Steve Dinan has a story at the Washington Times on how the pro-amnesty crowd is arguing that the concerns of the tea party are the same as the supporters of illegal immigration:
Immigrant-rights groups sought to tap some of the “tea party” thunder Thursday by using the anti-tax-and-spending movement’s nationwide protests to argue illegal immigrants must be legalized because they are eager to pay their full taxes.
Didn’t we just hear the other day that nearly half of workers paid no net income taxes? Which half do you think a Central American dishwasher with a fifth-grade education is going to be on? Of course, the argument that amnestied illegals will pay more in taxes than they do now is correct; my colleague Steve Camarota estimated their average federal tax payments would go up 77 percent. But their use of government services would rise 118 percent, leading the overall annual fiscal burden created by illegal immigrants at the federal level to triple to nearly $30 billion a year (and those are 2002 numbers).
And there’s this:
“Here there are people who don’t want to pay taxes, and we’re saying there are all these people who want to carry the load and we don’t allow them to,” said Mary Moreno, a spokeswoman for the Center for Community Change. She led a delegation that delivered five boxes of blank tax forms to a Capitol Hill office as a symbol of all the tax money left uncollected because illegal immigrants have not been legalized.
“Center for Community Change,” huh? I wonder what group this is that’s claiming to be sympatico with the tea party. Oh, here’s their board of directors: the head of MoveOn.org, representatives of the SEIU and the AFL-CIO, someone from the Needmor Fund (a major funder of ACORN), et al. Well, that shows how sincere they are in their embrace of the tea party’s goals.
And while the immigration issue is not at the forefront of the tea party, that’s because there’s no amnesty push in Congress comparable to the reckless expansions of government we’ve seen over the past year. This week’s NY Times poll suggests that would change if harry Reid were to follow through on his threats to push amnesty; Tea Partiers are much more concerned than the with illegal immigration than even the public at large, with 82 percent considering it a “very serious” problem, compared with “only” 60 percent of the general public.