Like illegal aliens, who saw how they were allowed to stay anyway, will bother to comply with an "earned path to citizenship"? Especially when ACORN and other liberal groups will register them to vote anyway, and when bilingualism allows them not to learn English anyway, and when President Obama will allow the "unscrupulous employers" he talks about to get away with hiring them anyway?
And if they don't comply and don't earn their path, what then? Is any advocate of 'legalization' suggesting jail or deportation? Ineligibility for benefits and educational opportunities? A fine for not paying the fine? A sternly worded letter? What incentive is there for current criminals to take this magical yellow brick road of legalization? We've already been told that any sort of incarceration and then deportation is inhumane. And we've been told that enforcement of existing laws is impossible. But if this new, new monstrosity is passed, magically this will be enforceable?Drew M. at AOSHQ nails it:
Obama just said something to the effect of 'illegal immigration makes a mockery of those going through the legal process'. Um, so the answer is to jump the illegals ahead of those playing by the rules? I guess my pants aren't sufficiently creased to understand that thinking.I can only hope that this is Obama's "Malaise" speech, revealing the inept policies and empty rhetoric of this Administration. It certainly abounds with enough Obamunist Straw Men.
Remember when Obama was considered a great orator? Why was that again?
My God, this is a speech filled with warmed over ideas, straw-men and catchphrases. At least it's being delivered in a low energy, stumbling manner.
He says we're missing out on more Einsteins with our current laws. Yeah, that's what we're getting on the southern border. Millions of Alberto Einsteins. Of course, the liberal dupes will call the previous statement "hate speech". Like I am supposed to pretend that at this very minute, a truckload of people, each carrying a knife and a couple pounds of cocaine, are *not* making their way somewhere across the Mexican border.
I suppose he could be talking about the H-1B indentured servants for the tech industries. These are skilled and far better than illiterates (often in Spanish, let alone English) from south of the border.
However, what is happening in technology industries is the upper-class and white-collar version of what is happening in construction and agribusiness. In the tech field, the discouraged mostly white middle class workers have their potential wages bid down by H-1B's and so they leave technology and go work in accounting, finance, business, or now, given the liberal expansion, governmental bureaucracy. New immigrants from Asia, not culturally fluent in Americanisms or well spoken in English, can't follow them there.
In construction, manufacturing and agribusiness, the discouraged mostly black lower class workers have their potential wages bid down by illegals and so they leave that work and head off to welfare and drug dealing.
"Crime along the border is down", the Obamunist says. "It's more secure today than 20 years ago." Wow, news to those of us who live in Cali, let alone Arizona. All that was missing after that statement was a sitcom audience laugh track.
"Illegal immigration makes a mockery of those going through the legal process." Yes it does--and the answer is to make a further mockery of the legal process???
And then he brings up Straw Woman Emma Lazarus. Let us paraphrase it for the 21st century liberals:
Give me your criminals, your pushers, your huddled slavers yearning to run brothels, the wretched refuse of your failed state. I'll give them welfare checks!In the absence of sensible border controls, that's exactly what we will be getting.
And, speaking of Emma Lazarus, let's remember what Ellis Island -- the Temple of the Immigrant -- really was. It was a processing center, holding facility, temporary jail, and quarantine. If you didn't qualify, you got sent home. Your name was processed through a bureaucrat who only spoke English. If you had any number of diseases, you were locked up until they could either send you home, you died, or you were no longer communicable. Ditto for Angel Island here on the West Coast.
And the biggest straw man of all -- "doing the jobs we won't"! The Obamunist actually has a self-fulfilling point here. If you go to Oak Park or Del Paso Heights around Sacramento here, or any other California ghetto for that matter, and offer the able-bodied high-school dropouts minimum wage plus room, board, and transportation to and from the farms and fruit orchards of "Apple Hill", let alone the orange groves in the San Joaquin Valley for the season, away from the drive by shootings and the violence, they're going to sneer at you. They already get room, board, and some spending money (as well as any drug money they can hustle) for sitting around with their friends and family. They're making a rational economic decision. And you can thank the very same Barack Obama and his fellow travelers for that.
The problem I have with those who spout off about "jobs spoiled Americans won't do" is that when they say that, they are sneering at those of us who *have* worked to get skills and/or education to do more than pick fruit. If they really *believed* that rhetoric, they would be changing welfare benefits and shaming the ghetto underclass so that their rational economic decision is not to sit around the ghetto getting high all day.
(And of course, it's called "racist" to ask able bodied African American Oak Park dwellers to move a short drive out of town to pick fruit, but it's somehow not racist to expect illegally-entrant Mexicans to move a thousand miles or more to pick said fruit).
With the liberals here, the game is "heads they win, tails we lose". They carp about the need for "a living wage", and then they import a massive underclass to drive the wages down. And to vote for more liberal Democrats.
