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GOP is being tricked into supporting another amnesty for illegal
aliens, and post-American libertarians like Paul Gigot of the Wall
Street Journal are accomplices in the con game.
Gigot's
August 17 column says that "A Bush amnesty is precisely
the kind of large political event" that could shake Hispanic
voters loose from the Democratic party. Given that blacks were the
only major group to vote more heavily Democratic than Hispanics
last year, it is hard to believe that serious people could believe
such a thing, but there appear to be some who do, at least in the
White House. (For an analysis of GOP prospects among Hispanic voters,
see "Impossible
Dream or Distant Reality?: Republican Efforts to Attract Latino
Voters.")
Now, there
are plenty of reasons unrelated to politics to oppose the president's
amnesty/guestworker plan: It rewards lawbreakers and sends the message
overseas that we are not serious about enforcing our laws; it is
guaranteed to encourage new, parallel streams of illegal immigration;
it will create additional demands for government services, since
illegals are not eligible for welfare, whereas fully one-third of
legal Mexican immigrant households use at least one major welfare
program; it will create millions of new candidates for dual citizenship,
eating away the very basis of our polity; and last but not least,
there is simply no way the INS could administer such a large program
without permitting massive fraud.
These drawbacks
to amnesty should alarm all Americans. But what about Gigot's assertion
that it would be a good deal politically for the GOP?
If that's true,
why are the Democrats promoting amnesty too? Gigot tries to make
the case that, in this one instance, amnesty is good even though
the Left embraces it. But elections are a zero-sum game — in our
two-party system, if the Democrats win, the Republicans lose. And
both parties believe that amnesty would serve their political interests.
Only one can be right.
Here is what
Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum,
said of Bush's amnesty proposal: "On the left, it was electrifying."
He should know; the forum is the leading lobby for high immigration,
cofounded by the National Lawyers Guild, a former Soviet front group
which still sits on forum's board. What does Gigot know that Sharry
doesn't?
And recall
that immediately after the White House floated the amnesty trial
balloon in July, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle one-upped the
president by demanding amnesty for all illegals, not just Mexicans,
thus presenting the Democrats as the defenders of all those immigrants
who aren't from Mexico (nearly three-quarters of the total). When
the president was thus forced to concede that "We'll consider
all folks here," the Democrats upped the ante again with a
new list of demands: Amnesty for any illegal from any nation who
has worked at least 90 days in the United States during the past
year and a half; an end to any limits on the legal immigration of
immigrants' family members; and the right for guestworkers to bring
their families with them. There is nothing the president can propose
that the Democrats can't top. Or, as Eliseo Medina, executive vice
president of the Service Employees International Union, said, the
Democratic demands "take the White House's immigration plans
one step further in the right direction."
In one sense,
this jockeying over amnesty simply confirms the stupid party/evil
party stereotype. For years, Republicans have been confusing two
aspects of this broad issue — immigration policy vs. immigrant policy.
Immigration policy is whom we admit, how many, and how we enforce
the law. Immigrant policy concerns how we treat those we've admitted
to live among us. In the mid-1990s, Republicans responded to public
concerns over the harmful impacts of bad immigration policy by enacting
changes in immigrant policy instead. So, rather than embrace the
modest cuts in legal immigration suggested by Barbara Jordan's bipartisan
Commission on Immigration Reform, the Congress, led by then-Sen.
Spencer Abraham, targeted legal immigrants already here for sweeping
welfare bans and vindictive deportation rules.
But there's
more than just stupidity at work here. The greed of short-sighted
elements in the business community, abetted by libertarian idealogues
who reject the legitimacy of national borders (recall the Journal's
frequent call for a constitutional amendment, "There shall
be open borders"), has driven much of the amnesty discussion.
A lobbying alliance called the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition,
including construction, hotel, restaurant, landscaping, and other
trade associations, has been instrumental in pushing Republicans
to support the amnesty/guestworker plan in order to secure cheaper,
more servile workers. Even Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, that
exemplar of Americana, is a member, apparently because it's tired
of having to entice American grandmothers to wait its tables.
So it's no
surprise that, as Gigot notes, "Business, labor, Catholic bishops
and even the media like the idea." We are seeing a replay of
the odd-bedfellows coalition that thwarted immigration reform in
1996: Leftists and their ethnic pressure-group allies joining with
rope-selling businessmen and libertarians. Business will get short-term
benefit of a pliable workforce, while the Left will benefit in the
long term through the importation of a vast new poverty class on
whose behalf it can excoriate American society.
But the Republican
party, not to mention the American people, are bound to lose.
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