Tag Archives: Immigration Reform

Obama Deportation Record

ImmigrationPresident Obama Deporting Record Number Of Aliens

The current administration likes to point out that they are strong on immigration enforcement:

Immigration officials announced last week that President Obama has deported more than 1.9 million people since first taking office, more than any other previous administration.

Sounds tough, right?  Nearly 2,000,000 people “gone”.  More than even Bush.

True?

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Immigration Policy Hospital Style

ImmigrationSo I’m torn.  I think that America should open her doors to anyone that wants to come here – terrorists and wanted criminals excepted.  However, that doesn’t mean that I’m signing up for paying for medical bills:

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Days after they were badly hurt in a car accident, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana lay unconscious in an Iowa hospital while the American health care system weighed what to do with the two immigrants from Mexico.

The men had health insurance from jobs at one of the nation’s largest pork producers. But neither had legal permission to live in the U.S., nor was it clear whether their insurance would pay for the long-term rehabilitation they needed.

So Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines took matters into its own hands: After consulting with the patients’ families, it quietly loaded the two comatose men onto a private jet that flew them back to Mexico, effectively deporting them without consulting any court or federal agency.

When the men awoke, they were more than 1,800 miles away in a hospital in Veracruz, on the Mexican Gulf Coast.

I have no grand illusion that clouds my judgement when it comes to medical care.  You cannot compel me to contribute to your care without my consent.  However, that doesn’t mean we can just fly these people back to where they came from.

Common Sense Or Tyranny?

Big Brother

Big government folks, people from gun control guys to vote control guys, should appreciate the idea of a biometric database.  The libertarian in me isn’t sure sure about this idea:

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

The ramifications are pretty scary.  How far are we willing to go for the sake of security?

Immigration: Of Things Illegal And Legal

Let’s be honest here; America is a nation OF immigrants.  Not only that, but the greatness of our nation is in large part the product of the greatness of those immigrants.  This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, surprising.  After all, it is the precise individual who is willing to risk everything to come to an unknown land in order to build a better life for himself that creates the very greatness we’re discussing.

With that said I’ve been baffled by the resistance republicans have to immigrants and immigration reform.  Baffled for two reasons:

  1. It is the leftist that is the statist.  It’s not the lovers of Liberty that want to empower the state to dictate the whos, the whys and the whens of an otherwise free people to decide where they wanna live and work.  Building a state that controls such thing is normally the domain of the left, of the democrat; of the statist.  It distresses me that the republicans have abandoned a principle based in Liberty like this.
  2. The Latino population is not one that naturally is liberal.  The Latino is very conservative.  They are very religious, value a strong family and embrace personal responsibility in the form of a massive work ethic that not only supports the immediate family but often the extended family.  Even if that family is in another country.  By alienating the Latino, the republicans are walking away from a natural base.  And a base that is only going to grow.

All of which makes what Obama did today distressing:

(Reuters) – About 800,000 young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children could be spared deportation under new immigration rules announced by President Barack Obama on Friday …

I’m not distressed that Obama made bad policy here, he didn’t.  Allowing immigrants who wanna live and work here the legal opportunity is absolutely the right thing.  And for this, I am in rare but enthusiastic support of the President.  Rather I’m distressed because the republicans have so utterly failed in the whole immigration debate.

This decision will garner support from the Latino vote.  And to be sure, those folks won’t suddenly turn into died in the wool leftists.  But, BUT, we know that politics is a team sport and soon, not very long to be sure, as people begin to affiliate with a “tribe” they will become a member of that tribe and we’ll find it hard to convert them back to their natural support.

Congratulations to President Obama.  Here I think he did the right thing.  And the right lost a massive opportunity to do the right thing as well.