“I will not support any bill that does not provide this earned path to citizenship for the undocumented population.” Senator Barack Obama on amnesty-again. HERE.

Hillary Rodham Clinton:
“I believe we have to, as part of comprehensive immigration reform, create a path to earned legalization and I will continue to stand for that and advocate for that.” Hillary on anmesty-again. She is a “YES”. HERE.

Meet the Press — NBC — December 16

Romney: Those people who have come here illegally, and are in this country – the twelve million or so – that are here illegally, should be able to sign up for permanent residency, or citizenship, but they should not be given a special pathway, a special guarantee that all of them get to stay here, for the rest of their lives, merely by virtue of coming here illegally. And that, I think, is the great flaw in the final bill that came forward in the Senate.

Tim Russert: They shouldn’t have to go home?

Romney: Whether they have to go home – they should go home eventually – there is a set – in my view they should have a set period – during which period they sign up for application for permanent residency, or for uhhh – citizenship, but there’s a set period whereupon they return home, but if they have been approved for citizenship or for permanent residency, why that would be another matter, but for the great majority, they will be going home…

More and VIDEO HERE

National Review Online…EDITORIAL
December 21, 2007 12:00 AM

Stalled at the Border

By The Editors

Republicans have an opportunity on immigration, if only they will seize it. The Democrats are positioning themselves to the left of public opinion. Howard Dean denounces Republicans for using “outrageous phrases like ‘illegal aliens.’” Hillary Clinton ties herself in knots for days over granting drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, almost everyone in public life favors — or, at any rate, feels compelled to claim to favor — tougher enforcement measures.

Yet Republicans are blowing the opportunity. They are engaged in petty backbiting over one another’s records. Since very few politicians have good ones on this issue, that’s a strategy of mutual assured destruction. It also obscures the choices we face now. Worse, the Republicans are picking on secondary or even tertiary issues. Gov. Mike Huckabee has taken a lot of criticism from the other presidential candidates, for example, for allowing the high-achieving children of illegal immigrants to receive favorable tuition rates at colleges and universities. It is the sort of question that would not even arise in a country that was serious about controlling its borders. A politician’s position on the narrow question is important only insofar as it bears on what he or she would do about the broader one.

Even more beside the point has been the spectacle of Mitt Romney’s attacking Rudy Giuliani for letting illegal immigrants in New York City talk to police without fear of being deported, or Giuliani’s counterattack on Romney for employing a lawn-care company that hired illegals. A sensible federal policy would not place cities in the position of choosing between solving murders and turning a blind eye to illegality. It would also not place the onus of law enforcement on individual consumers.

The important divide concerns what we should do now. John McCain and Giuliani would step up enforcement, create a guest-worker program to meet employers’ desire for immigrant labor, and allow illegal immigrants already here to become citizens if they meet certain conditions (such as learning English). We think that policy mix is a mistake. There is no pressing national need to bring illegal immigrants “out of the shadows,” and the possibility that we will do so will only serve as a magnet for more illegal immigration. Moreover, immigrants would succeed, and assimilate, faster, with less friction from the native-born, if we took in fewer immigrants each year. Neither candidate takes any notice of this point.

Read the rest here…

De-Fence, De-Fence
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | December 19, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Immigration: Congressional Democrats, and some Republicans, gut the Secure Fence Act in the omnibus spending bill against the wishes of the American people. In a bill with 9,000 earmarks, border security takes a back seat.

The Secure Fence Act of 2006 required the construction of 700 miles of border fence, modeled on the success of the border barriers in the San Diego sector of the U.S. border. The operative word is “secure.”

That legislation specifically called for “two layers of reinforced fencing” and listed five specific sections of the border where it should be built. The omnibus spending bill removes the requirement for two tiers and the specific list of locations.

Funding for two-tiered reinforced fencing of the type that reduced illegal immigrant apprehensions by 96% along the border between the U.S. and Tijuana, Mexico, was removed from the omnibus spending bill approved this week in Congress.
The two-tier fence in San Diego runs 14 miles along the border with Tijuana, Mexico. The first layer is a high steel fence, with an inner high anti-climb fence with a no-man’s land in between…

Read the rest HERE

Heritage Foundation

Your tax dollars at work… funding La Raza

The omnibus includes a $390,000 earmark to the National Council of La Raza to provide technical assistance on Hispanic workforce issues (Title I, Chart ‘c’ of the Labor-HHS and Education Joint Explanatory Statement). — The NCLR Hope Fund also would receive a $1 million earmark to capitalize a revolving loan fund… HERE

Open Borders/Illegal alien lobby resists enforcement of lawBy D.A. King, Gainesville Times, September 24, 2006

http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/stories/20060924/opinion/126420.shtml

In 21st century America, many who make their living from illegal immigration howl that vocal opposition to that organized crime is somehow “extreme”or “hateful.”

Absent the tools of convention, logic, the rule of law upon which our nation was founded or any supporting majority public opinion, the prosperous open borders/illegal alien lobby uses the only tool it can: name-calling.

The tireless attempts to label as “hate groups” organizations that advocate for controlled and reasonable immigration levels, secure borders and equal enforcement of the law are not working any longer. Panic has set in.

Witness remarks at a press conference held under the Gold Dome last week aimed at Gov. Sonny Perdue’s recent crackdown on fraudulent documents used by illegals to obtain Georgia driver’s licenses: “Unmitigated racism,” declared one “civil rights activist.”

It appears that some who profit by an enabled illegal population do not welcome the governor’s SecureID initiative.

At the same press conference, concerning recent federal immigration law enforcement actions in Stillmore, where more than 100 illegal aliens were arrested for using fraudulent and stolen Social Security numbers, “acts of law enforcement terrorism” and “attacks on immigrants” were the shameless descriptions of justice finding a tiny fraction of Georgia’s illegal population.

Recognizing a goldmine when they see it, immigration lawyers, ethnic-based separatist groups, bankers and willing employers are not eager to tolerate actual enforcement of existing American laws in what they have labeled an “immigration debate.”

Their enemy? Facts.

Here’s one: The same federal government charged with protecting our borders and enforcing our laws defines “immigrants” as “persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States” and “aliens who are granted permanent legal residence.”

A person who is not a citizen and is present in the United States in violation of our laws is an illegal alien.

On these pages last week, Gainesville immigration lawyer David Kennedy explained at length that the Washington D.C-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes illegal and massive immigration, was a past grantee of the Pioneer Fund, and declared that group to be a “white-supremacist outfit.” The illegal alien lobby is very fond of that term. No word yet on what they label the majority of black Americans who have the same objections.

The fact that the Pioneer Fund also counts as grantees Johns Hopkins University, Cornell Medical School, Brandeis University, University of California-Berkeley, the University of London and the University of Tel Aviv, among others doesn’t seem to prove the writers’ mindless and self-serving accusation.

At more than a million each year, the United States takes in more real immigrants than any nation on the planet. Because wealthy corporate campaign donors have been allowed to take charge of American border and law enforcement policy, we also suffer the world’s highest level of illegal immigration. Arizona Sen. John McCain put illegal entries at “almost 4 million” in 2002.

Most who study the issue understand the Census estimates that we now have 11 million illegals in the nation to be inaccurate by half. Illegal aliens not being all that willing to answer a Census seems to be a very sensible truth.

In a 2004 independent study of the black market created by illegal immigration, the Wall Street financial firm of Bear Stearns estimated the illegal population at 20 million, as did state Sen. Sam Zamarripa to the Georgia Senate in 2003.

Bear Stearns estimated the IRS loss of income taxes to be $35 billion a year to off-the-books payment of wages, with health care, retirement funding, law enforcement and education losses coming in at another $30 billion annually. Two years later, these are now considered very low and conservative estimates.

Bear Stearns made no effort to estimate the cost, financial or cultural, of forcibly instituting an optional language to English in the United States.

Kind of makes one wonder about the entire concept of “cheap labor” doesn’t it? Or is Bear Stearns being hateful and extreme?

In 1995, the Bill Clinton-appointed chairwoman of the Commission on Immigration Reform was the late Barbara Jordan, D-Texas, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South. She testified to Congress on immigration reform nine years after the “one-time amnesty” that was to solve our illegal immigration crisis forever.

Jordan was clear on what it would take to gain credibility on immigration policy: “Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave — deportation is crucial.”

On the criminal employers who lure illegals into our republic, Jordan recommended mandatory electronic verification of legal employment eligibility. “Employer sanctions can work,” she said.

Fortunately for Jordan, a 1994 Presidential Medal of Freedom award winner, 21st century immigration lawyers in Georgia weren’t there to attack her “extremism.” Si?

D.A. King is columnist for the Marietta Daily Journal and president of the Dustin Inman Society, a Marietta-based coalition actively opposed to illegal immigration. He was a witness at the recent Congressional Field Hearings held in Gainesville on illegal immigration. On the Web: (http://www.TheDustinInmanSociety.org.)

Holiday visit to Mexico becomes one-way trip

Sanctions law, crackdowns spur many illegal migrants to leave

Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 18, 2007 12:00 AM

NOGALES, Sonora – It’s a common scene this time of year: streams of overloaded cars, pickups and vans with U.S. license plates crossing into Mexico for the holidays.

Most are filled with Hispanic families from Arizona and other states on their way to visit relatives south of the border for a few weeks before heading back to the U.S. But this year, the holiday travelers are being joined by scores of families such as Jorge and Liliana Franco, who are driving to Mexico not to visit but to stay – permanently.

Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, immigration crackdowns, Arizona’s new employer-sanctions law and a sluggish economy have combined to create a climate that undocumented families such as the Francos no longer find hospitable.

PLEASE read the rest HERE.

From Grassfire.org

Special Report
Border Fence Funding Hoax of 2006 and 2007
How Congress And The President Are Working Behind-The-Scenes To Un-Do The Secure Fence Act

As Grassfire.ore has previously reported, despite grandiose claims, our government has built just 5 miles of the the 854 miles of double-layer border fence mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. (Go here for that report.) While this fact is outrageous in and of itself, it begs a question:Why?

If the law mandated a double layer fence covering 854 miles of fencing, then how come such little progress has been made?

Grassfire.org’s research staff has uncovered the truth of how Congress and the President are playing games with the American people — pretending to support a real border fence but then working behind the scenes to ensure that the Secure Fence Act is never really implemented.

Secure Fence Act Hoax of 2006
In the fall of 2006 when Congress passed and the President signed into law the Secure Fence Act, most Americans thought they understood what they were getting. The plain text of the law states that “the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide for [at] least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors” along a specified range of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Act then stipulated the precise regions of the border, covering a total of 854 miles. [Note: using Google Earth, Grassfire has created a short video showing the precise areas that have been mandated by the Secure Fence Act to have double-layer fencing. View here.]

Please read the rest from Grassfire HERE…and start calling candidates for elected office.

Doubters can read the quotes from the people who really make the rules here.

Globalist HERE.

“This action basically repeals the Secure Fence Act (of 2006) and undermines past efforts to secure our nation’s borders,” Congressman Duncan Hunter December 2007 – more than a year after the Secure Fence Act swindle of 2006.

Bill guts border fence requirement
Would eliminate 854-mile barrier approved by Congress

World Net Daily

Republican presidential hopeful Duncan Hunter is blasting a Democrat-sponsored bill that would eliminate the requirement passed by Congress to build a double-layered fence covering 854 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“By eliminating the double fence requirement, the Democratic Congress is going to make it easier for drug and human smugglers to cross our Southern land border,” said Hunter. “This goes against the interests of any family that has been touched by illegal drugs or any American who has seen their job taken by an illegal alien.”

As WND reported last week, an amendment submitted by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, for the Department of Homeland Security 2008 budget was aimed at gutting the already-approved Secure Fence Act, which was adopted with the promise hundreds of miles of physical fencing would help secure the U.S. border with Mexico

Read the rest here.