It’s easy to understand why Democrats have embraced amnesty for illegal aliens. Illegal aliens are mostly Hispanic and Hispanic voters lean heavily Democrat. Democrats look at a state like California which elected Ronald Reagan twice and see how flooding with Hispanic voters turned the state permanently Democratic. Their goal is to do that with the whole United States.
It’s harder to understand why any elected Republicans or Republican consultants would support this idea – well, if you ignore the fact that it’s driven almost entirely by large amounts of cash being moved from the pockets of businesses that want to profit from illegal labor to the pockets of the GOP Establishment. If you took that money out of the equation, there would be very few Republicans who back amnesty.
Because the people who are pocketing this money can’t just say, “Look, Mark Zuckerberg is kicking in the max to my campaign; so of course I’m backing amnesty,” they spend most of their time fighting straw men and trying to distract people. None of these guys, not John McCain, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham or Jeb Bush can answer the most basic questions anyone has about this. In fact, when you raise the most obvious questions that should be the first things anyone asks on the issue, immediately they start shouting “nativist, xenophobe,” falsely claiming that a fence won’t work and sneering, “What, you can deport every last person who broke the law? That’s IMPOSSIBLE!”
Yet, they never seem to answer the basic questions like….
1) How do Republicans continue to get elected if we make millions of illegal aliens into citizens who will vote heavily against us? Mitt Romney received 27% of the Hispanic vote and lost to Barack Obama by roughly 5 million votes. In other words, you’re probably padding the Democrat totals by 400,000+ potential votes for every million illegal aliens that become citizens. In fact, between illegal immigration and legal immigration, the Republican Party is literally bringing in the very people by the millions who will ensure that there is never another conservative President. Has there ever been another political party that has systematically and intentionally destroyed itself the way the Republican Party is doing on amnesty?
2) Why do you believe supporting amnesty will make Hispanic Americans vote for the GOP? There simply isn’t much evidence that support for amnesty is the key to the Hispanic vote. If it was, why wouldn’t Hispanic Americans ALREADY be backing the GOP after Reagan signed onto a “one time” amnesty? Furthermore, if you had to pick one guy as the “face of amnesty” in the Republican Party, it would probably be John McCain and he only received 31% of the Hispanic vote. Does the Republican Party need to do more to bring in Hispanic voters? Absolutely. That should be a high priority, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that backing amnesty isn’t going to get the job done.
3) Why would anyone believe that if we give illegals citizenship or legalized status that we’ll get any better security in return? Reagan already cut that deal with the Democrats -- a “one time” amnesty in exchange for security. They didn’t honor their part of the agreement and today, Barack Obama is openly defying existing law to facilitate more illegal immigration. Quite frankly, there’s not much reason to think people like Paul Ryan, John McCain or Marco Rubio would do any better if either one of them were in charge. Republicans who are drowning in money that’s being paid to them by people who support illegal immigration can’t be trusted to enforce the law. That’s why the last amnesty bill that was pushed by Republicans (which passed the Senate with Republican help) gave almost unlimited discretion on security to Barack Obama, even though he’d already stopped enforcing the laws on the books. At this point, no intelligent person can possibly believe we’ll get any security that’s promised unless we get enforcement first.
4) If we’re not going to deport illegals now, why would anyone believe we’ll deport them later? There is no logical or effective way to deal with illegal immigration that doesn’t center on deportation. If you allow people to benefit from breaking the law by getting legalized status or citizenship, you encourage another wave of illegals to try to do the same thing and all the same arguments used against deportation still apply. “You’ll break up families” (as if that doesn’t happen every day of the week when people go to jail for breaking other laws), “It’s hard to catch everyone,” “What, are we going to kick people out who’ve been getting away with breaking the law for so long?” Those are incredibly lame arguments, but if you find them convincing today, why wouldn’t they be just as convincing in another decade or two?
5) How does it benefit America to make Illegal aliens citizens? I know it seems a bit passé in these days and times to actually consider what’s best for the country before taking a position on an issue, but it seems particularly relevant in this case. Millions of Americans have been victimized by criminal acts committed by illegal aliens. Every one of those rapes, murders, thefts and other crimes wouldn’t have happened if our borders were secure. When you look at the decline of the rule of law in America, the special treatment illegal aliens are getting is a big part of it. What moral case is there for following our laws if whole classes of people are allowed to break them with impunity? Moreover, 62% of illegal alien households are getting welfare. Why in the world would we want people who are collecting a welfare check to be given the privilege of American citizenship? Why would we want to make millions of people who are likely to stay poor long term because of a lack of education and difficulties with English into American citizens? Moreover, once illegals become citizens and aren’t just relying on their American born kids to sponge off everyone else, the number of government programs they’re eligible for would skyrocket. When you’re talking about making illegals into citizens, first and foremost you’re talking about importing more poverty into our country in the futile hope that it will somehow make life better for everyone else. That’s just not how the world works.
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