Two weeks ago at its annual summer meeting, the Republican National Committee waded into the ongoing battle over immigration reform with a resolution that opposed any path to citizenship for undocumented people now in this country.
The resolution, authored by Arizona National Committeeman Bruce Ash and overwhelmingly approved by his fellow GOP leaders, calls instead for the undocumented to be granted legal status and a work permit that must be approved every two years. If someone with the new work permit were to be out of work for more than two months in any two-year period or were convicted of a crime, they would be subject to deportation.
The only exception would be the so-called DREAM Act kids, or minors brought to the United States by their parents. While they would also be ineligible for citizenship, they would be granted a special permit to remain in the country. The permit would be renewed every five years and, unless they were attending school or were employed, the DREAMers would also be subject to deportation.
The resolution stands in stark contrast to the immigration reform proposal passed by the Senate earlier this year, which proposes a 13-year path to citizenship for undocumented people now in the United States.
The Senate proposal, hammered out by the so-called Gang of Eight senators that included Arizona’s John McCain and Jeff Flake, passed out of the upper chamber with 68 votes in late June after a last-minute amendment called for a “border surge” that included a doubling of the number of Border Patrol agents and more fencing along the southern border. But the legislation stalled in the House of Representatives, where House Speaker John Boehner said that rather than a comprehensive bill, his caucus would develop individual reform proposals.
Ash, who wrote in his resolution that “a majority of Americans support legal immigration and oppose any form of amnesty that would propose a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens,” told the Weekly that the RNC proposal could be a compromise that allows immigration reform to get support from Republicans who oppose a path to citizenship.
But without a path to citizenship, Democrats are not going to support comprehensive immigration reform. And without Democratic support in the Senate and the White House, there is no reform to be had.
Congressman Raul Grijalva says the absence of a path to citizenship is a deal-breaker for him.
“If that’s out of the picture, then there is nothing to work out,” says Grijalva, a seven-term Democrat who represents Southern Arizona’s 3rd District.
From Grijalva’s perspective, Democrats have already compromised. They have supported the security buildup in the Senate bill and other elements in exchange for a lengthy pathway to citizenship for those now in the country.
“There’s considerable dissension in the pro-immigrant community among Democrats about how far we’ve gone already,” Grijalva says. “To compound that by taking out the pathway effectively eliminates the ability of the deal to be able to push for it.”
Grijalva says the pathway to citizenship is important to any deal because without it, “you will have a sub-class of permanent folks in this country with restrictions that no one else has, with fewer rights than everybody else has, and with no opportunity to make themselves full Americans. And that’s not what America is about.”
But Ash says immigration reform shouldn’t depend on “creating future voters” for the Democratic Party.
Crashing the Senate’s immigration-reform proposal would make many conservative Republicans happy, although other members of the GOP believe that passing some kind of reform proposal is crucial to the party’s efforts to woo Latino voters.
McCain, who has spent time during the recess working the business community to support immigration reform, told the PBS News Hour last month that immigration reform doesn’t automatically win the GOP “a single Hispanic voter, but what it does, it puts us on a playing field where we can compete for the Hispanic voter. If we don’t do that … I see further polarization of the Hispanic voter, and the demographics are clear that the Republican Party cannot win a national election. That’s just a fact.”
Neither McCain nor Flake appear willing to address the RNC resolution. Spokespersons for both senators did not return emails asking for comment on the proposal.
Grijalva believes Latino voters will hold Republicans responsible if immigration reform doesn’t pass.
“The momentum is to get something done,” Grijalva says. “If the House decides that they’re going to be the ones who kill this, then it falls squarely on the shoulders of Republican leadership. Latino voters are not a monolith. Not everybody agrees on everything. But on this issue, there is agreement, and that will be the driving issue for a generation.”
But Grijalva is becoming increasingly skeptical about the chances for immigration reform getting through the House of Representatives.
“My heart is optimistic,” Grijalva says. “The realist in me has doubts.”
This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 4, 2013.
SPEAK UP NOW ABOUT THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION INVASION OR LET BOTH PARTIES TURN THIS COUNTRY INTO A TOILET OF POVERTY?
CAN WE TRUST THEIR PROMISES AGAIN?
Every reader who gets the majority of intelligence on illegal immigration storm, are more than likely inclined to believe the Liberal driven press, whether national or local regenerated reports. That’s about as far as the U.S. population gets, and so the media achieve the main objective to brainwash the masses. Insignificant to some are the grassroots organizations, which has neither the money nor the powerful representation of acclaimed in the news articles to pass on the facts. The Tea Party that has grown in millions of members has been ridiculed by some of the press, but the advocates for the Obama administration have used their power to spy on Conservatives.. This government has driven a wedge between the American people,
Earlier this year we were told 622 criminal illegal persons were released from prison; the real number being 8,000, according to ICE documents.
These people committed homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, threats, extortion, sex offenses, cruelty toward family, resisting an officer, illegal weapon possession, hit and run, and drug offenses accompanied by sentences of more than a year. It was Obama who willfully sprung them free into our backyards, giving them defacto amnesty. Oh! I forgot ID theft? This has essentially caused much misery to the citizen or legal resident victims. Further to that has been the never ending stream of drunken driving violations. The majority journalists and reporters omit these stories, because of Liberal sentiments or upsetting certain radical ethnic groups.
Both political parties have remained dormant enacting laws that make logical sense, such as writing into law a biometric Social Security card. Electronically recognized for such acts as determining who is hired for a job, who has the right to vote and also to protect a legal person’s credit and personal data. This is the height of ineptitude, because billions of dollars that could be saved in stopping theft on a grand scale. Yet the Obama administration is distributing free food stamps, to low income (illegal aliens) and their babies and children. Are you even aware that American taxpayers are still the fall-guy in supporting continuous numbers of previously sponsored new citizens, that during the 1986 amnesty because the limited governments agents who are supposed to oversee that the financial support didn’t have the manpower or that the original petitioner could not care for the CHAIN MIGRATION family members. Chain Migration needs to be amended or rescinded, same as the Birthright citizenship law that gives babies and children illegal alien mothers a right to citizenship. These two laws are overwhelmingly a huge blot that comes with illegal aliens on international flights or just crossing the border. The Heritage foundation had it right when they stated it was a 6.3 trillion burden.
The Obama regime must be stopped. America will not tolerate any more violations of our Constitution.
Obama has engaged in mass deception and cover-ups from his personal role in the Benghzi attacks to “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation, NSA spying, tacitly supporting a Muslim Brotherhood revolution and this “president” illegally bypassed Congress to pass Obamacare. That’s the short list.
A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that 57.5 million working-age Americans are either unemployed or out of the labor market. This figure is almost identical (57 million) to the number of people the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty legislation would bring in. Steve Camarota, the author of the study, said:
In one of the furthermost contributors to the vast civil rights advances in the 1960s was the fact that the United States had a rigid labor market with the aim of increasingly needing Black American workers, particularly in the Southern states.
And a key reason for the rigidity of the employment market was the spectacular decrease in annual immigration flows continually since 1921, according to historians of that period.
Throughout the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington D.C, it is essential to be attentive of the role that spiked volume Immigration that has repeatedly played in stalling economic progress among the descendants of America’s appalling slavery system. It is a time to acknowledge how the economic, political and social advances of Black Americans in general spiraled upwards when annual immigration numbers were reduced throughout our history.
Analysis debunks White House report on amnesty benefits
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
According to the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, a recent White House report citing the economic benefits of granting amnesty and citizenship to illegal aliens is misleading and based on dubious assumptions. His study suggests the overall cost to taxpayers of such an amnesty is likely to exceed $6 trillion.
The White House report claims that amnesty would increase the income of Americans by $791 billion over the next decade. Rector say the income boost claim is misleading because the amnestied illegal aliens themselves would benefit the most through higher wages. And the magnitude of the increase is faulty because the underlying assumptions claim their wages would increase by a full 25 percent. According to federal data, the 1986 amnesty increased illegal-alien wages by only 5–10 percent.
The report also claims that amnesty would create almost 2 million new jobs for current citizens over the next decade and increase their income by about $130 billion. Rector says the simplistic Keynesian economic assumptions used to generate these figures have been “discredited for decades.”
Moreover, Rector said the White House report ignores the net costs associated with amnesty and citizenship. Millions of illegal aliens would be eligible for Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, and more than 80 different means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps and public housing. And the benefits they receive will greatly exceed the taxes they pay
Rector found that legal immigrants without a high school diploma receive $5 in government benefits for every $1 in taxes paid each year. That means the annual net cost of the amnesty to taxpayers would be about $37,000 per household.
Read Robert Rector’s article. Read more on the costs and forced illegal immigration inheritance on American society through the websites of Numbersusa.com and Judicialwatch.org and many other non profit, grassroots organizations.