Amnesty and Betrayal
By William Norman Grigg
|
Source: The New American, Febuary 9, 2004
President
Bush’s proposed immigration reform package is a shocking betrayal of
our nation’s sovereignty, culture and economy. It must not be allowed
to pass. |
Bill
Clinton uttered countless deceptive words during his eight-year
occupancy of the White House, but perhaps none captured the essence of
his slippery dishonesty better than these: “It depends on what the
meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” In defending his proposed amnesty for
millions of illegal aliens, George W. Bush is striving to set a new
record for brazen presidential dishonesty.
“This plan is not amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the
automatic path of citizenship,” insisted Mr. Bush at a January 12 press
conference in Monterrey, Mexico, as he stood alongside Mexican
President Vicente Fox. “I oppose amnesty because it encourages the
violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration.”
As has often been said, crime unpunished is crime rewarded. In his
January 7 White House address calling for a “new temporary worker
program,” the president outlined a plan that would reward those who
violated our immigration laws by jumping the queue and taking up
residence here illegally:
- The president proposed “legal status, as temporary workers,
to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the
United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to
participate in the program and have been offered employment here”;
- That temporary legal status, the president said, “will last three years and will be renewable”;
- Mr. Bush claimed that “our current limits on legal immigration are
too low.” He added that his administration will work with Congress to
“increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to
citizenship” for illegal aliens currently residing here, as well as
others arriving every day in anticipation of being legalized once the
proposal goes into effect.
It’s vitally important to recognize that the Bush plan would not be
limited to the current illegal alien population, which is commonly
estimated to be 6-12 million (but may be 20 million or more). As the
president’s own words demonstrate, it would also extend to “those in
foreign countries who seek to participate in the program.”
Supposedly, those coming from foreign countries would need a job offer
in advance of their arrival. But the president’s invitation had an
immediate, and quite predictable, effect. “The U.S. Border Patrol marks
January 7 as the day illegal crossing numbers surge,” reported a
January 10 Arizona Star dispatch
from the Mexican border town of Hermosillo. “We’re starting to see an
increase already,” commented Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame. It’s
reasonable to expect that a similar “amnesty rush” is underway
elsewhere as millions — or tens of millions — of others race to take
advantage of the Bush plan.
Ah, but that plan isn’t an amnesty, insists the president, clinging to
his official fiction with Clintonian tenacity. Representative Ron Paul
(R-Texas) has no use for such evasions. “Millions of people who broke
the law by entering, staying, and working in our country will not be
punished, but rather rewarded with a visa,” comments Rep. Paul. “This
is amnesty, plain and simple. Lawbreakers are given legal status, while
those seeking to immigrate legally face years of paperwork and long
waits for a visa.”
More disturbing still is the fact that the Bush plan represents merely
the first installment. The Mexican regime has already broadcast demands
for further concessions. Mexican President Fox offered honeyed words of
support for the Bush plan during his January 12 joint press conference
with Bush. But prior to Bush’s trip to Monterrey, Fox had told the
Mexican press that the Bush plan “es más pequeñito de lo que buscamos”
(“it’s much smaller than what we’re looking for”). And Mexico’s El Universal had
reported, “The secretary of Foreign Relations, Luis Ernesto Derbez,
affirmed that [Fox] cannot be satisfied with George W. Bush’s proposal
to grant temporary employment to immigrants.... [T]he goal is a total
and complete program that protects those [Mexicans] in the United
States and those who aspire to go there.” (Emphasis added.)
The Mexican regime will be satisfied with nothing less than the
abolition of our southern border, and our absorption of as many people
as that government sees fit to send north. Eventually, the process
begun by the Bush plan would “solve” the illegal immigration problem by
simply removing our borders altogether — and by effectively destroying
the concept of U.S. citizenship as well.
Anatomy of a Betrayal
Supposedly, the newly legalized “temporary workers” would return to their home countries after the permits expire.
“My proposal expects that most temporary workers will eventually return
permanently to their home countries when the period of work that I will
be negotiating with Congress has expired,” explained the president in
Monterrey. Toward that end, he continued, “I’ll work with [Mexican]
President Fox and other leaders on a plan to give temporary workers
credit in their home countries’ retirement systems for the time they
work in the United States.”
The administration’s proposal would also “reduce the cost of sending
money home to families and local communities,” continued the president.
Such remittances from Mexican workers in America are that nation’s
second-largest source of foreign income. Additionally, as the president
pointed out, through the Inter-American Development Bank “we” — meaning
American taxpayers — “are expanding access to credit for small business
entrepreneurs” in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
All of this taxpayer-funded largesse is necessary, insists the
president, in order to “reduce the pressures that create illegal
immigration” by expanding economic opportunity south of our border. But
the amnesty itself creates a powerful incentive for newly legalized
immigrants to establish themselves here and begin the process of chain
immigration, through which untold millions of new immigrants would be
brought in. This is what happened with the most recent immigration
amnesty in 1986.
In anticipation of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservative”
rhetoric, former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the chief sponsor of
the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), insisted that the
earlier amnesty was “a humane approach to immigration reform.” Simpson
also admitted at the time, “I don’t know what the impact will be.”
Eighteen years later, we now know the impact: 6-12 million, and
possibly 20 million or more, illegal aliens. If amnesty is granted to
that population, and it begins the process of chain immigration of
relatives from abroad, and it is supplemented by millions of others who
come here based on job offers extended through Bush’s temporary worker
program, we might as well disband the border patrol and discontinue the
fiction of having immigration controls at all.
Global “Job Fair”
President Bush’s concern for the economic plight of illegal aliens in
our midst is as puzzling as his indifference to the economic
circumstances of American workers.
“Over the past 10 years, more than 2 million low-skilled American
workers have been displaced from their jobs,” writes CNN financial
analyst Lou Dobbs. “And each 10 percent increase in the immigrant
workforce decreases U.S. wages by 3.5 percent.” Mr. Bush and his
political allies blithely assure the public that illegal immigrants are
doing jobs nobody wants. However, points out Steve Camarota of the
Center for Immigration Studies, “what they really mean is that they are
doing jobs that they as middle- and upper-class people don’t want.”
“Massive immigration is vastly more popular among the elites than among
the public,” Steve Sailer, president of the Human Biodiversity
Institute, told THE NEW AMERICAN. “Lawyers, politicians, and business
executives won’t find their pay driven down much by increased
competition. On the other hand, if I was, say, a carpenter, I’d be
horrified by what the President of the United States is planning to do
to me and my family. What’s the global average wage made by carpenters?
I’d be surprised if it were more than 33 percent of the average
American carpenter’s wage, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it were only 10
percent as much.”
“It’s all a matter of supply and demand,” explains Sailer. “As they
teach you during the first week of Econ 101, when the supply of labor
goes up its price [wage] goes down.... The only restriction the Bush
people are talking about is that the job offers to foreigners must meet
the minimum wage. That’s $5.15 per hour, or $10,712 for a full-time
worker.”
Sailer describes the Bush plan as “a globalist libertarian’s fantasy. It’s essentially identical to the Wall Street Journal editorial
page’s long campaign for a constitutional amendment reading ‘There
shall be open borders.’” This would mean not only a deluge of
low-skilled, low-paid labor from Mexico, but from across the globe.
According to Dobbs, “for all the world the president’s [immigration
proposal] … sounds like a national job fair for those businesses and
farms that don’t want to pay a living wage and for those foreigners who
correctly think U.S. border security is a joke and are willing to break
our laws to live here.”
The immediate beneficiaries would be illegal workers from Mexico, and a
Mexican government that uses illegal immigration to the U.S. as (in the
words of former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda) a “safety valve.” But
there are literally billions of people willing to work for even less
than Mexicans are. “In this age of cheap jet travel, poor Mexican
immigrant job hunters might find themselves undercut by even poorer
temporary workers from, say, Bangladesh who may be willing to work for
even less,” Sailer predicts. “According to UN figures, there are
several billion people poorer than the average Mexican.”
With hi-tech and manufacturing jobs fleeing the country, and millions
of low-skill workers flooding in, what will America look like just a
few years from now if Bush’s amnesty proposal is enacted?
Just the First Step
The January 8 New York Times
editorially praised the Bush amnesty as a prelude to a larger effort to
reform our immigration system: “For simply reopening what has always
been a torturous debate in this country, the president deserves
applause. He has recognized that the nation’s immigration system is, as
he put it, ‘broken.’” But the unspoken purpose of the process the Bush
plan would inaugurate is to demolish, rather than repair, what remains
of our immigration system.
The invited audience for President Bush’s January 7 White House
announcement included representatives from various “citizen groups,”
such as the Hispanic Alliance for Progress, the Association for the
Advancement of Mexican Americans, the Latino Coalition, and the League
of United Latin American Citizens. The address itself served as an
overture for a hastily called “Summit of the Americas” in Monterrey,
Mexico, the following week. These two facts underscore the real purpose
of the amnesty proposal: It is a significant step toward the
amalgamation of the U.S. with Mexico — as well as Canada, and
eventually every other country in this hemisphere — into a regional
political bloc.
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox
signed a document called the “Guanajuato Proposal,” pledging that their
governments would “strive to consolidate a North American economic
community whose benefits reach the lesser-developed areas of the region
and extend to the most vulnerable social groups in our countries.”
Within a few months of that declaration, the Mexican government had
composed a five-point program to hasten “consolidation” with the U.S.:
- Legalization of “undocumented” workers (that is, illegal aliens from Mexico);
- An expanded permanent visas program;
- An enhanced guest workers visas program;
- Border control cooperation;
- Economic development in immigrant-sending regions of Mexico.
This list of demands, according to then-Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge
Castañeda, were essentially non-negotiable: He insisted that the U.S.
had to accept “the whole enchilada, or nothing.” The Bush
administration has dutifully worked to meet that nation’s demands —
without exacting anything from Mexico in return.
During Fox’s 2001 visit to the U.S., the groundwork was laid for the
so-called “Partnership for Prosperity” (PfP) — an initiative designed
to use American tax dollars to build Mexico’s manufacturing sector.
According to the U.S. State Department, PfP’s action plan calls for
U.S. assistance — meaning taxpayer subsidies — to Mexico to boost
investment in housing and commercial infrastructure to boost Mexican
productivity. This has the unavoidable effect of drawing manufacturing
jobs south of the border — even as low-wage jobs are increasingly
snapped up by illegal immigrants (pardon me — future temporary workers)
surging northward.
The Bush administration’s indecent eagerness to eradicate our southern
border and consolidate our nation with Mexico was noted by Newsweek political
analyst Howard Fineman. “Whatever else George W. Bush does, or doesn’t
do, he has earned a place in history as the first American president to
place Hispanic voters at the center of politics, and the first to view
the land between Canada and Guatemala as one,” noted Fineman. “It makes
sense, if you think about it: Texas, long ago and far away, was part of
Mexico. Now a Texan is trying to reassemble the Old Country, and then
some.”
“The ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North
American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition
to the European Union,” opined an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial
on September 7, 2001. “Unlike the varied landscapes and cultures of
European Union members, the United States, Canada and Mexico already
share a great deal in common, and language is not as great a barrier.
President Bush, for example, is quite comfortable with the blended
Mexican-Anglo culture forged in the border states of Texas, California
and Arizona.”
President Bush has only offered oblique hints of the agenda that
Fineman correctly described. Mexican President Fox has been more candid.
During a May 16, 2002 speech in Madrid, Fox boasted: “In the last few
months we have managed to achieve an improvement in the situation of
many Mexicans in [the United States], regardless of their migratory
status, through schemes that have permitted them access to health and
education systems, identity documents, as well as the full respect for
their human rights.” Here Fox referred to the incremental legalization
illegal Mexican immigrants achieved when various state and local
governments began to accept matricula consular cards
as official ID. Those cards are issued by Mexican consulates without
regard to the recipient’s legal status. Easily counterfeited, the matricula cards give illegal aliens access to employment, health benefits, banking services and — in some states — driver’s licenses.
In the Madrid speech, Fox explained that demolishing the distinction
between legal and illegal Mexican immigrants is necessary in order to
advance the merger of the U.S. and Mexico: “Eventually our long-range
objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada,
our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions
similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of
attending to future themes [such as] the future prosperity of North
America, and the movement of capital, goods, services, and persons.”
Such movement of persons would no longer be “immigration” or
“emigration” — terms referring to the crossing of international borders
— but merely “migration” within one vast political entity. In other
words: goodbye to U.S. citizenship.
Significantly, in his remarks at the January 12 press conference in
Monterrey, Fox pointedly, and repeatedly, used the term “migration” to
refer to the Bush plan, referring variously to “that migration topic,”
“the migration matters,” “this migration proposal,” the “migration
flow,” and so on. Tellingly, he also referred to “the leaders of the
countries of America” — rather than to national leaders of separate and
independent nations.
Patient Persistence
Amnesty for illegal aliens, a central piece in the agenda for
hemispheric consolidation, would almost certainly have been announced
long ago were it not for 9-11 — an event that demonstrated, in a tragic
and lethal fashion, the mortal danger resulting from the failure to
secure our borders.
However, merger-minded elites in both the U.S. and Mexico regrouped and
continued their campaign for amnesty. Last fall, a coalition of radical
groups — including the Communist Party — organized the “Immigrant
Workers Freedom Ride.” In that campaign, busloads of illegal aliens
were brought to Washington to lobby on behalf of amnesty.
Vicente Fox did his part by visiting three southwestern states — Texas,
Arizona and New Mexico — to lobby state legislatures to support the
amnesty drive. “We share nation and language,” Fox told the New Mexico
legislature. “In addition to our geographical vicinity, we are united
by inseparable bonds, history, values and interests.... We must join
together.... You need Mexico and Mexicans, and we need you.”
Acting as the supposed leader of “Mexicans living abroad” (a group
that, according to the Mexican government, includes Americans of
Mexican ancestry born in this country),
Fox demanded that lawmakers in this country “facilitate access to
health care and education services for all those who share our
border.... Without this, it is impossible to think about the path to
greater integration and shared prosperity.”
Open borders, amnesty for illegals, subsidies for Mexico’s economy,
exporting manufacturing capacity south of the border, expanded welfare
benefits for foreigners who entered our nation illegally — these are
all part of the same seamless design. As Fox himself put it, that
design is the “integration” of the U.S. and Mexico into a
hemisphere-wide political unit.
Many observers believe that the Bush amnesty plan is part of a
political strategy aimed at courting the Hispanic vote — which would be
a shockingly cynical and opportunistic venture. But the truth is even
worse: President Bush is consciously betraying our nation by
undermining our borders, our sovereignty, and the integrity of our
laws. And he is doing this as part of a campaign that will — if
successful — result in an end to our national independence and our
constitutional order.
Every American worthy of the name must not accept this incredible betrayal — and must not allow it to be consummated.
Fedgov as HR Director?
William Norman Grigg
‘‘I have constantly said that we need to have a immigration policy that
helps match any willing employer with any willing employee,” stated Mr.
Bush on December 15, 2003. The president reiterated that point in his
January 7 announcement: “If an American employer is offering a job that
American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our
country a person who will fill that job.... I propose a new temporary
worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing
American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs.”
This would mean, in effect, putting the federal government in charge of
a human resources management program for the entire world. This would
require a comprehensive database of both jobs and potential employees —
their skills, education, salary requirements, and so forth — with
American businesses acting as appendages of the federal government.
Mr. Bush pointed out that under his envisioned program, employers “must
report to the government the temporary workers they hire, and who leave
their employ, so that we can keep track of people in the program....
There must be strong workplace enforcement with tough penalties for
anyone, for any employer violating these laws.”
This program would open the floodgates to low-paid foreign labor from
around the globe, thereby artificially depressing wages and creating
increasing demand for imported labor. In principle, it would put the
federal government in charge of employment policy for every American
business that employs foreign workers. |
Bush’s "Non-amnesty" Amnesty Proposal
President George W. Bush made the following statements in his January 7 White House address:
"I propose a new temporary worker program that will match willing
foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can
be found to fill the jobs. This program will offer legal status, as
temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now
employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who
seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment
here."
"All who participate in the temporary worker program must have a job,
or, if not living in the United States, a job offer. The legal status
granted by this program will last three years and will be renewable...."
"Undocumented workers now here will be required to pay a one-time fee
to register for the temporary worker program. Those who seek to join
the program from abroad, and have complied with our immigration laws,
will not have to pay any fee. All participants will be issued a
temporary worker card that will allow them to travel back and forth
between their home and the United States without fear of being denied
re-entry into our country."
"The citizenship line … is too long, and our current limits on legal
immigration are too low. My administration will work with the Congress
to increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to
citizenship." |
What You Can Do
- Contact your Congressman and demand that he oppose any amnesty proposal.
- Urge your friends, neighbors, and co-workers to do the same.
- Learn more
about the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA), the deceptively
named program to create a hemisphere-spanning socialist superstate
- Join in the effort
to prevent implementation of the FTAA pact, which is scheduled to be
completed next year. For more information about the FTAA and how you
can get involved, go to: www.stoptheftaa.org.
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