OPINION

They Will Risk Your Kids' Lives Before They Risk Immigration Reform

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For the Gang of 8, the choice is clear. If it’s a choice between the lives of your kids and keeping the coalition together behind their immigration reform scam, your kids lose.

Under the Gang of 8’s plan, you can stay in America legally – and become a citizen – even if you are a chronic drunk driver.

Their immigration bill is packed with obnoxious features – the “path to citizenship,” the entitlement giveaways, the utterly toothless “border security” lies – yet this one dwarfs them all in terms of pure, shameful cynicism. That the Gang of 8 is perfectly willing to let American kids (and, for that matter, immigrant kids) die seems like a harsh charge. But conservatives must judge policies not upon the vague, amorphous intentions expressed by their proponents but by their real-world consequences.

The real-world consequence of this immigration reform bill will be more dead kids. Maybe yours.

One DUI? No problem. Two DUIs? Good to go. Three DUIs? Well, the law says that after the third time you get caught driving drunk you might have a chance of possibly, maybe, perhaps, not being allowed to stay in the United States. That is, if the federal bureaucracy takes time away from its really important jobs, like persecuting conservative citizens for daring to exercise their constitutional rights, and goes and finds you.

And that’s assuming it doesn’t give you a waiver. Because this joke of a law would let the feds waive the gutless three-time loser provision whenever they feel like it.

But hey, only a paranoid nut could ever imagine that bureaucrats in the federal government might misuse their authority, right?

Go ahead and Google the phrase “illegal immigrant drunk driver kills.” I’ll wait while you look through the 1,170,000 results. The nun in Virginia. The man dragged to death in Boston. A couple of cops in Texas and Arizona, with the Houston drunk having been convicted before. Then there is the baby in New Mexico, killed by an illegal on DUI number four.

That’s just from the first page of the Google search results. And that’s just DUIs, not the other myriad crimes (including violent ones) the Gang of 8 think we should just put up with in the name of getting people who shouldn’t be here in the first place out of the shadows.

I’ve seen it myself, up close. I had jury duty in Santa Monica. Our defendant was a gentleman from Central America accused of a DUI. Long story short, it being Santa Monica, one idiot woman dressed like a flower child’s bad trip hung the jury because she just couldn't vote “guilty” despite him blowing a .18 and staggering around like Ted Kennedy after Labor Day weekend at the compound.

Her explanation? "Well, maybe it's not wrong in his culture." It was the combination of parochialism, condescension and stupidity that sums up modern liberalism.

Heaven forbid we expect our uninvited guests not to put our children at risk because they’re too cheap to take a cab. If you are military and get a DUI, your career is over. If you are lawyer and get a DUI, you can lose your law license. If you are an illegal alien and get a DUI, you get ushered to the head of the line for American citizenship.

Oh, there’s a postscript. Being a lawyer, I saw some holes in the evidence and figured that something big was being excluded by the judge. After the mistrial, I called the deputy DA to ask what was missing. It turns out the defendant was popped zooming home from the party celebrating his getting his license back after his previous DUI conviction.

Seriously.

If we had a free press that told the truth about what's in it, the Gang of 8’s immigration abomination would be dead on arrival. But you won’t hear about the bloodbath on our streets from the mainstream media – instead, the media’s designated agenda is endless hand wringing over the mercifully rare lunatic who wanders into a gun free zone.

The everyday carnage on our roads? Well, the media isn’t going to let a little thing like hundreds of dead kids stop chronic drunks from swerving back and forth across the center divider of the pathway to citizenship.

No, the “even if it saves just one life” rationale apparently only applies when it’s offered to justify stripping fundamental rights from law-abiding American citizens. When it comes to future Democrat voters – being illegals and criminals make them a donkey party twofer! – our dead kids are just acceptable losses.

Maybe I’m biased. As a lawyer, I’ve done a lot of accident litigation. I know exactly what happens when young bodies are torn and crushed by steel boxes moving at high speeds. I shut my eyes and see the photos of one child ejected from an SUV that went rolling end-over-end on an interstate. Or, more accurately, what was left of him.

The Gang of 8 is willing to accept that as the price of “reform.” Are we?

And it isn’t just American kids this scam promises to kill. Before the illegal kids need to figure out how to somehow survive our drunk-packed roads, they need to get through the desert. This new amnesty will do what the last one did, entice millions to trek through the furnace of the Southwest knowing that in a few years the reformers will crank up the same old song and start pushing Amnesty 3.0. Some of those kids will die coming north, or perhaps be murdered by drug dealers. The only thing they won’t have to worry about is being caught by the Border Patrol.

The immigration reformers don’t care about us or the bloodbath on our streets now, and if you believe that passing their bogus bill will make them start then I have a bridge to Ciudad Juarez I’d like to sell you.

We have zero tolerance for pastries nibbled into the shape of Glocks, but adult illegals driving around sauced to the gills? Welcome to America! Any real reform would have a one-DUI-and-you-are gone, no waivers, no excuses, no joke provision. But that will never, ever happen. The dirty little secret is that it would mean lots of illegals would get a one-way ticket home, and the reform crowd wants them here – even if that means that some of our kids have to die.

Hey Mario Rubio, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, why don’t you go down onto the Senate floor, look the American people in the eye and – for the first time in this entire disgraceful debate – tell the truth. Tell us how, yes, some of our kids will die because of your plan, but that you’re willing to accept that price tag for the greater good of allowing people who shouldn’t be here in the first place to stay here.

But they won’t. Apparently, if you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. And our kids are the eggs.