President George W. Bush will be addressing the nation Monday evening, primetime, to discuss his plan for dealing with illegal immigration. I’ve been on the phone and email all morning sort of getting a feel from folks far more connected to me, and here’s what I came up with. Speculation is part of his program will be some kind of ‘guest worker’ program that includes those illegal aliens currently in the United States. The program will fall short of amnesty, but offer a path to citizenship.
More important will be the President’s plan to deal with increasing security on the border. After all, all the plans in the world to deal with the illegal aliens that are already here don’t mean a hill of beans if several thousand more of them are allowed to cross every night. In fact, the new plan to offer amnesty or guest worker status will probably cause another increase in illegal aliens, like the last few amnesty plans did.
We’ve already been burned once, I think around the time of the last campaign, when the President talked about all the new Border Patrol agents that would be placed on the border. For the most part, they were not financed and never materialized. Frankly I do not have a great deal of faith in words from the federal government on this issue. With rare exceptions they’ve gotten in the habit of telling us what we want to hear, patting us on the head, and sending us to bed with milk and cookies. The news reports said that the President was exploring placing the military on the border. That, along with some major fence construction, would probably make a dent in the tide. But the other very useful tool that the President could give the states would be to offer to pay for the states to mobilize their national guard units for border duties. No, of course these actions won’t stop everyone illegally entering our nation – but the numbers could be significantly reduced.
May 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I stopped “buying” what the President was “selling” a long time ago.
Rumors about 5,000 National Guardsman on the border is an insult. Take out the support staff and break them into shifts (they arent presumably going to work 24 hours a day) and you have MAYBE 1,000 troops per shift out in the desert.
Considering he only funded something like 200 of the couple of thousand extra border patrol agents after his Presidential campaign promises, I won’t be holding my breath.
I keep hearing over and over that these illegal aliens simply come here to work and to provide for their family back home. That many of them in fact wish to return to their native land. If that is the case, why the hell do we need to give them amnesty or any other euphemism for amnesty if that is the case?
Importing millions of illegal aliens from the Third World who are poor and uneducated is simply not a benefit to our society. The dictates of common sense mandate as much.