Lest we forget: Amnesty stalled when first proposed last year and Steve Sailer predicted it in VDARE.COM
With the unemployment rate pushing 6 percent and Ford announcing it will close four plants in the United States and lay off more than 21,000 workers, a light bulb flashed on somewhere in the nether depths of the Bush administration:
Wouldn't this be a swell time to revive the idea of amnesty for illegal aliens?
And the idea is indeed revived. Last week Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda popped up in Washington and admitted that for the first time since Sept. 11 talks with the administration on immigration are advancing "little by little." He predicted a "good outcome" later in the year—which in Mr. Castañeda's mind means turning most of the Louisiana Purchase over to Mexico.
Amnesty—no one wants to call it that but that's what it is—was a major morsel on the Bush administration's plate before 19 perfectly legal immigrants carried out the biggest act of mass murder in human history. After that, amnesty went on the backburner, while various politicians scurried about pretending to do something about the mass immigration that made the Sept. 11 massacre possible.
Now, four months later, with the Justice Department still unable to locate or deport aliens suspected of involvement in Sept. 11, the public attention span has proved short enough for the administration to get back to real business. As the Los Angeles Times reported last week,
"the most significant development in the national immigration debate is what hasn't happened: No lawmaker of influence has moved to reverse the country's generous immigration policy, which for more than three decades has facilitated the largest sustained wave of immigration in U.S. history. Proposals to restrict a system that welcomed more than 9 million legal immigrants during the 1990s were not even accorded a formal hearing on Capitol Hill."
[Los Angeles Times, "Wave of U.S. Immigration Likely to Survive Sept. 11," January 10, 2002]
But if no lawmakers are moving to cut immigration, the administration, in addition to resurrecting amnesty from its political grave, is moving to provide more welfare to legal immigrants. As the Washington Post reported last week,
"The Bush administration proposed yesterday that poor immigrants who have lived legally in the United States for at least five years be allowed to collect food stamps, restoring part of the safety net that was removed in a 1996 overhaul of the welfare system."
Not only is the Stupid Party reversing its own achievement in welfare reform but also it's encouraging even more illegal immigration by aliens who will now have an incentive to gain amnesty, live here for the requisite length of time and get food stamps.
By now it ought to be clear that the Republicans have entirely abandoned even the pretense of representing the American working and middle class voters who gave their party landslide victories in the 1970s and '80s. In their place, the Republicans plan to capture the elusive butterfly of the Hispanic vote.
But of course it's not just Republicans. Democrats too are licking their whiskers in anticipation of the Hispanic votes they can gobble far more easily than the GOP. And now both Big Business and Big Labor are on board with Republicrats to promote even more immigration. When Mexican President Vicente Fox addressed a joint session of Congress just before Sept. 11 to push for amnesty, he had the happy support of both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO.
Amnesty makes no sense even in the best of times, but in the wake of recession and massive lay-offs, it's insane. Amnesty not only will bring more and cheaper labor into the labor market and thereby drive down wages but will encourage more illegals to cross the border—at a time when many are starting to go home because even they can't find jobs here. More food stamps will help entice them to stay. (VDARE.COM comment: If Congress really agrees... See "Food stamps for immigrants 'troubling'," Washington Times, January 17, 2001)
But if amnesty in a recession is insane, amnesty after Sept. 11 is criminal to the point of treason. We already know that terrorists can enter the country legally, and only this week the Post reports federal authorities express worry that "as many as half" of some 5,000 Al Qaeda "loyalists" trained in its camps "may be living in Middle Eastern, European, Asian and North American cities as sleeper agents, awaiting an opportunity to wage jihad, or holy war." It is simply unbelievable that four months after Sept. 11 we still permit any immigration. The truth is our ruling class is demanding even more of it.
The refusal of any part of the ruling class—Republican or Democrat, business or labor, liberal or conservative—to reduce or halt immigration ought to tell the American people that the elite cares nothing for either their wishes or their interests and has learned absolutely nothing from Sept. 11.
If Americans want to protect either their jobs or their sheer physical safety from the dangers immigration threatens, they need to find new leaders in both parties soon.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
January 17, 2002
