Los Angeles, knows well the crippling effect that mass immigration has had on black workers. (Of black men aged 18 to 65, 40 percent are jobless.) Testifying last year before a congressional subcommittee on immigration, Anderson unabashedly told the committee members, "Give me a list of all the laws that I as a citizen can break." The muted members produced no list.

An outraged vice president of the 14,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police said, "Even the president of the United States is prepared to reward lawbreakers." A spokesman for the National Border Patrol Council flogged the plan as "a slap in the face" to its 10,000 agents.

A healthy nation is like an extended family. A balkanized, polyglot, teeming mass of strangers is not a national family. The Bush plan treats America as just a place on a map and workers as mere interchangeable units of production on a board game of globalism. But America is, essentially, an elegant idea, engraved in a social contract of shared rights and obligations. The president would rip up that contract.