immigration – Page 3

A look ahead: 2014 on the national front

This will be, by far, the trickiest of these columns I’ve taken the last three days to write. There are so many unknowns that even the “known unknowns” pale in comparison. But as the conservative, pro-liberty movement stands currently there are a number of items for which we can reasonably be certain 2014 will bring some kind of resolution.

First and foremost among them is that the goalposts will continue to be moved for Obamacare. As originally envisioned, we would all begin feeling its full effects tomorrow, but self-imposed – and I mean self-imposed, because few of these changes went through the legislative branch – changes have pushed back the deadline for many later into 2014 or even 2015. At this point, the strategy seems to be that everything bad about Obamacare gets blamed on Republicans who were really pretty powerless to stop its enactment in the first place – remember, Democrats had a clear majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate from January 2009 to February 2010 when Scott Brown was sworn in – and those few popular items are all due to the Affordable Care Act. That seems to be the preferred, focus group-tested name now because Obamacare has a bad connotation.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to be beyond the prospect of a government shutdown (really a slowdown) which Republicans were deathly afraid of for some reason. I don’t recall any hardships in October, do you? My life seemed to be unaffected. Nevertheless, the GOP seems to be afraid of its own shadow so when Democrats threaten to shut down the government the GOP snaps to. It’s sickening.

By that same token, the ball is supposedly being teed up for immigration reform (read: amnesty) over the summer, once GOP Senate incumbents know their filing deadline has passed. There’s no question a schism over immigration is developing in the Republican Party just as Obamacare is splintering off those Senate Democrats who face re-election in states Mitt Romney carried in 2012. I say primary ’em all with conservatives so that maybe the incumbents will be scared straight.

Those are some of the key domestic issues we’ll be facing. I can guess two or three which won’t come up as well.

We will see absolutely zero effort to reform entitlements, whether Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. This will be another year they hurtle toward insolvency, probably going splat just in time for Generation X to reach retirement age in about 15 years. (That would be me – I’m on the cusp between Gen X and Boomer.)

Nor do I care how many articles of impeachment are drawn up: the House leadership doesn’t have the courage to pursue it, nor would they ever get the votes in the Senate to convict. They could find Barack Obama in bed with a dead girl, live boy, a bloody knife in his right hand and a signed confession in his left and the Democrats would swear the boy set him up and the girl stabbed herself thirteen times – in the back – and not convict him.

It doesn’t matter how poor the economy is, either. The government won’t dare stop priming the pump to the tune of a trillion dollars a year in debt, parceling out $80 billion or so of “quantitative easing” monthly. When the Dow and its record highs are the one factor of success apologists for Obama can point to, anything which maintains that facade will be continued despite the possibility of long-term inflationary catastrophe – again, probably in time for Generation X to retire.

Just as ineffective is our foreign policy, which has been a muddled mess as old friends are ignored and longtime enemies coddled. We may have an idea of what the hotspots may be, but events have a way of occurring at the most inopportune times and places for American interests.

All this points toward the midterm elections this coming November. While Democrats are talking up their chances of regaining the House, the odds are better that Republicans will instead take the Senate. The sixth year election in a President’s term is traditionally a bloodbath for his party, although the one exception over the last century was during the term of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton in 1998. At that time, though, the economy was in pretty good shape and the modest gains by the Democrats in the House weren’t enough to swing control back to them. (The Senate stayed in GOP hands, with no change in the 55-45 GOP majority.)

Looking briefly at the Maryland delegation, all indications are that all of our eight-person Congressional delegation will seek another term, although only Fifth District representative Steny Hoyer and Seventh District Congressman Elijah Cummings have filed so far. The most spirited race may be the Sixth District, where 2012 U.S. Senate candidate Dan Bongino is expected to take on freshman Democrat John Delaney.

But there’s still time left for the 113th Congress, which will have to deal with the mercurial Barack Obama for another year before we enter the home stretch of what seems like a couple decades of the Obama regime. There’s little doubt that conventional wisdom will be set on its head again and again over the next year, a real-life version of trying to predict the upsets we all know will occur during March Madness. It’s all about who comes out on top, but my bet is that it won’t be the American people.

McDonough: Middleton resolution ‘clueless’

The colorful Pat McDonough, who considered a run for Governor but instead will bid to retain his seat in the House of Delegates, is using his bully pulpit to blast a resolution to be introduced by Baltimore City Councilwoman Sharon Green Middleton.

McDonough’s staunch opposition to illegal immigration extends to a pledge to introduce a bill similar to Arizona’s SB1070 if re-elected to the General Assembly next year. In contrast, Middleton’s proposal codifies the City of Baltimore’s opposition to the law.

(continued on my Examiner.com page…)

Jobs that teens won’t do?

This item from the Center for Immigration Studies interested me. It’s a backgrounder called A Drought of Summer Jobs: Immigration and the Long-Term Decline in Employment Among U.S.-Born Teenagers.

While CIS has acquired a reputation as an immigrant-bashing organization, what I took from reading through the study wasn’t so much the immigration aspect (although it is significant) but the general decline in the number of teenagers working. Their theory is that older immigrants, who are at the requisite skill level for entry-level work but don’t have to work around schooling, extracurricular activities, and other pursuits, are taking these jobs in increasing numbers.

One conclusion of the study suggests that these teenagers are handicapped later in life by not getting work. By that they mean they don’t get the experience of being on time and adjusting to a work schedule, providing customer service, and other job-related skills they don’t teach in school. Obviously that’s true because, while schooling is good, there’s truly no substitute for the good old School of Hard Knocks. Just ask any manager or customer about the service in certain outlets and you may hear horror stories about this generation. (Then again, I’m sure if you asked my parents’ generation about their recollections of us starting out you would get many of the same complaints.)

I can’t see fault in CIS’s theories but I think there are other factors at work. One intriguing finding is that teenagers from lower-income families aren’t as likely to be working as those in the upper starta of income. Now you would think that poor teenagers would be helping out the family’s economic situation and perhaps that was so a generation or two ago, but apparently that’s not the case anymore.

Obviously I wasn’t here on the Shore a generation ago to see what the young population did during the summer; perhaps readers can help me out. As it stands now, there are a number of low- or semi-skilled positions available in the area which seem to be filled by nonnative workers – picking crabs, processing chickens, or other agriculture-related work was probably a stepping-stone job among the youths of an earlier time while my generation likely grew up with the rise of Ocean City from a sleepy seaside town to the regional resort it has become. Now those jobs in the agricultural, food service, hotel/motel, and amusement fields seemingly fall more and more to imported workers. Anymore you can’t walk in Ocean City without tripping over a worker here for the summer on a visa – even here in Salisbury a couple years back we had a charming young Slovakian lady who was the lifeguard at the apartment pool.

However, it seems from some anecdotal reports that the employment situation in Ocean City has changed a little bit – but it’s still not to the advantage of teenagers looking for work. They’re being bumped out by displaced older workers from other fields who are desperate to keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads.

So the CIS backgrounder isn’t necessarily surprising given what we know about the local situation, but it is worrisome. These days teens seem to have a lot of idle time on their hands; time which some fill with camps, classes, sports, or sitting in their living room playing video games. But too many who would like a job can’t get one, and that’s something which may affect their financial and employment status for the rest of their life.

Immigration sure to produce fireworks in General Assembly

Over the next week, Maryland’s contentious budget battles will have some competition in the acrimony department as foes of illegal immigration do battle with support groups like CASA de Maryland and the National Capital Immigrant Coalition.

At stake are bills dealing with the reporting requirements for detained criminal suspects and convicted prisoners already in the penal system related to their immigration status, broadening the scope of local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws similar to the 287(g) program already in use by Frederick County, an effort to codify into law that non-citizens aren’t permitted to be registered as part of so-called “motor voter” registration, and English-only laws for both Baltimore and Harford counties.

(continued at my Examiner.com site…)

Immigration: divisive issue

In the last few days – as if fending off TEA Partiers and worrying about how new GOP wunderkind Scott Brown will vote isn’t enough – observers see a rift in the Republican Party over immigration.

Two pieces have drawn my attention. One is an article by Peter Slevin in the Washington Post and the other comes through the Center for Immigration Studies as a Backgrounder by James G. Gimpel, who is a professor of government at the University of Maryland. Both look at immigration as an issue which could permanently relegate the GOP to minority status.

But the two pieces disagree on why. Slevin and the Post, no friend of conservative Republicans, blames the hardline stance of TEA Partiers who want the borders secured and illegal immigrants frogmarched out of the country. Conversely, the Gimpel piece simply notes that, “The decline (in GOP voting share) does not seem to be associated with the local Republican Party’s position on illegal immigration.” Instead, the Gimpel study seems to indicate this has more to do with socioeconomic status and the state of politics where newly-arrived immigrants seem to congregate, large urban areas.

I’ve noted before that at the current time it’s better to not lose the base the GOP has by being soft on illegal immigration than cater to a group who is more likely to vote with their meager pocketbooks and support all the government goodies they can get. It’s going to be just as much up to the Latinos to bring themselves out of the ghetto that Democratic policies have placed them in as it is the black population’s own job to get off of the plantation Democrats have placed them on. Those who have immigrated here legally have just as much – if not more – of a stake in stemming the illegal flow as native-born Americans do.

For over 200 years, history has shown that the best way to get ahead in America is to assimilate into its culture. Certainly we can celebrate our heritage (I sure like my Polish cuisine) but the route to success over time has been to emphasize the “American” part of the moniker much more heavily than the “Polish,” “Mexican,” or “African.” In years past, immigrants were eager to shed their old ways and Americanize their first-generation offspring – now we only Americanize them insofar as striving to have them born in the United States to become “anchor babies.”

If a nation is to survive for long, it must have clearly defined borders and be prepared to only allow in those it deems worthy of entry. While I know some of my associates in the political and blogging worlds believe totally in the idea of a free market which includes providing labor, that policy has to have limitations or it will lead to chaos.

Immigrants in our history came for opportunities, and these opportunities only came to those who worked hard and were willing to sacrifice their blood, sweat, and toil. Unfortunately, our system of entitlements has brought forth a different sort of immigrants, and while they remain a few bad apples in a bunch that is still willing to work hard for little financial gain, those bad apples sap the strength of the whole.

But while the TEA Partiers are falsely accused of having a strain of xenophobia, it’s worth pointing out that the Gimbel study shows that ideology trumps race at election time among a larger and larger share of the minority population. Regardless of what the Republican Party does to attract minorities, it would never be enough for liberal Democrats to give them credit for trying. Just as we see in the black population, voting against their self-interest is becoming a problem for Latinos as well, and the immigration issue is just a red herring to the real problem of victimization practiced by poverty pimps of all colors.

Blaming the man for holding you down is a universal language.

Does the GOP listen to a minority – or its base?

Longtime readers may know that some of my readers are on the opposite side of the immigration issue as I, and the other day one sent along a report attempting to convince me of dire consequences if the GOP doesn’t follow the Democrats as the party of amnesty. One of the findings of this report by America’s Voice is that Latinos distrust the GOP on immigration and switched over a four year period from being Bush voters to Obama voters. Then again, one needs to question the mindset of the group when the report is released in a press conference with:

The America’s Voice report “The Power of the Latino Vote” was released yesterday during a telephonic press conference with Eliseo Medina, Executive Vice President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Janet Murguía, President of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR); and Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice.

Undoubtedly, each of these groups has an interest in unfettered immigration, particularly the SEIU – you don’t think they’d love to organize these low-skill workers for the millions in union dues they can shift to the Democratic Party?

Given that backing, it’s no wonder they try to convince Republicans they have the wrong view; but in truth even if the GOP completely changed its position to advocate for amnesty they’d be better off attempting to woo voters in downtown San Francisco. In many respects the Latino population is like the black population and will likely languish in poverty the same way, just with poverty pimps who speak Spanish.

On the other hand, the base that the GOP counts on doesn’t want amnesty, and it’s a stance which appeals to those union households who were the backbone of the Reagan Democrats.

A Zogby poll conducted in November asked a cross-section of Americans their views on immigration with specific attention paid to business executives, union households, and small business owners. As documented by the Center for Immigration Studies, these groups overwhelmingly believe that amnesty is not the way to go.

Something tells me that a number of these people also comprise a goodly portion of TEA Party activists – the ones who stayed home on Election Day 2008 because they were disillusioned with a GOP candidate who was perceived as pro-amnesty in John McCain. Yet even the pro-amnesty side concedes that:

Last week, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) sent a political warning to his fellow Democrats: if immigration reform doesn’t pass, as promised, Latinos won’t vote.

Thus, the threat posed by the pro-amnesty side may be a hollow one, and I’d rather take my chances on not losing the votes of the TEA Party people who have been ready and raring to go to the polls by stopping amnesty than worry about Latino voters who may or may not show up – chances are that the heavily Latino districts would vote Democrat anyway just as heavily black districts do.

Do we need immigration reform? Yes, we do. But the first steps need to be making our border more secure and verifying that illegals aren’t getting the jobs Americans can do, along with reforming the visa system to help us root out scofflaws who overstay.

The question becomes whether we are a nation which sacrifices the rule of law for the almighty buck, and allowing those who cross illegally to become legal citizens without significant penalty flies in the face of those law-abiding immigrants who went about chasing the American Dream the right way. While Ronald Reagan was a great President, one of his biggest mistakes was agreeing to amnesty for millions of illegals in 1986 – it was the root of the immigration problem we have now.