Rather than enforcing our current laws, and for purposes of political expediency, we are moving toward another vast expansion of federal government monitoring and information collection.
Look at what we are going to have to do in order to not hold people who came here illegally accountable for their unlawful actions (from the Framework announced today). Some of these things are not new, just “improved” variations of monitoring the population, including more rigorous checks not only of who enters, but who exits, and also who is working where. At least no one is yet proposing exit visas in addition to entry visas.
Remember, in order to collect information on illegals, the government needs also to collect information on legals. This all may be “necessary,” but at least recognize what illegal immigration and its “reform” is costing us in terms of our personal privacy.
Increasingly we are becoming a nation monitored and watched at every level and in every place, from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam:
Additionally, our legislation will increase the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and surveillance equipment, improve radio interoperability and increase the number of agents at and between ports of entry. The purpose is to substantially lower the number of successful illegal border crossings while continuing to facilitate commerce.
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Our legislation will require the completion of an entry-exit system that tracks whether all persons entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.
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Our proposal will create an effective employment verification system which prevents identity theft and ends the hiring of future unauthorized workers. We believe requiring prospective workers to demonstrate both legal status and identity, through non-forgeable electronic means prior to obtaining employment, is essential to an employee verification system; and,
The employee verification system in our proposal will be crafted with procedural safeguards to protect American workers, prevent identity theft, and provide due process protections.
I think I’ve seen this movie before:
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Comments
Careful, now, or you will start to sound like Ron Paul or Rand. Which, by the way, I think is an excellent thing. 🙂
I’ve been making the same point about E-Verification – probably the most innocent sounding of these monitoring measures – for years.
It inserts the Federal Government into a real-time monitoring step in the screening and hiring decision.
It seems innocuous enough today.
But once that pathway is established, so much more will be piled on in the future. I do not want the Federal Government between me and adding an employee.
I will hire less, guaranteed. And I’m in a white collar field that probably has zero issues with ‘illegals’ hiring.
I just don’t want to participate in such a system, or such a world. And I think Ron Paul’s comments about a wall being used to keep people in vs. out feels a little less crazy every year.
So long as potential terrorist roam the world by the 10,000s, all of Mexico’s violence threatens to spill over, and we have an entitlement state growing by leaps and bounds, we cannot have an open border.
But fundamentally, at heart, I am an open borderist (if that’s a phrase). Not the radical socialist kind.
The individual liberty preserving, competition among governments kind.
Give it 40 years, and our socialist brethren would like to have an army of government drones watching the populace, which they would also like to be a bunch of government drones.
In four years, we will be more like France …
“There is a state but it is a totally bankrupt state,” [French Labour Minister] Mr Sapin said.
Our choice is to either secure the border or to secure the society. Securing the border makes unnecessary the intrusive activities you mention. So of course the choice is to clamp down on freedom.
I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the federal government is simply so big that the only, ONLY project of conservatives that will work is to elect whichever candidate that will reduce it-repeal, defund and starve the beast. The rest is window dressing.
Forget governing. The goal needs to be reduction in all areas of the federal government except defense until the states have assumed control of about 80% of what the feds now do. Only then will the Republic become manageable again.
I’m considered extreme on border security and vilified over it.
oh well.
secure it, kill people who try to cross it.
protect it as well as you would protect a politician.
comme positatus does not apply on federal (land) borders when aiming outwards.
make the dept of defense defend us.
not protect another countries borders better than ours are protected.
hey … unbelievable … i found my clone!
lol careful, associating with me makes some sort of phobic somehow 🙂
As if the problems of immigration weren’t difficult enough, our Dear Leader has put his mark on the debate by demanding that “same-sex couples” be included in his “Final Solution.”
I worked in immigration for a lawyer who once represented a Mexican man who said he was looking for asylum because he’s gay. Perhaps she was a bad judge of character because she really did believe him, and empathized with him and won the case for him. A few years down the road she saw him at a party. He was married (to a woman, that was before gays started marrying each other) and pretended not to know her.
I thought you were dead.
We would be in a much better position to achieve immigration reform if the Obama Administration had spent that last four years enforcing federal law rather than dismantling it. Brave immigration agents have been left with no recourse but to sue their own Department head, simply so that they—like any other law officers—will be allowed to do their jobs. Just last Friday a federal judge made an important preliminary ruling in their favor. The ICE union also held their own agency head, John Morton, in no confidence with a unanimous vote. The first task for every media agency in the country ought to be to study this lawsuit, to listen to the long-documented complaints of ICE agents, and to review the record of stymied attempts at congressional oversight of DHS.
McCain: DHS Secretary to have final word on border security
OMG
I think that this is solving a problem that’s going away anyways: Mexican birthrates have been down for last couple of decades, our economy is never going to be able to bounce-back as more and more regulations are added. So the illegals (and legals) here will leave and go find better jobs elsewhere.
Besides: can you name a country that was ever able to actually, truly, “secure their borders”? The Soviets and Nazis and Mao perhaps pulled it off – but is that level of control really what you want? And it’s not like millions of people *wanted* to move to those countries anyways.
I suspect the cost of all of this new bureaucracy will be more than whatever the illegals cost in taxes.
In a word: the cure is worse than the disease, and the disease was going away anyways.
Si, Juan Pedro. Com ober now, caus senor Bari and hees stupi yanquis gibes mor botes. Tha wa hees el preisedente for lif.
esto está muy bien
I wish the libs would explain to me how this won’t cost us billions/trillions of dollars. If illegal aliens are taking the jobs Americans do not want, that implies low paying jobs. Low paying jobs mean they pay little in taxes – they might even avoid deductions/credits to avoid discovery. If they become citizens, they are then entitled to all the deductions/credits on their taxes. Since we’re talking low paying jobs, they will most likely then pay no taxes at all and get more money back than they paid in. So, who pays for all that?
And that is not even counting the extra burden of 0bamacare…
The “framework” says that “illegals” presently in the US could get a visa, which wouldn’t allow them access to welfare services, until some lamebrain federal judge (most likely in the Ninth Circuit) says otherwise.
I really don’t care about the costs/jobs/etc of the whole illegal alien (they are NOT immigrants) issue.
its a slap in the face to every vet or immigrant who spent the time and funds to do it legally.
this countries sliding situational ethics are killing us.
I have a big problem with government invading my privacy.
I also have a big problem with illegals not identifying with and embracing our stated Constitution and our history.
If illegals are coming here because the rest of the world sucks then maybe the rest of the world should do their “fair share” and stop sucking. The Obama Claus bill is coming due.
America is slipping out of sight. We accept this fact, or we fight to get it back. We FIGHT to get it back. Nothing less will do. Hear that, Paul Ryan? “Prudence” won’t do the job. It won’t get it back.
Professor WJ. Not that you must post, but are you OK?
Jus’ askin’..
Of course, now that I’ve shot my fingers off..voila, a new post.
Liberals don’t like keeping aliens from crossing the border, they’d rather control the population.
Liberals don’t like putting criminals in prisons, they’d rather control the population.
Am I sensing a pattern here?
It’s an instance of group rights infringing on individual rights. We don’t want to look for terrorists at the airports because that would be anti-Arab, so we subject everyone to highly invasive and time-consuming procedures. Same idea.
Thank gawd that I have a terrific new senator and a representative who have their heads screwed on straight, Ted Cruz and Lamar Smith.
Both are categorically against ANY form of amnesty and are demanding enforcement now.
Meanwhile, the anointed one is undermining even his political base in the Congress. Great huh?
as a former state’s attorney in cornfield hell (that would be Illinois outside the corrupt north) I cant understand how we can reward lawbreakers. If we have to be “compassionate” and not break up the illegal families, would it not be best to say that if you committed a felony by coming here illegally you can NEVER be a citizen, but you can gain permanent residence. That would not reward acknowledged criminals. but still allow the reality of their situation and residence to be accommodated. Which would be compassionate without rewarding lawbreaking, and impose an real penalty for their actions
Always suspicious when somebody plays the sympathy card (overdone kindness or compassion). It’s too easy a ploy to make the other side feel guilty. And since that overweights the issue with emotion it’s harder to be rational and clear and determine a right or wrong. There’s no question an illegal committed a wrong. If this country puts any pride in its judicial system these criminals should pay for their crime. Until then no citizenship and no entitlements.
But if they want to shop while they’re here – hell we can use some more cash in the drawer. Love those spenders. Keeps the economy growing. Better they’re spending here than in Mexico. Barry’s got that right – alien economics – there’s a good citizen!