Thursday, July 05, 2007
Amnesty advocates sure are in a big hurry
Walter Shapiro's Salon article, Hitting a Wall on Immigration," captures the frenzy on the pro-amensty side of the debate:
[E]arly indications suggest that the Democrats are likely to gain a few Senate seats in the upcoming elections. Would not a more liberal [immigration] bill emerge in 2009 if there were a Democratic president and a somewhat more sympathetic Congress?
Janet Murguía, the president of the National Council of La Raza, makes the case against waiting until after the presidential election. "Our worry and our concern is that a new president would not see immigration as a top priority," she says. "It will be a very polarizing and difficult issue. And the fight isn't going to get any easier as we go along. I would think that any presidential candidate -- whatever his or her public position on the issue -- would really hope that the whole thing would be solved in this Congress."
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the right-of-center Manhattan Institute and a zealous advocate of immigration reform, offers a similar assessment. "The chances of getting a bill in 2009 are risky at best," she says. "They don't take up health-care reform, they don't take up Social Security every year. And the votes probably won't be there unless you suddenly have 60 Democratic senators." Jacoby also raised the specter of an anti-immigrant backlash: "The economy could go sour, we could have a terrorist attack. Who knows?"
Perhaps this explains why it was "rush, rush, rush" on the Senate's amnesty bill, a bill of several hundred pages of legalese rewritten four times, including twice within the 12 hours prior to its most recent cloture vote.
There is an old saying, "marry in haste, repent at leisure." If an amnesty is ever enacted, it would be MORE permanent than all too many marriages. If the economy went sour or there was a terrorist attack after amnesty became law, amnesty could hardly be revoked.Labels: [E]
|posted by Jim on 3:50 PM|
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