Mark Krikorian sums up why, nicely.
First, there just aren’t very many illegal aliens who have been here 25 years, the duration Gingrich specified as warranting amnesty. The old INS estimated that there were about 5 million illegal aliens in 1996, and the growth rate had been about 300,000 a year, which means that 10 years earlier (i.e., 25 years ago), there would have been about 2 million illegal aliens. Of those, I would guess the majority have in the intervening quarter-century either gone home, died, or finagled a green card (at least one-quarter of each year’s green-card recipients — new “legal” immigrants — are illegal aliens using the federal immigration program to launder their status). So that’s fewer than 1 million people out of the current 11 million illegals who would be covered by the Gingrich Amnesty, and probably fewer than half a million.
But wait — 25 years ago. Hmmmmm. That rings a bell. Did something happen back in 1986 with regard to immigration? Oh, yeah, I remember — Congress passed the one and only amnesty for illegal immigrants, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), that legalized close to 3 million illegals (there had been about 5 million, so about 2 million remained after the amnesty, because they didn’t meet the law’s requirements). That was supposed to be followed by tough enforcement to prevent future illegal immigration and to throw out the resident illegals who didn’t qualify for the amnesty (or who failed to lie their way to a green card, since a large share of those successfully claiming amnesty, perhaps as many as one-quarter, did so fraudulently — among the liars was Mahmud “The Red” Abouhalima, a leader of the first World Trade Center attack).
So the Gingrich Amnesty would cover illegal immigrants here when Congress passed IRCA. That is to say, it would pick up where the previous amnesty left off, legalizing precisely those people who didn’t qualify for IRCA. This just underlines what a chump you have to be to support any deal offered you by amnesty supporters.
Gingrich was not only in Congress when that previous amnesty passed. He voted for it. At least, back then our betters had the decency and honesty to call the thing “amnesty.”
Yes, Reagan signed it into law (his AG, Ed Meese, has since said it was Reagan’s biggest mistake). That amnesty was supposed to fix the problem. Did it?
Update: Via Ace, Gingrich is spanking Romney on twitter for pushing against Gingrich’s position on immigration. Which brings up another truth, which is that you can’t really trust Romney on this issue either. And you can’t trust that he’ll wage attacks against his opponents that don’t end up backfiring on him. When you’ve been on both sides of every issue, there’s bound to be a quote or policy position in your past that will hurt you now. And so it is with Romney.
Behold, conservatives, your two front-runners.
It didn’t work because, other than the amnesty part, none of the enforcement provisions were/are followed. No secure border, no audits of I-9 forms in employee personnel records, no penalties for hiring/employing illegals, no guest worker program etc etc etc.
Until we get the border secure, the current resident illegals should be considered illegal. And if they get deported, they can take their kids with them.
Kathleen Parker (also known as Dave Weigel in a dress), has stated that Newt is a man of bad ideas, Perry is a giggle-fest…Cain is a game show host in a clown car…and Romney has been the candidate all along.
Although Huntsman is “too smart for his own good”.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-ever-happened-to-the-gops-2012-presidential-wannabes/2011/11/22/gIQAPqVWmN_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions
I am not sure what Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, David Frum and David Brooks want, or George Will…but it currently isn’t on their plate. These are folks who would rather hang out with liberals, but can’t find any…the small c communists ate all the liberals. Joe Lieberman is their candidate.
Then again, nobody is on my plate either. Paul Ryan…your phone is ringing.
Brokered convention to save the nation. The rest of these people are just bad enough to lose to Obama. This shouldn’t even be a close race.
Ryan/Rubio is a landslide win.
We shouldn’t settle for less.
I wonder what would happen if Palin changed her mind and ran at this point? It made sense for her to bow out when other candidates looked very strong _and_ conservative, such as her friend Rick Perry, but when Romney is still widely seen as a RINO and the others all appear to have made near-fatal mistakes (or been crucified by the MSM like Cain), maybe Palin’s time has come.
Unfortunately, it would probably be taken as a sign that the entire collection of current Republican contenders has self-destructed, perhaps with good justification.
I’m starting to think Obama may win in 2012 after all….
Bryan – I’m not defending the Speaker but he has a point. There are 10-11 million illegals. How do you propose repatriating them back to their home countries? Moreover, it looks to me like the American people do not have the will to do that.
I think Gov. Perry and others had a good first step: First secure the borders so the problem does not worsen. Then sort out what we do next. I for one would remove all fiscal subsidies available to illegals, although I would allow their American born children to attend public schools and colleges like anyone else. (The 14th Amendment is a pesky thing.) I would also put a stop to the Federal government’s doing things in English and Spanish. This is America and we speak English here. Without the financial support of the government those who can’t make it, I think will leave, and those who can will stay. For those who stay, we should make them permanent resident aliens, or provide some path to citizenship.
Then none will leave knowing this. That is precisely the point. They all must be deported. It is the only way to save our nation from fracturing further.
Behold, conservatives, your two front-runners.
What the heck is that supposed to mean? They’re YOUR two front-runners as well.
Don’t like it? Tough. We don’t either. But look across the spectrum of candidates, both declared and undeclared and tell me who would
(1) be better and
(2) could beat a Democrat
You can say “we’re f’ed” only so many times and then it gets old. As in, really old.
He is just bitter that Perry f’ed up the debates and is no longer the front runner.
note: I supported Perry at the start of his campaign as well. I am just not bitter and whiny about his fall.
Governor Perry can beat obama. He holds all the keys to do so. He is not weak on immigration…he is caught. he is not for amnesty…but securing that border first and then we will talk. He came into the race with that idea and many others. He knows all about it…and he is not a liar…he owns what he has done…and he backs the state of which handed him a veto proof bill and he governors. Shows he will stand with the People. His ideas are brilliant. Check him out real well…he is the only one who has gone face to face with obama already…The pundits and Romney’s staff might say it is Romney or Newt…even Cain can beat oby…but the facts don’t add up…Perry is the one to kick obama out of office and put this country back on track. What we can do with the illegals is a future discussion…Secure the border first…then talk and back the people! Number one thing we the people need is one we can trust…Perry.
What was Milton Friedman’s position on illegal immigration? I think you’ll find that Newt’s position is more inline with free market principles than Bachman’s.
Romney has flipped and flopped his position on immigration? I’m shocked, I tell you…just SHOCKED!!!
I tend to think Gingrich and Perry are correct on the immigration issue. I know it runs against other conservatives’ view of the rule of law and fair play, but practically speaking, there is little else we can realistically do. Secure the border and then deal with the illegals who are already here. If they otherwise abide by our laws and work for a living, let them stay.
Besides, the number of illegals who can vote is growing. Without meaning to, conservatives often come across as racist toward them. As I said – “without meaning to.” It’s easy for the left to demagogue us that way, so we shouldn’t play into it by refusing to recognize reality and the practical ways we can deal with it.
FWIW, I could live with Gingrich as the nominee…but I would prefer Perry. Romney is a flip-flopping, unreliable, and untrustworthy joke who wants to be President just because he thinks he should be.
“Besides, the number of illegals who can vote is growing.” That statement and the cavalier way it was thrown in tells us more about the problem in America than anything in the story. Americans have come to accept that illegals can vote and are pandering to them. If my neighbors dog jumps the fence and poops in my yard I pick him up and take him home. After the third or fourth time he just may disappear.
These people are holding our nations legal citizens jobs. Your getting soft. You must have a job.
Shouldn’t Perry be added to the do not trust list as well?
Well at least we can trust (maybe) the candidates who are too low in the polls to win the nomination.
As long as we stop giving out free crap to people anyone who wants to come here and work hard and make our country better is welcome. You idiots blather on about broken laws and deportation and label anyone who speaks about treating these people with any sort of respect in the most ridiculous of terms. Look at the OWS movement and tell me any of those people deserve to be here more than the vast majority of illegal immigrants who bust their ass in this country to support their families.
We need to stop spending money on a broken education system, stop supporting free-loaders on the health care system, and stop giving lazy people money to do nothing. We need to reward people that work hard and support the system.
You all need to stop and think before you display this borderline racism. What does it mean to be an American? Is it enough to be born here? What if people want to be an American and were born in Mexico? Most of the people that come up here work very hard and are worthy of respect. But what if you are a snotty kid with a silver spoon up his ass pissing on banks? I know which group I would rather deport.
I hear you on the OWS crowd but just using the anecdotal evidence provided to me from living in a small city outside Phoenix which is primarily Hispanic with a large illegal component I must disagree to a very large extent. The majority of illegals coming up here to work have no desire to be American. They hire coyotes to get them here so they can work and send money home. They have few, if any, useful skills other than general labor and after paying the drug/human smugglers off they exist to do as little as they can just earning enough to survive and stay drunk most evenings.
There are exceptions to this. People who are just as you described. A family 3 doors down whose children were both born here and the oldest now attends NAU. Good folk but the minority by far. If they were to be deported the kids would be devastated and we would offer to help but it is the parents fault. They have been here over 20 years and haven’t tried to become citizens. Don’t want too. When the children are grown and they have a little retirement they are going to go back to Mexico where it will last and spend it there.
The OWS crowd may be wrong and may be breaking laws in their political protests, but Americans have the right to be wrong (see Nov., 2008) without the threat of deportation. Illegals don’t.
The only one of the candidates who has been consistently right on this issue is Bachman. Who has a different set of problems.
On this issue, the candidates rank:
(1) Bachmann
(2) Cain
(3) Romney (largely because of his veto of in-state tuition bill from Mass Legislature)
(4) Santorum
(5) Paul
(6) Newt
(7) Huntsman
(8) Obama
(9) Perry
I don’t trust either one of them.
In 1984, this crap was supposed to stop and there would not be another Reagan disaster.
What happens after the Newt and Romney disaster goes through, and the wetbacks still keep coming?
Perry has the plan. Shut the boder down, and do it NOW!! Then, lets talk!
Tuesday’s debate on National Security was by far the best and most substantive of this series. Even if proctered by CNN, who in times past stepped all over themselves and candidates, with both CNN’s agenda and their partner in leftist ideology, POLITICO’s.
Newt’s and Cain’s attempt at a Lincoln-Douglas format woke-up MSM to electorate’s avid interest in clear debates on substantive issues instead of pablum feeding from a story book of leftist ideology. Really shook all MSM up.
Although a clear front runner hasn’t emerged from the Republican fold, the Electorate is knowledgeable of critical issues facing Our USA and is looking for a Republican candidate who can articulate: 1) the problem and 2)a solution to that problem and 3) their perception of both problem and solution and how they would propose to fix it.
Thus far, all Republican candidates have been careful to tow We The Elite People’s Washington DC play book mantra. Innovative solutions a la Ross Perot’s, hasn’t surfaced in any one of the debates thus far…ergo, each candidates turn at front runner status.
One candidate, who has consistently tried to squeeze thru We The Elite People’s Washington DC Republican playbook is Ms. Bachmann. Without offending established Washington DC’s pride (and prejudice) she has skirted around entrenched powerbrokers’ favorite issues with a deft surgeon’s scalpel to stand firm on an issue, expose it, lay it out to the electorate, show what she understands has to be done and how she would like to have it dealt with.
Question: Would a Ms. Bachmann, as President invite a Sarah Palin as Vice President?
The other candidates have as of yet continued to dance around a pin head type rhetorical responses, frustrating any electorate’s critical thinking.This ushers in the candidate “flavor du jour.”
Vote massively this 2012 election because massive fraud has already befallen every precinct in the USA. Don’t dare stay home. Too much is riding on your Vote. God Bless America.
If the GOP keeps obsessing over illegal immigration, you lose.
Domestic Energy = lower costs for consumers and manufacturers = Growth = Jobs = fewer home foreclosures + enough tax revenue under the tax code at the moment to 1) secure the Mexican border (although you all are going to also keep all those Africans, South Asians, and those desperate Europeans who are either swimming to America or flying in on a tourist visa – which is who we have in The Bronx – barely a Mexican in sight),
2)slow the INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS BORROWING that is the #1 threat to whatever America we will have at that moment.
Truly amazing how so many GOP turned on Rick Perry because he supported, TEN YEARS AGO, the overwhelmingly popular with Texans (who share a long history with Mexico) and veto-proof law that currently allows 16,000 children, who have been residents of Texas for THRE YEARS, of maybe not legal migrants, to pay the same tuition rate for public community college or four-year college as ANYONE who legally resides in Texas for ONE YEAR can pay.
I assume natural-born citizens of Texas have to prove they have a residence in Texas.
This is SO repeating history. 1920 GOP sweep to stop the flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Too many Jews and Catholics.
And, even after the new, highly restrictive laws with quotas favoring Northern European Protestants were passed, the Northern (Indiana and Maine) Ku Klux Klan was STILL marching on Washington.
You do NOT have Calvin Coolidge to keep the peace today, and all those 1920′s Southern Democrats who kept blocking Federal anti-lynching laws? Well, they are now all Southern Republicans, except when they are not.
Illegal immigration is NOT the issue that should define 2012.
A lot of us fiscal conservatives really believed the GOP had learned their lesson after the fiscal disaster of one-party GOP rule 2000-2006.
and you let ROMNEY, whose sole reason for being on the stage is that he had nothing more productive to do the past five years than campaign and make donations, you let ROMNEY use this issue to destroy Perry? (sorry, Gingrich is on his own – I have no actual vote until the general election and I think a Perry-Gingrich ticket is fine)
The only candidate who can actually win in 2012 is Rick Perry, for all the reasons you GOP purists sniff at. The debates? Obama twitches in the presence of anyone with rooted self-confidence. Obama only has ‘racist!’ to use, and he will use that against anyone. Might as well have the one person on that stage who makes Obama insecure.
Ok, I know Benjamin Netanyahu is not available, but, Rick Perry is just as tough, and resilient.
And, if anyone is paying attention, Rick Perry has already changed Obama’s foreign policy just by being Rick Perry, in Septemeber, calling Obama’s foreign policy “naive, arrogant, misguided, and dangerous”. Nov. 12: Perry says sanction Iran’s Central Bank. Nov. 21: NFZ over Syria.
News today? EU, led by Sarkozy, calls to sanction Iran’s Central Bank and NFZ to protect humanitarian corridors and border refuges in Syria.
Hey – it was a work day for the rest of the world.
and, somehow the USS George H W Bush carrier group managed to transit the Suez Canal in complete secrecy in order to be on the shores of …Syria now that all American citizens have been told to leave, by Obama.Oh, and Pakistan’s nukes? The Saudis paid for them last year.
K2K: If the GOP keeps obsessing over illegal immigration, you lose.
Domestic Energy = lower costs for consumers and manufacturers = Growth = Jobs = fewer home foreclosures + enough tax revenue under the tax code at the moment to 1) secure the Mexican border (although you all are going to also keep all those Africans, South Asians, and those desperate Europeans who are either swimming to America or flying in on a tourist visa – which is who we have in The Bronx – barely a Mexican in sight),
2)slow the INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS BORROWING that is the #1 threat to whatever America we will have at that moment.
Truly amazing how so many GOP turned on Rick Perry because he supported, TEN YEARS AGO, the overwhelmingly popular with Texans (who share a long history with Mexico) and veto-proof law that currently allows 16,000 children, who have been residents of Texas for THRE YEARS, of maybe not legal migrants, to pay the same tuition rate for public community college or four-year college as ANYONE who legally resides in Texas for ONE YEAR can pay.
I assume natural-born citizens of Texas have to prove they have a residence in Texas.
This is SO repeating history. 1920 GOP sweep to stop the flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Too many Jews and Catholics.
And, even after the new, highly restrictive laws with quotas favoring Northern European Protestants were passed, the Northern (Indiana and Maine) Ku Klux Klan was STILL marching on Washington.
You do NOT have Calvin Coolidge to keep the peace today, and all those 1920′s Southern Democrats who kept blocking Federal anti-lynching laws? Well, they are now all Southern Republicans, except when they are not.
Illegal immigration is NOT the issue that should define 2012.
A lot of us fiscal conservatives really believed the GOP had learned their lesson after the fiscal disaster of one-party GOP rule 2000-2006.
and you let ROMNEY, whose sole reason for being on the stage is that he had nothing more productive to do the past five years than campaign and make donations, you let ROMNEY use this issue to destroy Perry? (sorry, Gingrich is on his own – I have no actual vote until the general election and I think a Perry-Gingrich ticket is fine)
The only candidate who can actually win in 2012 is Rick Perry, for all the reasons you GOP purists sniff at. The debates? Obama twitches in the presence of anyone with rooted self-confidence. Obama only has ‘racist!’ to use, and he will use that against anyone. Might as well have the one person on that stage who makes Obama insecure.
Ok, I know Benjamin Netanyahu is not available, but, Rick Perry is just as tough, and resilient.
And, if anyone is paying attention, Rick Perry has already changed Obama’s foreign policy just by being Rick Perry, in Septemeber, calling Obama’s foreign policy “naive, arrogant, misguided, and dangerous”. Nov. 12: Perry says sanction Iran’s Central Bank. Nov. 21: NFZ over Syria.
News today? EU, led by Sarkozy, calls to sanction Iran’s Central Bank and NFZ to protect humanitarian corridors and border refuges in Syria.
Hey – it was a work day for the rest of the world.
and, somehow the USS George H W Bush carrier group managed to transit the Suez Canal in complete secrecy in order to be on the shores of …Syria now that all American citizens have been told to leave, by Obama.Oh, and Pakistan’s nukes? The Saudis paid for them last year.