amnesty

Pelosi and Reid are right in character and wasting no time in driving last gasp attempts to forward their statist agenda before the New Conservatives take over. Harry Reid made lots of friends by launching four ‘Amnesty Act’ bills at the same time… good ol’ Harry. I guess Harry figured if he threw enough bull bleep, some of it would stick.

Nancy Pelosi is mourning the loss of her pet committee chairmanships, all the while bemoaning the Republican intractability and insensitivity to the needs of the “people”. Ever the people, with the DeMarxists. It’s their #1 modus operandi… along with, “for the children”. Not nearly as catchy as they used to be, these shopworn terms of the Marxist elites. The proletariat isn’t listening to them… we just revolted, remember?

By the way, Nancy, while you’re moaning about Republicans not being willing to compromise… Does anyone remember Nancy of the most ethical Congress in history having conference room door locks changed, to keep Republicans out of the DeMarxists’ nefarious scheming for Obamacare? Tough luck Nancy. We went from having no attention span out here to news and information micro-management and a very long memory.

It’s not Nancy’s brave new world. Not Obama’s either. He’s as determined as ever, but the reality is that the Republicans will be controlling the purse strings from now on, unless or until they prove themselves again unworthy.

The president just ‘can’t get traction’, bemoan the most ardent of his remaining fans. No more popular support from the masses, no more adulation from bought-and-paid-for rock concert crowds. Nothing but failure and condemnation.

The left has been purged of the only moderating influences in that benighted party. You’ll remember them, the ‘blue dogs’? Their leaving means only the most ideologically pure Marxists will remain. This brings the whole thing down to a fundamental battle between us… you and I… the American Patriot who has stood firm through the centuries and who stand firm now… and the forces espousing an evil, dictatorial, government monster machine having neither mind, heart and, most especially, having no soul.

The enemy is the is the party of the left and it must be expunged from American politics. Purely and simply, it has no place in a free America populated by free citizens.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

Immigration is a difficult issue for conservatives these days. It is fraught with emotions and passionate feelings. Worse, whenever someone tries to discuss the issue dispassionately, the old canard of "no true Scotsman" is employed against them. But conservatives need to continue to have this discussion and get their ducks in a row on the issue because the other side has a successful call to arms that we need to prove wrong. It is too easy for the left to claim that it has "compassion" for immigrants and we don't. We need to pull the debate away from faux "compassion" and toward the facts.

On the right we have at least two main ideas about immigration. Some want open borders and easy employment for illegals so that business has a quick and constant source of cheap labor. These business-oriented conservatives (some might call them country club Republicans) are less interested in social issues and more interested in money and economic growth. Opposing the open borders folks are those that might be called nativists, those that feel America should not have a wide open border and that America is for Americans.

The problem we have here is that there is no reason why conservatives cannot be both a nativist and an economic expansionist that wants to employ some foreign-born workers where they are needed. There is no reason why we can't be both strong border advocates and interested in making new Americans from immigrants. Our two sides do not necessarily have to be as diametrically opposed as they seem to be.

Of course, the passion erupts when we try to reconcile these two positions. The closed borders folks all too often employ a sort of "no true Scotsman" theory against anyone that wants to make some sense of this situation. If you seem to waver from their view you aren't a "real" conservative to too many of them. But nativists aren't the only ones to blame as the open borders crowd dismisses everyone on the other side as yahoos and hatemongers when the truth is that Nativists only want to follow the Constitution and protect American culture. We need to get past the name calling and remember that we need to be on the same page of this matter or the left will win making things unsuitable for all of us on the right.

Some of the open borders crowd have come to realize that open borders are no longer a good idea. Not long ago, for instance, I spoke to Richard Nadler, president of Americas Majority Foundation, and he realized that after 9/11 open borders was suicide. Nadler's group is a conservative pro immigrant-labor organization that specializes in minority outreach. Nadler feels that to be seen as the anti-Hispanic party will destroy the GOPs electoral future. He makes a good argument in many ways.

To my personal experience, I have seen many sons and daughters of immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- and these kids don't want to be Mexicans, or Guatemalans, or what have you. They might not mind visiting the country of their parent's birth but they generally would rather stay here and they think of themselves as Americans. But I will have to agree with Nadler that if these young people grow up thinking that the GOP is filled with people that hate them, then these new voters will reflexively vote Democrat in huge numbers. I believe Nadler is right that we could be committing electoral suicide if we allow this perception to grow.

But this need to seem more friendly to Americans of Hispanic origin does not mean we have to throw away American principles, our culture or our laws. Nor do we need to open the border wide and let just anyone come here. We have every right to try to put breakers on the flow of foreign immigrants and a responsibility to think of America first.

Now, many thousands of illegal immigrants have returned home over the last two years. This is because the economy is such that the easy jobs these people filled have dried up. But at some point our economy will pick up again and the influx of illegals will resume to fill the jobs a stronger economy creates. We need to try and solve this problem now, before our economy picks up and the influx resumes. So, at some point the left is right that now is an ideal time for comprehensive immigration reform. But let it be on our terms, not the lefts.

Here are some of the points we must consider:

• Tougher border security measures
• A logical path to citizenship for those here
• A robust guest worker program
• Broader enforcement of the laws already on the books
• Implementation of the e-verify system to determine whether a worker is a legal resident
• An end to welfare and free in-state tuition to illegals
• An end to automatic citizenship to babies of foreigners

Am I suggesting total amnesty? Certainly not. But this problem is bigger than just imagining it is possible to deport millions of people all at once. We are past the time when we can stick our fingers in our ears and yell “la,la,la” in hopes that the problem will go away. Our past politicians have failed us on this issue. It is up to us to fix it.

There is one final area that impinges on immigration that must be considered here: education.

Currently our educational system coddles illegals by teaching kids in Spanish only classes. Our schools also fail our society by downplaying American principles and eschewing American exceptionalism. We must return American principles to our schools. After all, if kids are taught that America is a bad place, why should they grow up to want to protect our American heritage? This is no less true for the child of a natural born citizens than that of a foreign born immigrant. Further, how do we expect the kids of immigrants to grow up to want to be acculturated to American ideals if we tell them that America is a bad place? An important place to make American citizens is in school. As conservatives we need to take back our schools from the extreme left that now runs them.

First of all tonight, I would like everyone who reads this column to read Erick Erickson’s article for Friday, March 26, 2010 on RedState.com. I have long been an admirer of Erick’s work and this time he has taken the bit in his teeth. Erick has articulated exactly what a lot of us have been thinking.

Erick Erickson

We have a rogue government which shows every indication of continuing to abrogate the principles of freedom and liberty upon which this land was founded, and the head of that government is behaving like this country is his fiefdom and we serfs to his monarchical tyranny. There is a tipping point here. Whether we have reached that point yet or not is a difficult thing to gauge.

The founders took a lot of abuse before they rebelled. They, like we, saw it as an action to be taken only in extremis. Yet driven to what they saw as a position of intolerability, take it they did. These were not wide-eyed radicals, but mature, reasoned and educated men. Most stood to lose everything and understood that once begun there could be no turning back.

No one, least of all people like Erick or myself, would want to see open strife in this country as long as there was any recourse to redress by election or through the courts. Along with the rising anger in this country as more and more ‘details’ of the monstrous 3,000 page bill are revealed (Nancy Pelosi: “You have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”), is the increasingly voiced fear that Barack Hussein Obama and the Demarxist Congress would somehow manufacture a ‘national’ emergency and there would be no elections come November.

I personally think that would be a very foolish thing to do. But there is no doubt that the DeMarxists are even, as this is being written, working to steal the election using a ‘universal’ registration of voters – registering of illegal aliens. By passing an amnesty for some twenty million illegal aliens now residing in this country. Such a welfare-dependent, largely uneducated class of people would easily be led to vote for the padrone who is furnishing the goodies. In fact, that is very much how things work in the Latin American countries where the bulk of the illegals come from.

Stealing elections is something the Democrats have a lot of experience doing and I would expect them to take this route first. In their overweening arrogance they will expect complete success. We need to make sure we have some some surprises for them. In the final analysis we can put absolutely nothing past them. They have given ample proof that there is no depth of dishonesty, dishonor or connivance that they will not plumb.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

Crossposted at Right Minds