The immigration bill that passed the Senate doesn’t look like it’s going to have much of a chance in the House; this, after years of people on both sides of the aisle agreeing that we need a comprehensive immigration bill. So what’s wrong? What happened? What do you think? The far Right is at it again, once more proving that they care nothing for the good of the country and that they are only interested in carrying out the will of those billionaires who fill their pockets on a continuing basis.
So what’s to do? Not much really and certainly nothing as far as getting the bill passed because the problem has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with removing the roadblocks to not just immigration, but everything else that is breaking down our country at a time when we need to move bravely forward but are bogged down in a Tea induced quagmire.
Right now this country needs so much and is getting so little from congress that it would be better off without it. But to even court such an idea is to accept the breakdown of the greatest governmental concept in the history of man. I’m talking about Democracy based on The Constitution. It started here and it would be really great if we could make a serious attempt to keep it going.
Of course, the immigration bill would be a great step in that direction. One of the big sticking points is the Right’s demand that those who came here illegally must be punished. That’s right man, we gotta crack down on those little old ladies who almost died hustling through a desert full of snakes and border cops so they could produce generations of upwardly mobile children, grand children and great grand children who are now doctors, lawyers, teachers and landscapers. Forget the bankers who launder trillions and steal billions, forget the drug dealers who slaughter our youth in the streets of our cities, forget the crooked congressmen who get paid by the oil-o-garchs to poison our land, forget ‘em all, let ‘em go, but get that damned little old lady who crossed the border illegally thirty years ago and has been living a life of high crime and propagation ever since. GET HER!!! Grind her into the pavement. What, you think; we’re maybe just a tad over the top?
Then, of course there’s border safety. “They’re pouring over our borders,” shout the beleaguered chorus of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas sheriffs, mayors, congressmen and politicians. They’re burying us in brown bodies. We hardly have enough ammunition to shoot them all.
Of course no one mentions that the Obama administration is sending them back, at a rate that exceeds those that are still coming in, resulting in a negative influx. Nobody mentions this because if they did, it might affect the billions that our defense contractors expect to get for new equipment to fight the brown invaders.
This is just a small list :
6 Northrup Gruman Airborne Radar Systems @$9.3 million each
16 Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopters @ $17 million apiece
8 American Eurocopter light enforcement helicopters @ $3M each
Wait a minute; is this a border or a war zone? Are we protecting against invaders with tanks and automatic weapons or are we setting up this massive war machine simply to grab, half naked women and kids, swimming across the Rio Grande with just the clothes on their backs.
The order sheet also calls for 17UH-IN Bell helicopters that are already out of date. This is all part of an additional $33 billion that was added to the already outrageous $46 billion that the bill and its sponsors seemed to think was needed to keep these little old ladies from invading our southern border. How about we spend some of that money to help Mexico so that their citizens can earn a decent and safe living and stay down there?
There would be 19,000 new border patrol police and 350 miles of fence for them to polish and mend. There would also be 4,595 unattended ground sensors,104 radiation isotope identification devices, 53 fiber optic inspection scopes and get this 10 unmanned aircraft. DRONES? You think the Pakistani’s are the only ones who have to worry about death from the sky?. Oh yeah, and two $18.6 million VADAR radar systems.
If you thought it was all about prejudice or little old ladies you were dead wrong. It’s all about MONEY, tons of money for our greedy defense contractors, and that much money makes the kind of bad actors we have in congress take their curtain calls.. Our statesmen are great on the graft.
Oh, by the way, just in case you haven’t already figured it out, the Mexican border isn’t the problem with immigration. Every single airport that accepts international flights is the problem, because we have a steady stream of people coming into the country with all kinds of legitimate, time sensitive credentials and as soon as they are here they just chuck them and disappear into this huge country. So much for the reality of border security.
What needs to be fixed, what is really holding back the immigration system in this country are the current laws that allow and control immigration. We just don’t let enough people into the country legally right now. We need more immigrants and we need more of the right kind of immigrants. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs going begging in this country because we don’t have the right people with the right education to fill them but each year we send thousands of college graduates that have the knowledge to fill these jobs, back to their native countries to do those jobs there and bring that business to places outside the U.S.
And it isn’t just college-educated immigrants that we need. The guest worker program for seasonal laborers is a joke. The new bill allows for 20,000 a year for a start. That’s less than they need in one county in California. 200,000 would still be an inadequate start.
One of the biggest lies about the immigration bill is that it will cost the nation 3 trillion in welfare money. It’s a lie propagated by Jeff Sessions. ® Alabama. Sessions is the kind of guy, who you know he’s lying because his lips are moving,
The 11 million illegal’s that are in this country are for the most part working. What many of them aren’t doing is paying taxes because they don’t want to call attention to themselves. If they were legal, the same reasoning would drive them pay their taxes. It’s also why most illegal’s are not involved in crime, even petty crime. They don’t want to call attention to themselves because they don’t want to be deported. You legalize these people and a workforce that has been in decline will grow, you legalize them and they will be entitled to sustainable wages from which they will pay taxes, you legalize them and because of those sustainable wages they can become serious consumers. The whole economy grows.
Immigration will not expand the deficit of our social network programs. It will actually shrink it. Immigrants will be younger than our current work force and under the new law they will have to pay into SS & Med which they will not be able to collect until they are citizens, and age appropriate thus expanding the banks of the funds.
Immigrants are by nature, ambitious. That’s what drove them to get up off their asses and come here in the first place. This ambition and hard work helps the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that immigration reform will increase economic growth by more than 3% in 10 years and 5% in 20.
And they won’t tale jobs away from those who are already citizens. There aren’t a set number of jobs to divvy up. As an economy grows it creates more jobs as well as more consumers.
I don’t know about you, but my grandfathers came to this country with nothing but the desire to work. Both were tailors. Between them, in three generations, they produced; three lawyers, one judge, two doctors, one army colonel, four engineers, six masters degrees, one doctorate, four public officials and six teachers and that’s only a partial list. We need immigration reform and we need it now and done right.
Most successful legislation is the result of fair negotiation but when one side of the negotiating team is being held hostage by a segment of its own party, a segment that either wants the negotiation to fail or that wants some egregious ransom for it to succeed then one ends up with a failed bill even if it passes. I say failed even if it passes because the bill will not clearly addresses the needs that brought it to the attention of those that have gotten behind it.
In the case of the immigration bill that has passed the Senate, the phony provision that will bury the bill is the one that is sponsored by two segments of the right. First it’s sponsored by the military industrial complex which sees more profits coming from the unnecessary technological increments that have been added to the border security segment of the bill when no additional border security is needed or wanted to keep the border secure.
This same part of the bill is heavily backed by that segment of the far right which wants the bill to fail. They know that the security add-ons are unnecessary and they hope to prove that fact to their fellow congressmen in order to have the bill voted down. Both groups want to destroy something that is good for the country as a whole in order to gain some personal goal. For the military/industrial complex it’s greed. Not satisfied with being super rich they want to be gamma rich. For the other parts of the far right opponents of the bill it is in some cases bigotry, the inevitable threat of people who aren’t us; someone other then a white majority gaining power. For another part of that same Tea Party segment it is simply stopping anything that Obama backs, regardless of its worth. All of the aforementioned goals, those of the military/industrial complex, the bigots or the Tea Party are in direct contravention of a democratic state. All are bad for the country in general and all are traitorous.
This, in the common vernacular is called sabotage. It’s not the kind of sabotage that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are accused of. It’s the real kind.