GOP courts Latinos on immigration
The Republican National Committee unveiled a Spanish-language radio ad today that it plans to run during next week's Democratic convention that promotes John McCain's support for comprehensive immigration reform, while deriding Barack Obama as all talk and no action.
McCain reached across the aisle to Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts on the reform, which also had the support of President Bush. But the proposal died in Congress last year after opposition from those who said the path to citizenship amounted to amnesty.
During the Republican primaries, McCain soft-pedaled his support for the plan, declaring that he wouldn't push it again until the borders were made secure. Both he and Obama are courting Hispanic voters, who could be the difference in swing states such as Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.
"How do you know someone is a friend? You know because they stand up and defend you when it is hard. When Hispanics needed a friend in Congress during the immigration debate, who stood up? Who spoke out? John McCain," the announcer says, according to a translation by CNN.
"Senator McCain worked with Republicans and Democrats alike to form immigration legislation. And while the bill didn’t pass, only McCain demonstrated a real commitment to reforming immigration in a way that honored our laws as well as our immigrants and traditions," the announcer continues.
"And Barack Obama? Obama did not stand up. Obama did not speak out. And when the time came for him to do the right thing, he did not. Obama supported measures designed to insert a deadly 'poison pill' to kill the immigration legislation. If Obama didn’t even have the courage to stand up for immigrants, how can he claim to have the strength to change the way Washington works? John McCain is ready to lead. Barack Obama is not."
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What has happened to the Reagan Republicans...remember them...those who represented decency and respect for the human race, family values, and morals. Who are these new Republicans? Why have loyal Republicans allow an ugly and unfamiliar decay and decadence an opportunity to destroy the once pride and sturdy foundation the Republican Party! The Republican Party is being reduced to the lowest level of a vile and contaminated type of politics! The Republican Party has chosen mockery over decency as the party continues to use slimy, disgusting and nauseous tactics to destroy those who disagree with them.
The new Republican Party has adapted the Rush Limbaugh mentality...how can anyone approve of someone that would suggest that John Edward’s wife talks too much and was unwilling to use her mouth to make her husband sexually happy! According to Rush, when that happens, it's OK to have an affair. Is this an example of what members of New Republican Party stand for, approve of, and laugh at because you have to have a little humor in politics? Unfortunately and sadly, many respectable and honorable Republican senators, state representatives, and governors could be voted out of office because of the distasteful representation and image of a few bitter and deceitful political figures that’s trying to shape the New Republican Party. Fox News has also become a victim of this corruption! I suppose you can say it has become Bush’s Fox News! They have chosen to disregard truth, and unbiased reporting for “scare tactics” propaganda!
I am but one voice, but can clearly state I really don’t care for the McCain-Rove, Bush or Rush Republicans, and will not vote the ticket until it is willing to return to the principles and ideology that once was the cornerstone of the Republican Party!
May God have mercy on us if people continue to allow the new Republican Party to replace what was once the “Republican Party of the United States of America.”?
Illegals sould be deported PERIOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE REBUBS SUCK
McCain really threw his conservative followers under the bus on this one.....If he is friends with illegal aliens then he must be an evangelical conservative's adversary. Make up your mind, Mr. McCain.
That's it. The last straw. Anybody But McCain. Email this news item to all your friends so they can know what McCain has in store for them.
A New America filled with New American that all us Old Americans can take care of for generations to come with free medical care, free college education, free tutoring, and worst of all free lessons from our betters for all eternity on how evil and hateful we are and how we are not dying out fast enough and being replaced with better people from anywhere else but here.
Yeah.. yeah..yada.. yada...
The Latinos KNOW that the Republicans will renege on them, oh.. about 10 minutes after all the polls close. They NOW realize that they (legal or not) are being used as scapegoats for whatever ills the country.
"If he is friends with illegal aliens then he must be an evangelical conservative's adversary."
Christ doesn't ask for your green card before offering His compassion.
I am hispanic and and no matter how many ads they have in spanish or whatever this former republican will never vote republican again. And to all of you demagogues and xenophobes....karma baby, karma. All of your hate and narrowminded thinking will never reward you, it will bite you back in the end. You and all of your right wing rhetoric........defeated in the Civil war.....defeated during the Civil Rights Era.....defeated in court (antiimmigrant ordinances found unconstitutional). Whatever you try to do to stifle hispanics and other immigrants...you wil fail. I've ran into a lot of rednecks who think of us as dumb mexicans but you know what...keep thinking that(your doing me a favor)....it will ensure us victory in the end.
Daniel Griswold: Immigration law should reflect our dynamic labor market
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, April 27, 2008
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.
Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.
The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.
Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs – in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism – that require only short-term, on-the-job training.
At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs – those without a high school diploma – continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.
Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration
In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.
Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.
Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.
When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.
We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.
For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.
The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.
Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.
In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.
As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
"How do you know someone is a friend? You know because they stand up and defend you when it is hard. When Hispanics needed a friend in Congress during the immigration debate, who stood up? Who spoke out? John McCain,"
WHAT IS MCcAIN SAYING NOW , IS WHAT MATTERS.
HISPANICS ARE FOLLIES IF THEY SEE HIM TODAY AS SOMEONE WHO CARES ABOUT THEM. WHERE WAS / IS HE WHEN FAMILIES ARE TORN APART BECAUSE THEY CAME TO FEED THEIR CHILDREN ?
Another thing that irks the heck out of me is the phrase "immigrants are lawbreakers", or another "I'm sick of paying for their free care". For one, HAVE YOU EVER GOTTEN A SPEEDING TICKET? HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CITED FOR NOT WEARING A SEATBELT OR ANY THER KIND OF MOVING VIOLATION? If you have you have committed a crime, a misdeameanor crime at that (a misdemeanor is the same charge assessed when entering the country without inspection.) The other complaint "I'm sick of paying their taxes". Well, immigrants pay taxes as well, they DO file federal income taxes, they DO pay a state tax and a sale tax JUST like YOU. The kicker is you don't hear them crying about paying taxes (even though they make minimum wage or a litttle more) and some elitist who drives a Lexus and lives in a 150k house and IS able to feed their kids AND has money left over is the one that is crying about it. The other one is,"they don't want to learn English" Is that so? Have you ever asked one? I think if you came here to work and didnt learn English you would have a problem too. English is a hard language to learn and takes years to master it cant be learned in six months. Look at all the English schools and city libraries and they are chock full of people taking English classes. If you really have a problem with immigration but don't know why, I think you have some racial issues you need to address.
David Hernandez, illegals pay sales taxes, big deal, that doesn't make them citizens, and the American citizen workers they displaced, paid those sales taxes and still do, when they can afford to buy things. The only illegals who file income tax are those who have committed identity theft, stealing the social security number of a citizen, that is a felony crime. They earn lower wages, so they are not paying in to the federal system, they get money back, including income credits. On top of that they expect to be subsidized with housing, welfare, food stamps and medicaid.
Any new language can be tricky to learn, but many legal immigrants over the years have, and no one gave them free classes to do so. It is the obligation of someone who wants to come to a new country to adapt. However, illegals have no right to be here, and they will be removed. American citizens are not going to put up with this attempt at undermining our rights and freedoms, and killing our children.
I am a lifelong liberal democrat, but I will not vote for any candidate (I refuse to support Obama for this reason), any politician who supports illegal aliens or amnesty, in fact I will camaign against them.
JENNY,
"the American citizen workers they displaced"
I'm assuming they took your back breaking tomato picking job. I feel sorry for you. But good news, after ICE's raids, meat packing plants are now hiring workers!!! I'm pretty sure there are long lines of "American Citizens" applying as I type. You must hurry before an illegal takes your "Dream job away from you"
first was the excuse of "they are taking our jobs" then it came "they don't want to learn English and don't pay taxes" .....blah blah...... stop making excuses and just admit that you are afraid, the USA is becoming to brownie/Hispanic for you. You hate them, deep inside, you have racist feelings. just say it. period!!!!
The Latinos will be follies if they vote Republicans.
"Conservative Republicans used the power of the filibuster to defeat the bipartisan proposal, which would have created a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
McCain worked with Kennedy to craft the proposal but later backed away from it during the Republican presidential primary when his opponents attacked him for supporting the measure, which many conservative activists opposed. "
THIS IS the republicans draft For their convention by the GOP, Latinos will be foolish to vote for them.
`"It's certainly a vast improvement over the 2004 document,'' Devine, vice chairman of the advocacy group based in Alexandria, Virginia, said.
The document states opposition to any plan that would provide amnesty for people in the country illegally. ``The rule of law suffers if government policies encourage or reward illegal activity,'' it says."
Split on Immigration
That's a tougher line than the 2004 text, which called for a ``humane'' immigration system with a temporary worker program and a path for illegal immigrants ``to come out of the shadows'' and apply for citizenship. The language four years ago mirrored President George W. Bush's goals for revamping U.S. immigration laws.
The 2004 platform also reflects the position of Arizona Senator McCain, who co-sponsored legislation last year that would have overhauled the immigration system and offered an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship while tightening the border with Mexico and creating a guest- worker program. He has since said the U.S. must secure its borders before changing the system.