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Title: 83% of Americans support mandatory detention and forfeiture of property for illegal aliens, followed by deportation
Source:
Chicago Sun-Times
URL Source: http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn11.html
Published: Jan 11, 2004
Author: Mark Steyn
Post Date: 2005-10-19 01:12:08 by Uncle Bill
Keywords: deportation, forfeiture, Americans
Views: 181
Comments: 9
Chicago Sun-Times According to a RoperASW poll from last year, 83 percent of Americans support mandatory detention and forfeiture of property for illegal immigrants, followed by deportation. Eighty-three percent. Pretty big number. So who are the 17 percent who don't think illegal immigrants should be seized, jailed, have their property confiscated and deported? Well, they're pretty much everyone in the two major parties, plus the entire U.S. media. So why don't they think as the masses do? In the media and the Democratic Party, everyone seems to subscribe to the wisdom of Carol Moseley Braun's mom. As Ambassador Braun told her audience in the ABC debate, the NPR debate, the Rainbow/PUSH debate, the UCLA environmental debate, the AFCSME debate, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus debate, the Congressional Black Caucus debate, the Service Employees International Union debate, etc: ''My late mother used to say it doesn't matter if you came to this country on the Mayflower or a slave ship, through Ellis Island or across the Rio Grande, we're all in the same boat now.'' It goes down so well that Gov. Howard Dean's started using it, too. And why not? It's beautifully coded imagery: Whether you came here as slave owner or slave, standing in line and filling in the paperwork or through the express check-in, everyone's an immigrant, and all the rest is fine print. Who are we to distinguish between some uptight white-bread Pilgrim disembarking at Plymouth Rock and an Algerian terrorist with a forged Quebec driver's license making a break for it at the British Columbia/Washington state border en route to blow up LAX? Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Illegal Americans, Islamist Americans, Incendiary Americans, we're all in the same boat, whether we're rowing or planting the plastic explosives. Like so much Media-Democrat conventional wisdom, its uselessness or harmfulness as practically applied is less important than the fact that it advertises your niceness. So, for Democratic presidential candidates, being a moral poseur is the default position on immigration. After all, to be concerned about immigration is, as they see it, to be a racist. So, as on so many issues, the Democratic Party has nothing helpful to contribute. That leaves the Republican Party. I would imagine that, when a WASPy old Mayflower madam like Dean recycles Carol's mom's paean to Ellis Island and the Rio Grande, a lot of Republicans roll their eyes, if only metaphorically. Yet there was the president the other day using much the same nostalgic imagery in service of a massive amnesty dressed up as a decade-or-two ''temporary worker'' application process. If you're one of that 83 percent of Americans who want illegal immigrants deported, you're probably wondering why it's easier for those who break U.S. immigration law to get a job at the White House (true: an illegal immigrant worked as a Clinton/Bush gardener) than for anybody who wants to enforce U.S. immigration law to get a job at the White House. And I guess the answer is this: There are supposedly up to 10 million illegals living and working in America. It's not politically possible for a civilized nation forcibly to deport a population three times as big as Ireland's. So which of the remaining options is the least worst? To leave a population 20 times bigger than that of Dean's Vermont living in the shadows, knowing that those shadows provide cover for all sorts of murky activities -- from fake IDs for terrorists to election fraud. Or to shrug ''They're here, they're clear, get used to it,'' and ensnare them, like lawful citizens, within the coils of the bureaucracy. The president has opted for the latter option. A pragmatic conservative could support that, but only if the move was accompanied by a determination to address the ''root cause'': the inertia and incompetence of America's immigration bureaucracy. But there's no indication in the president's remarks that he's prepared to get serious about that. America takes in roughly a million legal immigrants and half-a-million illegals each year. Even routine visa and green card application take years to process: two, five, 10 years. Not because the feds are spending two, five or 10 years doing unusually thorough background checks, but just because that's how long it takes to shuffle the paperwork. Imagine a branch of ''60-Minute Photo'' that takes 60 minutes to develop the photos but three months to move them from the front counter to the lab at the back and another eight months to move them from the lab back to the counter. Right now, the system has a backlog just shy of 5 million. Drop another few million from the Undocumented American community in their laps, and lawful immigrants can add another half-decade and a couple more circles of hell to their own applications. Remember the 1986 immigration amnesty? One of its beneficiaries was Mahmoud abu Halima, who went on to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. His friend Mohammad Salameh wasn't so fortunate. He applied for the '86 amnesty but was rejected. So he just stayed on in America, living illegally, and happily was still around to help Mahmoud and co-attack the Twin Towers. He's the guy who rented the truck, which suggests he had enough ID to get past the rental agent at Ryder. But I don't want to tar illegal immigrants with the terrorist brush. After all, in their second and much more successful assault on the World Trade Center, most of the killers were approved by the State Department, ushered in through Foggy Bottom's ''visa express'' program for Saudis, even though their answers on the application form were almost comically inadequate (''Address while in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA'') and they're exactly the category -- young single men with no job and no motive to return -- that's supposed to be a red flag for immigration fraud. So that's a triple failure. Whether the terrorist (a) does the proper paperwork upfront, (b) applies for a retrospective amnesty, (c) gets rejected and ordered to be deported, or (bonus category d) gets arrested for immigration violations and then released (like Sniper Boy John Lee Malvo), it makes no difference: Whichever menu option he selects, the federal government will let him carry on living here until he's decided which Americans he wants to kill. The world's most powerful nation has an illegal immigration problem because it has a legal immigration problem. Transferring millions of people from the unofficial shadow network to the arthritic bureaucracy that allowed the problem to get this big is unlikely to solve it. Poll: 96% want illegals to stay that way Chertoff: Return Illegal Aliens 
Illegals The Political 'Untouchables'
By Mark Steyn
January 11, 2004
Little Bush, do you understand?
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#1. To: christine (#0)
Slouching Towards Miers Slouching Towards Miers Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values. The Wall Street Journal With a single stroke-- the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals. There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively." The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty. There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging. Some moderate (i.e., lukewarm) conservatives admonish the rest of us to hold our fire until Ms. Miers's performance at her hearing tells us more about her outlook on law, but any significant revelations are highly unlikely. She cannot be expected to endorse originalism; that would alienate the bloc of senators who think constitutional philosophy is about arriving at pleasing political results. What, then, can she say? Probably that she cannot discuss any issue likely to come before the court. Given the adventurousness of this court, that's just about every issue imaginable. What we can expect in all probability is platitudes about not "legislating from the bench." The Senate is asked, then, to confirm a nominee with no visible judicial philosophy who lacks the basic skills of persuasive argument and clear writing. But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials--debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like--the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges. By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left- leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists. Finally, this nomination has split the fragile conservative coalition on social issues into those appalled by the administration's cynicism and those still anxious, for a variety of reasons, to support or at least placate the president. Anger is growing between the two groups. The supporters should rethink. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values. He appears embittered by conservative opposition to his nomination, which raises the possibility that if Ms. Miers is not confirmed, the next nominee will be even less acceptable to those asking for a restrained court. That, ironically, is the best argument for her confirmation. But it is not good enough. It is said that at La Scala an exhausted tenor, after responding to repeated cries of "Encore," said he could not go on. A man rose in the audience to say, "You'll keep singing until you get it right." That man should be our model. Mr. Bork is a fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of "A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values" (Hoover, 2005). He is co- chairman of the Federalist Society.
Bwahahahahaha!!!! The shame of it all is they have no shame.
Let's expel the sorry pricks that hire them too.
Well said.
Watch DHS use this as an excuse for that Israeli firm to build more prisons here.
Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war. – Donald Rumsfeld
Do you believe that every illegal alien caught in this country should be deported? Yes 90% 5771 votes No 10% 670 votes Total: 6441 votes
Amen to that! If we can stop these companies from hiring them, we may be able to get a grip on this massive problem!
Secure our borders, save our nation!
BTTT
BTTT
Press 1 for English, Press 2 for English, Press 3 for deportation
WSJ.Com
Source
BY ROBERT H. BORK
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Want a cigarette George?
#2. To: robin (#1)
#3. To: Uncle Bill (#2)
#4. To: Uncle Bill (#1)
Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule.
I've already said too much.
#5. To: Uncle Bill (#2)
"Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities," he added.
#6. To: Uncle Bill (#0)
#7. To: Soda Pop (#3)
Let's expel the sorry pricks that hire them too.
#8. To: lodwick (#6)
#9. To: nc_girl_speaks_up (#7)
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