Back door amnesty was dealt a blow yesterday. Not a deadly thrust but rather a flesh wound.
Still, we should be grateful there were enough Republicans in the Senate willing to stand up against this travesty:
The prospects for immediate Senate action on the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants, disappeared Wednesday amid Republican opposition.But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pledged that senators would vote on the the measure, which is strongly opposed by anti-illegal immigration groups, before the Senate finishes its work for the year in mid-November.
“All who care about this matter should know that we will move to proceed to this matter before we leave here,” he said.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., had sought to attach the DREAM Act to the defense authorization bill. But Reid announced Wednesday night that Democrats were shelving the effort because of difficulties getting past legislative roadblocks.
“Unfortunately, some Republicans are opposed to this proposal and are unwilling to let us move forward on this bill,” Reid said.
It really was pathetic that proponents of the DREAM Act would try and sneak this amendment through using the very popular Military Construction bill as a vehicle. This kind of legislative subterfuge has become all too common these days after the GOP spent a decade tirelessly using the tactic to attach questionably germane amendments to a variety of legislative initiatives.
But as many predicted once the Democrats became the majority, many of the same parliamentary and legislative tactics abused by Republicans over their decade in power would be snapped up by the Democrats and used even more underhandedly.
While you can get away with this tactic easier in the Senate whose rules aren’t quite as strict regarding the germaneness of amendments, it still troubled some Senators:
Some Senate Republicans, including Texans Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, objected to the measure being brought up on a defense bill.“Putting extraneous things on this bill isn’t helpful,” Hutchison said.
Other Republicans aren’t ready to revisit a debate that imploded in June when the Senate scuttled an overhaul endorsed by the White House that would have given most illegal immigrants a chance for legal status.
“People, I think, want to let the immigration thing cool off a bit before we jump back in,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who helped derail the comprehensive immigration bill.
Reid will now look for another legislative vehicle to push this amendment. He will want to find something that Republicans want to vote for and can’t afford to kill off entirely.
Meanwhile, at the state level, it appears that enforcing the law actually works the way it was intended; it sends immigration scofflaws home or off to find greener pastures:
Illegal immigrants living in states and cities that have adopted strict immigration policies are packing up and moving back to their home countries or to neighboring states.
The exodus has been fueled by a wave of laws targeting illegal immigrants in Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and elsewhere. Many were passed after congressional efforts to overhaul the immigration system collapsed in June.Immigrants say the laws have raised fears of workplace raids and deportation.
“People now are really frightened and scared because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Juliana Stout, an editor at the newspaper El Nacional de Oklahoma. “They’re selling houses. They’re leaving the country.”
Supporters of the laws cheer the departure of illegal immigrants and say the laws are working as intended.
Can you imagine a country where every state actually enforced the immigration laws equally for all? Those who break the law by coming here illegally wouldn’t go “underground” as we’re constantly told by the open borders crowd. With no place to work, most of them would quietly go home, free to get in line and work to come to this country legally. That is sanity. And that is fairness.
Of course, for all of these state initiatives to work, we must have a federal government that is dead serious about patrolling the border. As long as we have a Homeland Security Department that continues to place a low priority on protecting the borders, not only will we be at a greater risk of suffering a terrorist attack, but the illegal immigrant problem will continue to be a source of concern far into the future.
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