Mike Scruggs
At least since the badly
flawed 1965 Immigration “Reform” Act, the United States has had
immigration policies that have gradually tilted the electorate to be
more liberal and therefore more Democrat. The 1965 Act replaced a policy giving immigration
preference to the immediate family of established immigrants to one
giving that preference to extended family. This resulted in the phenomenon
of chain-migration that escalated immigration levels from poor third
world countries. Immigration associated welfare and social benefits
costs began to escalate rapidly and eliminated any net economic benefit
of immigration to the American people.
Following the 1986 Amnesty, immigration laws
began to take a back seat to business demands for cheap labor and political
demands to please or appease increasingly powerful ethnic voting blocs.
As is true of all amnesties, respect for law declines and illegal immigration
multiplies. Illegal immigration was out of control by 1990, and indiscriminate
legal immigration was adding to the net economic and tax burden. Many
politically powerful business interests benefited from cheaper and easy-to-find
labor, but at the expense of American workers, taxpayers, and the economic
future of the country.
The pressure to please or appease ethnic voting
blocs increasingly hindered rational discussion of immigration policy.
Our immigration problems loomed large enough
in 1990 for Congress to mandate a study commission on immigration. The
Jordan Commission, known by the name of its chairperson, Representative
Barbara Jordan (D, TX), gathered a distinguished body of respected experts
and public figures in this study and conducted the most thorough examination
of the impact of U.S. immigration policies to date. Its recommendations
were completed in 1996 and presented to Congress and President Clinton
in 1997. These recommendations included correcting the devastating chain-migration
effect of the 1965 Act and limiting total annual immigration to 550,000.
Its recommendations are still valid, workable, and desperately needed
today. However, its recommendations were never followed or implemented.
They were pushed aside and ignored by the same political power combinations
of cheap labor and ethnic pandering that created the problems.
Republicans could have made implementing these
reforms a winning national issue with much bipartisan support. Barbara
Jordan was black, and blacks have suffered the most in lost jobs and
eroding wages because of cheap labor from illegal immigration. But George
W. Bush decided it was much more important to capture the votes of the
fastest growing immigrant group—Hispanics—before the Democrats locked
this group into its national strategy for Liberal Democratic domination.
Most Republican candidates only got about one-third of the Hispanic
vote. This supposedly smart political thinking was, however, based on
some unfounded and disastrous assumptions.
Bush began early in 2001 by trying to give an
amnesty to 3,000,000 Mexican illegals. This passed the U.S. House
with Democrat and a fair number of naïve Republican votes in the West.
Shortly thereafter, any thinking about such an amnesty was killed by
Senate Republicans because of 9-11 security concerns. Except for Cubans
and long-established Spanish families in the Southwest, Hispanic voters
and especially illegal immigrants are poorer, less skilled and less
educated than most Republican oriented voters. Those demographics do
not make them natural Republicans! Several studies have shown that they
vote Democrat because they have a very strong preference for their social
welfare programs. According to an NBC poll, 74 percent of Hispanic voters
support Obamacare. Giving an amnesty would have no more than a small,
short-term effect if any. Many Hispanic Republicans do not want amnesties,
and Democrats can always outbid Republicans on social welfare programs,
since they have no conscience about the costs or consequences.
The idea that Mexicans are religious and social
conservatives is more than two generations out of date. Bush did get
a majority of evangelical Mexican voters but only a third of Catholics
and even less of the fast growing number who are basically un-churched.
Social statistics on abortions and unwed births indicate that most Hispanics
are less conservative than non-Hispanic whites, especially Republicans.
In the first three years of the Bush Administration,
worksite immigration enforcement arrests practically ceased, dropping
an astonishing 97 percent. During the first six years of the Bush Administration
the number of illegal immigrants in the country increased by 5.3 million
or 79 percent. Bush and McCain, allied with Ted Kennedy, tried to push
through two massive amnesties between 2004 and 2006 without even disclosing
the possible costs involved.
Furthermore, Bush seemed to assume that no matter
how uncomfortable conservatives were with Presidential pandering to
get the Hispanic vote by amnesties, affirmative action, and ethnic preference
programs, that the support of the conservative Republican base is static—they
have nowhere else to go. This proved a disastrously wrong assumption
in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Conservative voters do
not have to choose between two candidates who have either offended them
or failed to convince them of their dedication to conservative principles.
They can stay at home, and despite the radical liberalism of Obama,
they did stay home in surprising numbers.
Why did Mitt Romney lose to Barack Obama, whose
dismal economic record, stubborn devotion to unworkable Marxist economic
principles, blatant anti-Christian social policies, and incompetent
and perplexingly anti-American foreign policies should have demanded
his removal from office? It is because uncontrolled immigration
under Bush and Obama has built a new majority who want a big government
welfare state free of traditional cultural restraints. The unpleasant
surprise of 2012 is that a new electorate has reached a tipping point
where recovering our country will be very difficult.
Those so-called conservatives, who believe we
can get this new majority to vote Republican, if we just give some amnesties,
open the immigration door wider, and ignore the suffering inflicted
thereby on American workers and taxpayers are badly misinformed and
exercising incredibly bad judgment. We are dealing with a constituency
whose natural and traditional politics embraces a big government welfare
environment supported by high taxes on producers. We cannot out-pander
the Democrats, and by such surrender we would alienate our conservative
base. Amnesty would gain few Hispanic votes and lose millions of conservative
votes.
Our choices for correcting the nation-destroying
damage done by foolish immigration policies are now growing fewer and
more difficult. We should at least realize that we have been swindled
by those who counseled irrational and cowardly surrender on important
immigration issues in the past. Amnesty by any name would only hasten
the death of our country and our principles.
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