The president will call tomorrow for amnesty for illegal aliens.
He will call it comprehensive immigration reform and will tell a sob story or two, but it will be amnesty and it will be blanket and he will be doing it for votes.
Because if he was doing it for principle, he would have done it four years ago.
But he, hoping to completely and forever cement Hispanic voters to the Democratic Party, will do it now. And any number of open-minded Republicans will shout “Amen” and support his plan.
They will also be doing it for votes.
This is further proof of how stupid they are. Because the simple fact is that the Latino vote has been lost by the Republican Party and will never come back. If we’re honest about public perceptions, the Democratic Party is the party of aggrieved minorities and the Republican Party is the party of white people.
Except, of course, for those white people who can get a racial exemption on the basis of claiming some aggrieved minority status.
But the upshot is the same. Various factors have led Latinos to generally view themselves relative to this society like blacks see themselves relative to this society. Latinos, instead of assimilating into the American mainstream, are solidifying outside it as an aggrieved minority.
So they will never vote Republican, because they will see the Democratic Party as sympathetic to their demands, and because they will not want to be in a “white” party. There is a growing antipathy toward things “white,” and some of that antipathy coalesces in the Democratic Party.
All of which is by way of explaining that Republicans who think they can win over Latino voters by supporting amnesty are idiots. Yes, we’ve got Marco Rubio, but we’ve also got Clarence Thomas, and from a show-Republicans-like-minorities standpoint, they are each equally useless.
That’s not an argument against amnesty, it’s a plea for realism.
The only reason to support an amnesty is because it’s the right thing to do, or because it is a practical necessity. Individuals can decide whether it is either, both or neither. That decision really doesn’t line up along party lines, it’s a matter of personal judgment.
And it’s a personal opinion which might have changed over recent years. The passage of time cements situations, even bad situations, and sometimes forces policy. Presumably, that was the intention of politicians from both parties who did nothing about illegal immigration for years on end. By doing nothing, they were doing something, and we are now face to face with that something.
Inaction has facilitated the Reconquista.
All we’re talking about now is the paperwork.
Both parties have used illegal immigration as a wedge issue to gin up votes and donations, while ignoring sometimes sweeping societal changes tied to an influx of illegal aliens. Across the country, communities have been fundamentally changed by what can only be called an invasion.
Ten percent of the Mexican population lives in the United States. We are Mexico’s welfare and health care system. After oil, money sent back by illegal aliens is the second-largest source of income in the Mexican economy.
Now the two parties are going to fight to see which can be most welcoming to folks who’ve already lived here half a decade or more.
Hopefully, there will be some wisdom.
Hopefully, someone will be honest enough to recognize that not all illegals are cut from the same cloth, and one size does not fit all when you’re throwing open the citizenship office to some 20 million people who climbed over the back fence.
See, some of the sappy stories are true.
Some illegals are, beyond the initial fact that they broke into our country like burglars and thieves, hard-working, law-abiding, self-supporting family people who would make great neighbors and citizens.
But anybody who thinks that’s the case for all illegals is an idiot.
Sadly, the president and his ilk are painting a picture of huddled masses yearning to be free. They make every Juan and Maria out to be some great person who ought to the get the key to the city.
And that’s not the case.
Because some of these illegal aliens are monsters. Some of them are trash. Some of them are crooks, welfare cheats and deadbeats.
Most alarmingly, some of them – many tens of thousands of them – belong to savage criminal drug gangs that have already ravaged their own country.
As a demographic category, illegal aliens have the highest level of criminal activity of any such category in our society.
And any naturalization or amnesty program that doesn’t recognize that fact, and separate the bad from the good, is going to do great damage.
Any amnesty plan has to be specific, not general. It has to be on a case-by-case basis, not a blanket gift. I don’t say that to slow it down, but to make sure we’re not giving green cards to Zetas.
My thought has been that there should be some national criteria set up – no criminal conduct, no welfare dependency, steady work history – and that local judges or county sheriffs should apply those criteria to illegals who have been living in their community.
Folks who’ve kept their notes clean, stayed off the dole, worked hard and treated their families and communities right should be welcomed. Give them a green card and tell them they’ve got three years or so to take their citizenship test.
My first choice would have been to have a secured border so they never got here. And failing that, I would have preferred to deport them right away.
But Washington screwed that pooch.
And years later, here we are.
And given this circumstance, I can live with that solution.
But I want somebody to say no to some of them. Stole somebody’s identity? Drove with no car insurance? Threw your kids on welfare? Angling for SSI? Got locked up for drunk and disorderly? Gang membership?
All of those: Get the hell out.
We’ve got enough home-grown trash, we don’t need anybody else’s cesspool dumped on our lawn.
Amnesty? I guess something’s got to be worked out. But it shouldn’t treat America like a door mat, or like the world’s welfare office. Good people who work hard and stay out of trouble, we’ll keep those. Bad people, who break the law and harass society, deport them.
Sadly, I fear that will never happen.
Sadly, I fear that, in the name of fairness, we’ll keep the bad with the good. Behind some sob story about going to college and separated families, we’ll have the equivalent of this generation’s Mariel Boatlift.
And when they get citizenship, we’ll have infiltrated an army of Democratic voters in communities all across the country.
And the electoral math on the U.S. population is 13.1 percent black plus 16.7 percent Latino equals the Democrats starting every presidential election with 30 percent of the electorate already in the bag.
But this isn’t about that, because that is already lost.
This is about getting the paperwork squared away, and about making the law reflect the consequence of 20 years of lawlessness.
