The below from our pal Mark Krikorian: I think he is too kind to Gingrich.<\/p>\n
National Review Online <\/em> <\/p>\n More Gibberish from Newt<\/strong><\/p>\n December 19, 2011 <\/p>\n By Mark Krikorian <\/p>\n On Face the Nation yesterday, Gingrich made clear that he wants to amnesty all illegal aliens, not just church-going grandmothers who wash the feet of the poor and knit socks for our troops in Afghanistan to help them kill the enemies of America. As he sees it, the bulk of illegals would get amnestied through his guestworker program: \u201cMy guess is that 7 or 8 or 9 million of them would ultimately go home, get a guest-worker permit, come back under the law.\u201d This is the same \u201ctouchback\u201d gimmick that amnesty backers have been pushing for years \u2014 illegal aliens cross over to Tijuana, have lunch, pick up their papers, and come back in the afternoon as newly christened legal workers. In the Fifties official government documents called this \u201cdrying out the wetbacks\u201d (really) and there\u2019s no way to describe it other than amnesty.<\/p>\n The others? \u201cBut the last million or 2 are people that have been here for a very long time. They\u2019re very part of \u2014 they\u2019re not citizens, but they\u2019re part of the community. One of the requirements would be that they would have to have an American family sponsor them to be eligible for review by the citizen review board.\u201d I guess the difference here is that the 7\u20139 million getting guestworker visas would have a temporary nonimmigrant status (a \u201cnonimmigrant\u201d is any foreigner legally here in a status that doesn\u2019t lead to eligibility for citizenship), whereas the people who got the nod from the citizen review boards would get a permanent nonimmigrant status. Except that the \u201ctemporary\u201d guestworkers would have to be able to indefinitely renew their status \u2014 otherwise, we\u2019d have to undertake the \u201cinhumane\u201d task of deporting them, right? So there\u2019s really no difference between his two groups of illegals.<\/p>\n Also, no one would be rejected by the review boards because you\u2019d just find an SEIU official in Berkeley or Madison or Cambridge to sponsor you, regardless of where you really lived, and the panels themselves would be staffed by ACLU members and La Raza activists. (East L.A. alone would rubber-stamp 2 million amnesty applications.) But if anyone were rejected, why wouldn\u2019t they just go and get one of the \u201ctemporary\u201d guestworker visas? Gingrich may know what he\u2019s talking about with regard to space mirrors or polar bears, but he has obviously not given two seconds of sustained thought to immigration.<\/p>\n Kris Kobach does know something about immigration, and his piece in the current \u201cMarvin the Martian\u201d issue of NRoDT (you should subscribe) raises another important point about the review board idea. Gingrich compares his panels sometimes to draft boards and other times to juries; but juries can only decide matters of fact, not law, whereas these boards would have to do both:<\/p>\n Or, to put it differently, a jury decides the narrow factual question, \u201cDid he do it?\u201d But Newt\u2019s amnesty panel would decide the legal questions, \u201cWhich immigration laws did he violate?\u201d (and inquiry that involves both law and facts) and \u201cDid he violate those laws in such a way that we are inclined to forgive the violations?\u201d These inquiries are vastly more complex and subjective \u2014 and likely would result in different panels\u2019 treating similarly situated aliens unequally.<\/p>\n Finally, the very premise of Gingrich\u2019s plan is false. He contends that very long-term, \u201cotherwise law-abiding\u201d illegal aliens with American dependents have no recourse if they\u2019re picked up by immigration authorities. But, as I pointed out in a recent Philadelphia Inquirer piece, there are already ways of legalizing certain illegal aliens with compelling cases, and there are changes that could be made to, for instance, increase the discretion of immigration judges to legalize such people. What we don\u2019t need is new government programs which would serve as fraud factories and open the doors to unlimited future immigration. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n