Libertarian Party of Allen County, Indiana: Amnesty debacle is on the horizon

Friday, May 18, 2007

Amnesty debacle is on the horizon

I was driving to the Northwest Area Partnership meeting last night when the Sean Hannity show started. I generally turn the radio off whenever Sean comes on. I decided to listen today because of the Amnesty agreement and because I was only going to be in the car for another five minutes.

Sean Hannity made complete sense in the first five minutes of his show.

He blasted members of both The Republican and Democratic Parties for the following items:

1. The current "Comprehensive Reform Bill" was negotiated behind closed doors by a few Democrats and a few Republicans. It is another classic "secret negotiation."

2. The current "Comprehensive Reform Bill" has not been released to the public or even to members of the Senate yet.

It is impossible to disagree with Sean on either of the above points.

Both Parties should be embarrassed by these secret meetings; especially the Democrats. Many Democrats promised to "rule in a fair and open manner." This was a good campaign promise; however, they are trying to pass one of the largest and most sweeping changes to our immigration policy "in the dark of night."

The Republicans are doing their best to become a minority Party and stay a minority Party. I am going to make a rather bold prediction... I think that the Republican Party will split within 5 years if 12 million illegal aliens receive Amnesty. The Republican base will go crazy (and they should).

I am 100% against amnesty for illegal aliens. It is 100% wrong to reward people for breaking our laws.

Here is what I think our immigration policy should be:

1. We must secure our borders.
2. The Federal Government must enforce our existing laws and deport every illegal immigrant they locate.
3. State and Local Governments must be allowed to do enforce our existing laws and deport every illegal immigrant they locate if they choose to do this (I beleive in State's rights so I would not want the Federal Government to force the States to do this).
4. US Employers must be given a system so that they can verify that their employees are legal and they must be punished if they knowingly employ illegal aliens.
5. Once we have removed a majority of the illegal immigrants in our country then, and only then, we should DOUBLE legal immigration.

Mike Sylvester

15 comments:

Anonymous said...: Immigration is a weird subject for me. I don't have a very clear stance on either side.

I am fine with immigrants as long as they come here legally. I have no problem with that at all.

I do think our borders should be more secure, for a multitude of reasons.

When it comes to dealing with the illegal immigrants already living here I think it is impossible to realistically try to send them all back to where they came from. There are just too many and they have become such a large aspect of many parts of the country. I don't like the idea of just giving them a free pass, but I am not sure what would reaslly be the best way of delaing with them or making sure they compensate the United States for breaking the law as well as often not paying income taxes.; 18 May, 2007 13:57
Tim Zank said...: I think the argument that we can't possibly deport 12 million people is a hollow one.
You don't deport all 12 million in one fell swoop, you simply enforce the freaking law now and when you bust an alien, you ship them back.
If the border becomes secure, we use common sense and enforce the existing laws, within 5 years you'll have a majority of them deported/located/arrested.
All these ridiculous arguments and emotions are nonsense. It's not rocket science....it's all posturing for votes..; 18 May, 2007 17:33
Robert Enders said...: If you believe in states' rights, then California should be allowed to admit whoever they want.

Which I think would be a good compromise. Undocumented (not necesarily illegal) immigrants would go into California where they are welcome and would not go where they were not welcome. If they do not seem to create a problem in California, then perhaps Indiana could decide to admit more immigrants.; 18 May, 2007 18:02
Anonymous said...: When the discussion turns to illegal immigration, I always fondly remember the words of that wise sage, Representative Bono.

When asked to talk about illegal immigration, he once replied, "What's to talk about? It's illegal."; 19 May, 2007 22:46
Andrew Kaduk said...: I think amnesty would do wonders for snuffing out a few black markets, and it would take the wind out of the movement to make the INS some kind of platoon of "universal soldiers" who could shoot to kill, randomly stop hispanics to "check their papers," or whatever BS Gestapo stuff a lot of "white-pride" folks are harping on these days.

Hey, amnesty may seem like a reward for bad behavior, but at least the money (this IS a money issue, right?) would stop being funnelled out of the country (never to be seen again). If illegals were paying the taxes and bills that the rest of us have to pay, they wouldn't have a freakin' dime to send over the border para los abuelos.

I think our economy would actually get better if we let the current illegals grow some roots here (not the violent felons, of course).; 20 May, 2007 22:32
Robert Enders said...: Andy, you and I see eye to eye on this issue. Mike is more concerned about the rule of law more than anything else, which is a valid concern. But a large reason why Prohibition was repealed was because it was unenforcable. Should they have waited until every bootlegger was in prison before they repealed the law? No. Instead, they sent Al Capone to Alcatraz for tax evasion. And technically you still must pay taxes on income earned during illegal activities. We can let otherwise-innocent immigrants stay as long as they start filing 1040's and name who smuggled them in. The smugglers must pay income tax on their smuggling fees or face prison time.

All in all, I would rather have these immigrants PAYING taxes rather than hiring all sorts of personel and buying equipment to kick them out.

If they want to work for a living, great. If they are receiving welfare, then the state or federal government is very stupid to sent a check to someone who is here illegally. I have no problem with deporting lazy people.; 21 May, 2007 18:45
Tim Zank said...: Guess what fellas' you don't HAVE to hire all sorts of personnel and buy equipment to kick them out.

All you have to is let cops do their jobs and share info between agencies. When the local cop stops you, he runs a wants and warrants on you, right? Why in the F%*! can't the local cop ask you if you are a citizen??????

Cop stops guy for speeding, he has a fake license and 16 people stuck in a sedan and no one speaks english. (keep in mind if you are white and in indiana, the first thing would be a trip downtown for a seat belt violation right?)but I digress....

What would common sense dictate in this scenario?

Come on people, we don't need NEW laws, we need to use the old laws and COMMON SENSE not "sensitivity".

Build the freakin wall, enforce the laws from 1986 already enacted and vote out the Ted Kennedys and the John McCains of this country.; 21 May, 2007 19:33
Doug H 3rd Dist Rep LPIN said...: To All,

Tim is 100% correct on this one. I've said for a while that this whole idea of having to sweep the country is pure nonsense.

We need to enforce the immigration law as we encounter people who were breaking other crimes.

We do need to make it easier to become an American citizen. If someone qualifies it shouldn't take 10+ years to become a citizen as it does in some cases now.

We could also do much better by severely punishing business's that hire illegal immigrants. Mike is right to say that employers must have tools available to check citizenship. Once they are in place we need to squeeze the employers who continue to provide aid and comfort to criminals.

Respectfully,

Doug Horner; 22 May, 2007 01:05
Andrew Kaduk said...: "We could also do much better by severely punishing business's that hire illegal immigrants."

Sure, because it's so easy to start and run a business, we ought to regulate them some more. You know, because hiring able-bodied, willing-to-work adults should be a heavily punishable crime if any statutory infractions are made along the way.

Here are a few more ideas, just to get the discussion rolling a little better. I think these would be real winners!

1. Armed random checkpoints to validate peoples' "papers." Anyone not carrying "papers" may be detained, jailed and tried!

2. Warrantless midnight raids on any suspected "safe houses" for illegals. Just kick in the door or gas the place, the line 'em up for the meat wagon...since painting houses, landscaping and fruit-picking are all very dangerous illegal activities, and the fullest force available to law enforcement officers should be used to ensure that such activities be stopped! Each house suspected of harboring illegal immigrants should be treated as if they were housing methamphetamine manufacuring. Then, and only then will we be safeguarding our children from the Mexicans' evil plans to conquer us.

3. Start rounding up anyone with a Spanish accent and herd them into fenced areas where they can wait for officers to either verify their legal status or immediately deport them.

4. Finish building that wall! Nothing says "The land of the free and the home of the brave" quite like a 20' tall fence with gun turrets and razor wire. I know for sure that it makes me feel free and brave to think about building such a thing along our southern border. Then we can build one across the northern border too...those Canadians are shifty!

5. Once we kick them out, we can throw their landlords in jail for ever renting to them in the first place (they can be cellmates with the small business owners who hired the illegals), and use eminent domain to acquire all of their properties, bulldoze the buildings and build dorms for the border guards who man the gun turrets and clean the shredded carcasses from the razor coils.

Man, all of these options...we really should get started!

It all sounds so much easier and cheaper than letting the illegals that are here alread, actually earn their citizenship. That would be far more costly, and just wouldn't resonate with the undertones of "send me your poor..." quite like firing up the Gestapo and kicking their asses out.; 22 May, 2007 11:54
Tim Zank said...: Andrew, any chance there's a recent immigrant in your family?

That's a mighty fervent rant, bro!; 22 May, 2007 18:51
Andrew Kaduk said...: No, but my family's only been here for 104 years, and my great-grandfather came over on a boat by way of Ellis Island. He had a little less than $50 in his pocket and knew absolutely no English (granted, he spoke 3 other languages...which was a hell of a feat for an Eastern European peasant of 18 years old). The way I hear a lot of people talking about this issue pisses me off considerably, because if some of them had their way, they would have turned the late Andrew Kaduk around and sent him back to Eastern Europe before he ever set foot on the US mainland.

However, people back then weren't afraid of immigrants...because almost everybody either was an immigrant, or at very least was closely related to one.

Now, I don't know if anyone noticed or not...but just about every item I listed above is taken directly from the playbook of the Third Reich. Can anyone honestly say that we should to stoop to these types of tactics to fix a problem that was literally caused by our national apathy? Well, that's what it would take to accomplish this clean-sweep idea. To me, that sounds like we want to beat up on the wrong people. It's not the illegals' fault that they are illegal...it's a statutory dilemma that WE created and they exploited. We allowed our handlers to write bad, unenforcable law....and now we want to crucify immigrants who realized that the laws were bad and unenforcable. Uprooting otherwise law-abiding peoples' lives to satisfy the national thirst for control and "security" is a piss-poor plan. To deport 12 Million people would literally take Nazi-esque railcars filled with people as if they were cattle. Is that the America that we really want to be??? It's not the America that I want to be, that's for damn sure.; 22 May, 2007 22:24
Doug H 3rd Dist Rep LPIN said...: Mr. Kaduk,

It appears to me that you have overreacted to my comments. Perhaps I was not clear and specific, so I will attempt to clarify and determine the true nature of our disagreement (if there is one at all).

I am NOT against immigration. I support all people of this planet being free to live wherever they desire. However, I support them doing so legally. To act in an illegal manner is criminal. It does not mean that people who come to the USA are evil, malevolent, or malicious. However the lack of these traits does not alter the fact that they are breaking our immigration laws.

I fully support business especially the small business's that build all of our communities and in the long haul employ most of our workers.

Unfortunately, we both know there are employers that break laws every day. I see no reason to give leniency to the breaking of one law over another. All business's operate under certain rules and regulations. I do NOT agree with all of these rules BUT I do support their enforcement otherwise we would have anarchy. The laws I would not support should be reformed or simply eliminated on a case-by-case basis.

A legal immigrant has far less to fear from an unscrupulous employer while an illegal immigrant has everything to fear from the same unscrupulous employer. I would even go so far as to respectfully suggest that the illegal immigrant undermines the rights of all employee's (not intentionally so) by putting himself/herself in such a position.

Let me clarify: First, ANY employer can potentially abuse ANY employee. That is a given. However, the greater the education and knowledge of the employee results in the reduced likelyhood of abuse by an employer.

Consider the following example. A disbarred labor lawyer for the Teamsters Union and a highschool dropout both apply at the local Walmart. All things being equal I think we can both agree that Walmart would be rather less able to abuse the disbarred labor lawyer. (You may make a funny comment here but I believe the analogy has merit.)

Now compare two immigrants. The illegal immigrant when abused can go nowhere. Not because there is nowhere to go but rather because of self imposed weaknesses. The first weakness is fear of law enforcement and being deported and/or arrested. Whether he would be punished by LE or not is irrelevant to his own fear. His second weakness is a total lack of understanding of our legal system and his rights because he was never taught them. His fear and ignorance make him a vulnerable target to unscrupulous and unethical employers who have little to fear from him.

On the other hand the legal immigrant has absolutely no fear of LE so this is not a detriment. Also, a legal immigrant has been taught a basic level of our government and his own legal rights (even if this is nothing more than a basic understanding of our Constitution). The legal immigrant will also have some idea of our cultural heritage and the benefits that go along with it.

As long as there are people who come to our country illegally they undermine the ethical employers by allowing unethical employers to undermine the entire system. I do NOT claim that there is any malicious intent here on behalf of the illegal immigrant, but rather an unavoidable side effect nonetheless.

We also have to look at the time when your grandfather came here. 104 years ago there was NO Social Security, NO income tax, NO welfare, NO federal and/or state aid, NO AFDC. Simply put there was NO infrastructure supplied by the State at all (state in this case meaning federal, state, county, city govt). Thus if an immigrant came to this country (as my great-grandparents did) they determined their own fate whether good or ill and did not place any burden on an infrastructure because there wasn't any infrastructure at all.

In all of these cases above I am certain there were minor State benefits but I hope we can agree that they were too minimal to consider.

While I as a Libertarian disagree with many of these programs the fact is that we all (as a society and a collective) pay for them. They are inefficient by design and wasteful due to a lack of caring by government employees. However, as citizens of this community we all pay for these programs. When these programs are further burdened by the abuse of illegal immigrants this places a greater strain on the system and only acts to further hasten its (and our Nations) demise.

Please note that in my initial post I supported Tims idea. There is nothing abusive about this. Whenever LE stops someone for a minor crime they run a check for outstanding warrants. I suppose you could call this "checking our papers" already. Please clarify your outrage at simply checking if someone broke a Federal Immigration Law along with any other State or Local laws.

I also proposed and still support the punishment of business's that undermine our system. They make it difficult for law abiding business's to stay in operation and this in the long run hurts all of us.

I will end by repeating that I think we need to make it easier in many cases for people to immigrate legally to the United States. We are all blessed and enriched by a diversity of backgrounds, ideas, experiences and cultures.

Respectfully,

Douglas E Horner

PS - Have a safe and happy Memorial Day and don't forget to donate and shop at our Labor Day Sale! :); 24 May, 2007 02:02
Andrew Kaduk said...: Doug,

Just one quick thing...

You said:

104 years ago there was NO Social Security, NO income tax, NO welfare, NO federal and/or state aid, NO AFDC.

So does the fact that we have saddled ourselves with all of this unconstitutional horseshit somehow nullify the idea that the U.S. is supposed to be a refuge for everyone? Does it void the mission statement by which our great-grandparents started their new lives in this hemisphere?

There is a human cost to all of our bureaucracy...and we're staring it in the face every time immigration becomes part of our discourse. In my opinion, it is wiser to undo that which we have erroneously manufacured than to continue to try to find ways to make these foolishly contrived statutory aberrations "work."; 24 May, 2007 10:03
Doug H 3rd Dist Rep LPIN said...: Mr. Kaduk,

I think we are coming to a degree of consensus on at least some of these issues.

You pose the question: "So does the fact that we have saddled ourselves with all of this unconstitutional horseshit somehow nullify the idea that the U.S. is supposed to be a refuge for everyone?"

To this I answer: No. It does not nullify the idea that the US is supposed to be a refuge for everyone. I agree with this 100%.

"Does it void the mission statement by which our great-grandparents started their new lives in this hemisphere?"

To this I answer: No. It does NOT void our mission statement. I would go on to say that whether it voids it or not it cannot be ignored. I simply submit that it does greater damage to the fabric of our economy and, thus, our standard of living and way of life.

I also do think that when our grandparents came to America they came to "become Americans". They bought our nations ideals, our culture, our "way of life" as it were. Our principles were valued and absorbed and America also absorbed some of their's through cultural diffusion.

I agree that it would be wise to undo the stupid things that we have done. Right On Mr. Kaduk. But we cannot ignore those stupid things just because we don't like them.

Respectfully,

Doug Horner; 24 May, 2007 21:04
Anonymous said...: Andrew and Doug:

I googled "immigration laws 1903" and found some interesting info here:

http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/kade/adams/chap10.html

Andrew, it appears that your grandfather immigrated legally, and probably used two of those fifty dollars to pay the immigration tax! It also appears that he was not a criminal, mentally ill, epileptic or a contract worker. According to the laws at the time, if somebody didn't want him to come, they couldn't stop him.

I cannot figure out where you get the idea that the US is supposed to be refuge for everyone, the constitution specifically gives Congress the power to decide laws on naturalization, and the Congress has excluded classes of people since the early 1800s.; 24 May, 2007 21:28

Libertarian Party of Allen County, Indiana

Friday, May 18, 2007

Amnesty debacle is on the horizon

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Friday, May 18, 2007

Amnesty debacle is on the horizon

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