Fear mongering has long been a stable of the Republican campaign platform, and illegal immigration from Mexico is the latest issue to the GOP has grabbed onto.
With high unemployment, Republicans and teabaggers have jumped all over illegal immigration with the false claim that they are taking American jobs, while ignoring the people actually hiring them at substandard wages. The recently passed Arizona unconstitutional racist “show-me-your-papers” law is little more than another attempt by Republicans to suppress minority voting.
The fact is deportations are up under President Obama. In fact, the Obama administration is deporting record numbers of undocumented workers and auditing hundreds of businesses that blithely hire undocumented workers. According toe CBS News, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration's 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007.
That begs the questions, where were the teabaggers when Bush was ignoring the immigration problem, just like they were silent was Bush was running the economy into the ground and turning a budget surplus into a deficit?
Not only has President Obama sent the National Guard to patrol the border with Mexico, just today he signed into law a $600 million border security measure that will put more agents and equipment along the Mexican border. It will fund the hiring of 1,000 new Border Patrol agents to be deployed at critical areas along the border, as well as more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It also provides for new communications equipment and greater use of unmanned surveillance drones.
As expected, that will not sway GOP teabaggers from making the false claim that the federal government is not securing the border nor will Obama get any credit.
Teabaggers and other prominent Republicans, including Senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, are now calling for repealing the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all people born in the United States to combat the so-called “anchor babies.”
The 14th Amendment is one of the three Reconstruction Amendments, adopted in 1868 to ensure freed slaves are citizens of the United States. Its Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses have gone a long way toward combating institutional racism and equality.
Republicans claim that people enter the country illegally in order to have children who are automatically U.S. citizens and who will "anchor" their parents to America.
Lindsey told Faux “news” that “people come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child. It's called 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."
The problem with that rant is that the facts do not bear that out. According to an AP story, “People who study patterns of illegal immigration say that this statement is probably not true in the vast number of birthright citizenship cases. The co-author of the Pew study told Time's Kate Pickert that "well over 80 percent" of the 340,000 births to an illegal immigrant in 2008 were to a mother who had been in the country for at least a year, suggesting they did not come to the country specifically to have a child. And "birth tourism" — in which people purportedly come to America specifically to have a child and then return with the child to their country — seems to be relatively uncommon.”
This is really a non-issue because children have to “wait until they are 21 to seek legal status for an illegal-immigrant parent. According to Politifact, "Only 4,000 unauthorized immigrants can receive such status per year, and the alien has to have been in the U.S. for at least 10 years."”
Clearly, we need comprehensive immigration reform.
I guess if Republicans want to abolish an amendment, perhaps they can look at the 2nd Amendment. After all, a well regulated militia is called the National Guard and the U.S. Army.
9 comments:
More pandering. Graham et al have people believing that women 8.75 months pregnant are one step from the border, ready to cross the second they go into labor.
Graham must be a real cynic: He's a smart guy who knows better -- at one time, he sponsored comprehensive immigration reform.
Another example of a problem that can trace part of its roots to the Iraq war. Bush sympathized with comprehensive reform and might have pursued it, but his political influence was so sapped by the war and by Hurricane Katrina that he punted yet again.
Correct, and don’t forget fear mongering and scapegoating. Usually the enemy we need to be afraid of is the gays and Muslims, but now it’s the brown people taking our jobs.
Fear mongering... you're doing a heckuva job!
2nd Amendment? haven't you been paying attention? The supremes settled that one, and not in favor of the piss in their pants liberals who are scared of guns in the hands of honest citizens...
I'm not sure, but I think the tv antenna commenter agrees with me.
A nation that cannot control who becomes a citizen is doomed.
Graham is an ass. It’s sad that he compares people to farm animals. But the facts simply do not bear out the myth of the “anchor baby.”
That is correct, Republicans are fear mongering as usual.
I understand the U.S. Supreme Court “settled that one,” just like the 14th Amendment. Both can and will stay. I don’t have a problem with guns in the hands of honest citizens, it’s guns in the hands of criminals and crazy tea baggers that want a “2nd Amendment solution,” like Sharon Angle.
The nation does control who becomes a citizen, but the states don’t. Besides, It’s in the Constitution.
When anyone can sneak across the border, without permission of the US government as recognized in international law, and create a US citizen, the government had de facto lost control of who can become a citizen.
On the 2nd Amendment: So who would decide who can own a gun, in your world? Government psychiatrists?
Hardly.
On the 2nd Amendment: The people.
I’m at a loss as to why in your world everyone having a gun is more important than Due Process and Equal Protection.
It's not. They are all equal. My point is, you were going down a scary road, saying some people should be denied rights because you don't like their politics. Our US Constitution was set up as a bullwark against such notions.
I'm happy to see you didn't try to foolishly argue against my first point. We have de facto lost control of who can become a US citizen.
Good, we agree on something, and that is that neither the 2nd or 14th Amendment should
be repealed. The 2nd Amendment does not mean the same thing as it did in 1780. Gun
control does not violate the Constitution. It makes no sense that who have to have a
license to drive, but we can’t have any control over something as deadly as a gun.
We have not lost control of who can become U.S. citizen, and we made it pretty clear
more than 140 years ago. In fact, we thought so much of it we put it into the Constitution.
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