The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, June 15, 2007
Fool Me Once: Border Protection and the Cynicism of the American People
Read the whole thing; but the bottom line is: even voices of moderation such as Peggy Noonan understand that this national imperative--which can only be seen as common sense and as something that ought to be a priority for any self-respecting nation-state--is not being seen as such by our elected leaders. The President and Senate Leadership seems to be completely tone-deaf to the real pulse of the people on this, despite the huge outcry over the Senate's initial attempt to vote on this bill, and despite the overwhelming poll numbers against the bill.A little love would go a long way right now. We should stop putting newcomers in constant jeopardy by blithely importing ever-newer immigrants who'll work for ever lower wages. The ones here will never get a sure foot on the next rung that way.
We should close the border, pause, absorb what we have, and set ourselves to "patriating" the newcomers who are here. The young of AmeriCorps might help teach them English. Those reaching retirement age, who happen to be the last people in America who were taught and know American history, could help them learn the story of our country. We could, as a nation, set our minds to this.
We shouldn't be disheartened. So much good could be done once a Great Pause begins, once the alarm is abated.
What will we do about the 12 million here? Nothing radical. We're not really a radical people, Americans.
Having no borders--that's radical.
Saying, to the American people, in essence, Back my big bill or I will not close the borders, is radical.
Insisting on "all or nothing at all" is radical.
Leaving your country wide open in the age of terror is radical.
But America isn't radical. If its leaders only knew! Our leaders are in need not only of wisdom but of faith. And, as always, love, as opposed to mere sentiment, and vanity, and pride.
As much respect as I have for what President Bush has done to take the offensive in this War against Global Islamism--he truly seems to have a blind spot for how our National Security at home is jeapordized by our open and porous borders; and by his lassiez faire, "PC" attitude to enforcing existing Immigration Laws. In fact, we have apparently lost the political will to hunt for people who have already been ordered deported. Also, after promising over 300 miles of Border fence in last year's bill that the President signed, only a few miles of that fence have been built--and the new bill cuts the target by more than half.
These things do not sit well with the electorate. Rich Lowry describes well the cynicism that this has caused (emphasis mine) :
Lowry really nails it about the mistrust of the American people--and for me it is terribly disappointing, having been a supporter of the George W. Bush since he first ran for Governor of Texas. I have had an enormously difficult time reconciling myself to the President's support of this clearly flawed law, which is heavy on forgiveness and even lighter on enforcement than the laws we already have on the books.In five years, we built the Hoover Dam. From 1931 to 1936, the Colorado River was diverted with tunnels blasted into the Black Canyon walls, a town was built to house a small army of workers laboring in the desert, and 3 1/4 million cubic yards of concrete were poured into a dam reaching 726 1/2 feet high - two years ahead of schedule.
It's hard to look back at this monumental effort without a feeling of envy. The dam was completed on the backs of desperate men during the Great Depression, but from this remove, it looks like an apotheosis of the can-do spirit. Who believes we could do something similar today, that political bickering, governmental bungling, Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, lawsuits and environmental objections wouldn't make such a project all but impossible?
In the 1930s, the Empire State Building was built in 410 days; more than five years after 9/11, the World Trade Center site still features a gaping hole. It might be the fate of President Bush to be remembered as the emblem of an Age of Cynicism, when - despite many encouraging economic and social indicators - we experienced a deep public funk, driven by the feeling that government couldn't be trusted to do anything, at least not well.
This is the spirit that more than anything else brought down (for now) the Senate's Grand Compromise on immigration. It wasn't Bush's declining clout or raging xenophobia so much as the collective grass-roots reply to the White House's detailed explications of the enforcement provisions in the bill: "We simply don't believe you."
His administration had made no appreciable attempt to enforce immigration laws until recently. A government can't ignore its own laws without creating deep suspicions about its motives. Then, there was the question of capability. At the same time the administration was maintaining it could process at least 12 million illegal immigrants into a complex path to citizenship, it couldn't even manage to issue passports in a timely manner when new regulations passed in 2004 came into effect.
The administration is paying a price for its serial abuse of the word "must." Bush often has said that a given country "must" relinquish its nuclear program or free a dissident or forswear test-firing a missile, with little in the way of consequence when his demand is ignored. So when his administration says, under the immigration deal, an immigrant or an employer "must" do something, no one believes that verb represents anything more than wishfulness.
And--still--there are no guarantees the new laws would be enforced, any more than the existing laws have (not) been. We've seen this movie before--during the 1986 Comprehensive Reform we were promised that Amnesty would also come with strict enforcement. It didn't. Fool me once, shame on me...
So look at us now, in a post-9/11 world: considering what happened on that day--and the lessons we should have learned (e.g. 4 of the 19 hijackers were in the country illegally)--still the most powerful and industrious nation on Earth won't expend the effort necessary to close and protect its our own borders. This is so unacceptable on so many levels that it defies the imagination. Apparently it will take a mushroom cloud over New York, Washington, or Los Angeles to get the point across; and of course that will be too late: for our economy and for the world economy. Not to mention those who would perish in such a holocaust.
I have heard it asked often over the last several weeks, but I have yet to see anyone on the "for" side of 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform' answer this one question: if we aren't enforcing the existing Immigration laws now--if we can't protect our borders NOW, why should we believe that the same bureaucrats will be able or willing to enforce even more complex Immigration laws in the future? If we can't trust the laws already on the books, how can we trust any future law? Is it too much to ask of our leadership to prove to us that you meant it last time, before asking us to spend $2.5 Trillion on social programs for this new group of Amnesty-recipients?
When all is said and done, I think that history will view this attempt to snow the American people to be a black mark on an otherwise valiant Presidency. But that has been its fatal flaw: this Administration has always seen its problem as an inability to convey the elites' mission to We the People, when its real problem has been in communicating OUR priorities to the elites. The President is serving the wrong masters: the media and the elites didn't put him there, WE did.
President Bush may have been right about the War against Islamic Jihadism being the War of our Lifetimes; but he is wrong if he thinks we are going to win that war if we can't protect the homeland--and that protection begins by protecting our Borders. This is not trivial; this is a mistake that will be catastrophic down the road if we don't stand up for our country now.
Meanwhile, in the ivory towers of the US Senate, the treachery continues; it has been officially announced that the bill is back...:
Once again, we must marshall our resources and we must defeat this Immigration Bill. Call your Senators now. And call your Congressman while you are at it. It's only the future of the Republican Party--and perhaps the Republic itself--which is at stake.... despite the fact that the conservative leaders of the anti-amnesty movement are refusing to cooperate, and won't give Mitch McConnell a list of amendments that they want considered. My source tells me that the reason for this is that the game has now been rigged. McConnell is essentially promising to bring the amendments up in exchange for cloture votes, but he's publicly saying that they will strip any problematic amendments out in committee.
In other words, if the bill gets through the Senate and the House, the Democrats and the open borders Republicans will work together when the bills have to be reconciled in committee to strip out any amendments that the "grand bargainers" don't like. Therefore, at this point, it doesn't matter what amendments pass, because any tough enforcement provisions that slip through will be rendered toothless when the bills are reconciled.
My source also noted that the cloture vote to end debate will be the real" vote on the bill because if debate is closed off, the bill is sure to pass. Then, what will happen is that the votes for the bill will be counted, and a few Senators who are afraid that their election prospects will be jeopardized by a "yes" vote, will be allowed to vote against the bill. This enables those Senators to tell their constituents that they voted against the bill, but it will still allow them to collect campaign contributions from lobbyists who have a better understanding of how things work, and know that the bill couldn't have been passed without their support. Put another way, they get to reap the rewards of supporting amnesty while telling the voters in their home states that they opposed the bill.
E Pluribus Unum.
Labels: Border Protection, Homeland Security, Illegal Immigration, President Bush
