The Weekly Punctilio: Immigration

This week’s Weekly Punctilio Award as the dopiest thing to apear in the Ft. Wayne, Journal Gazette, goes to Andrea Bates for this piece on immigration. Ms. Bates it seems would have one’s economic status as the only criteria for people who want to enter the US. As long as you happen to be poor and from a “third world” country, Ms. Bates would throw down the welcome mat.

I don’t know Ms. Bates but I’ll bet she’s an older woman who lives in a gated community. She probably has a nice yard maintained by a Hispanic crew for $25-$30 a week. She probably has a nice house that is cleaned once a week by a nice Hispanic lady for $20-$25 a week. She probably jetted down south of the border one winter, flying first or business class with her husband. She might have stayed in a nice hotel. Then one day, she strolled into town and noticed the poor children selling Chicklettes and beaded bracelets in the streets and was touched. So now she just wants to open the border, but not HER house of course. The only contact Ms. Bates would ever expect to have with these people is to tell them what needs to be cleaned.

But she’s got it bassackwards. We shouldn’t be promoting an unrestricted flow of poor, uneducated day laborers into the country to become a permanent underclass sympathetic to Democrat and socialist causes and who do “the work Americans won’t do.” We should be looking for educated, highly skilled workers to do the work Americans can’t do because our public schools and universities are more interested diversity and socialist propaganda than making sure Johnny can read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide.

THE defining domestic issue for the Democrat controlled congress in the next session will be immigration. Will the Democrats and President Bush succeed in their effort to establish an open border with Mexico and amnesty for the 15 million illegal aliens who are already here? Or can common sense Republicans and blue dogs stop the insanity that the president wants to foist on us? I don’t know.

But as surely as I’m sitting here touch typing, the 15 million illegal aliens will grow to 100 million then 150 million. See, what the politicians won’t tell us is that every one of the 15 million amnesty recipients will then be allowed to invite their extend families to America. These people will then be eligible for all the perks afforded any US citizen even though they will have paid little or nothing to support those programs. Already strained, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and other welfare programs will break under the weight of recipients who never paid into them.

Then what? At that point you have two options. You can either reduce benefits or raise taxes. Guess which direction Democrats will choose. All of Europe is currently riding this out of control socialist model off of a cliff. We’d better learn or we’re sure to follow. Republicans would be smart to get well right of the president on this issue for ’08.