Need to Know
June 11, 2013
Immigration debates: Republicans urge securing the border before legalization
Posted by Staff

The Daily Caller:

The full Senate body begins deliberations Tuesday on the immigration reform bill, and will cast its first votes on the highly charged issue later in the day.

The bill, crafted by the bipartisan Gang of Eight – Sens. John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Marco Rubio, Bill Bennett, Jeff Flake, Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham – has spent the past few weeks in the Judiciary Committee, where several amendments have been added to it.

The two votes that the Senate will take on Tuesday afternoon are purely procedural: on whether or not to move forward with debate on the bill.
06/11/13 9:48 AM

The National ID Act is buried in that bill, along with backdoor gun legislation and registration.

The Chicago Style Gang of Eight.... names we know well.... are chomping at the bit to get this through congress because it contains all the bills that have failed to pass the house and senate before in it.

It's like putting a bill to take grandmas healthcare away hidden in a bill supporting child health... a trick we know well.... (since they don't read the bills before they vote on them anymore) they just think they are voting for a child health program.

Enough is Enough...term limits!

No way Hussein will secure any border.
That would screw with their voter base.

Border? We ain't got no stinkin border.

Why not pass it? I mean amnesty worked SO well to keep illegals out when Reagan passed it, it will work again.

What is the point of immigration reform if the USA's southern border remains as porous as it currently is?

Globe Columnist May 12, 2013
Boston

Article Comments ---- Contrary to popular mythology, the federal government has taken border security so seriously that by now it spends more than $18 billion a year on border and immigration enforcement — 15 times what it was spending at the time the 1986 law was enacted.


Save In the clamor over immigration, the demand for more border security has been unrelenting. Immigration restrictionists have dug in their heels, insisting that stronger border controls must come before any other change. The Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight, bowing to political reality, is proposing an immigration overhaul that creates a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants living in the United States, but makes it contingent on a series of border-focused security “triggers.”
The bill they introduced last month is styled the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013” — the order of those terms is not random — yet a majority of Americans doubts the government would actually secure the border if the law is passed. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, one of the bill’s sponsors, publicly invited critics to suggest ways the security triggers could be made even tougher.

Immigration hard-liners are determined to prevent a repeat of 1986, the year President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark immigration law offering amnesty — it wasn’t a fighting word then — to about 2.7 million illegal immigrants. Yet the massive border strengthening called for in the law never materialized, critics say. So they’ve learned their lesson: border security first.

But suppose that in the years since then we had undertaken a massive effort to secure the Mexican border? What if, instead of largely ignoring the rising pressure to crack down on migrants entering the country illegally, Congress and the president had responded to it to with a will?
There is no need to imagine. They did.
An impenetrable, airtight Berlin Wall of a border is not a sensible goal.

Contrary to popular mythology, the federal government has taken border security so seriously that by now it spends more than $18 billion a year on border and immigration enforcement — 15 times what it was spending at the time the 1986 law was enacted. Washington now puts more money into immigration control than into all other federal criminal law-enforcement agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the US Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — combined.

The US Border Patrol has been dramatically built up, with the number of agents at the border having doubled over the past decade alone to more than 21,000. In addition to “boots on the ground,” America’s border is now being patrolled with radar stations, surveillance cameras, nearly 700 miles of steel fencing, and even Predator drones.

With our southern border quasi-militarized in this manner, the number of aliens illegally crossing into the United States has plummeted. From a high of 1.6 million in 2000, Border Patrol apprehensions are now at one-fifth that level, the lowest rate since the 1970s.

For all the complaints about insufficient enforcement, the feds are now more pitiless about prosecuting immigration violators than ever before — today a majority of all federal criminal prosecutions are immigration-related. And illegal immigrants and criminals have been deported with such growing aggressiveness in recent years that during President Obama’s first term, a record 1.5 million deportations were carried out.

This is not a description of some alternative reality in which border security had been taken more seriously. It’s a description of how seriously immigration and border enforcement have been taken in recent decades. From the Predator drones to the record-high deportations to the vast increase in Border Patrol agents, the last thing Washington can be accused of is ignoring the ferocious public pressure to secure the border.

Though you would never know it from all the hyperventilating and ginned-up outrage, net migration across the southern US border has now fallen to zero — the number of Mexicans entering is now matched (or even exceeded) by the number leaving.

Border security, of course, is a perfectly sensible goal. An impenetrable, airtight Berlin Wall of a border is not. Mexico and the United States are democratic friends and indispensable economic partners, deeply linked by ties of family, history, and trade. As Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the US-Mexico border is legally crossed daily by more than $1 billion worth of goods, 13,000 trucks, 1,000 railroad cars, and 400,000 people. It is mad to imagine that such a busy and important frontier could be sealed so hermetically that no one without legal papers can ever get across. It is even madder to insist that intelligent immigration reforms should be held hostage to such an irrational goal.

Jeff Jacoby at jacoby@globe.com.

I would go another step.
I would raid all known and suspected businesses that use Illegal workers.
Deport the Illegals and fine hell out of the companies.
Then, I'd order SURPRISE inspections of those companies for a few years.

But then, that is just a dream. We all know they are the special interests that line the pockets of Barry and our Reps.

I have nothing against someone who works hard to support a family.... many of the illegals do, even working jobs most Americans feel are "below" their class.

These people I have no quarrel with....

Stop all welfare, gov't bennies and handouts to anyone NOT documented.... problem solved!

This would do a lot more than any immigration policy the idiots in DC could come up with..... but it would reduce their voter base for sure!

This is the land of the free..... Not the "Freeloader"!

The only good illegals do is make that corporation richer.

We already have a work permit program for getting foreign workers to do those alleged jobs Americans won't do.

That's exactly the point!
Immigration Reform is just another political illusion!
Political Theatre brought to you by Congress!

Those soabs thought that we wouldn't see through their charade but wrong sirs & madams wrong!

yeah,it is so smart to forbid Local Law-enforcement to enforce Federal Immigration Laws!