Mark Steyn eviscerates the immigration scam
What would a Sunday be without the wit and wisdom of our favorite "columnist of the world," Mark Steyn. Well aside from boring, it'd be rather empty. Today's wonderful entry is all about immigration, and as usual, Mark turns his cutting wit loose:
I don't know whether this sham of a bill is dead or just resting ''in the shadows'' like a fine upstanding member of the Vampiric-American community. But, if it rises on the third night to stalk the land once more, I would advise its supporters to go about their work more honestly. First of all, the only guys ''living in the shadows'' are the aides of American senators beavering away out of the public eye to cook up this legislation and then present it as a fait accomplis to the citizenry (if you'll forgive the expression). That is an affront to small-r republican government, and, if intemperate hectoring mediocrities like Trent Lott and Lindsay Graham don't understand that, then their electors should give them a well-deserved lesson.
Second, the bill's supporters should stop assuming the bad faith of their opponents. On Fox News the other night, I was told by NPR's Juan Williams, ''You're anti-immigrant!'' Er, actually, I am an immigrant -- one of the members of the very very teensy-weensy barely statistically detectable category of ''legal immigrant.'' But perhaps that doesn't count anymore. Perhaps, like Colin Powell's blackness, it's insufficiently ''authentic.'' By filing the relevant paperwork with the United States government, I'm not ''keepin' it real.''
I wouldn't presume to speak for the millions of Americans who oppose this bill, but it's because I'm an immigrant myself that I object to the most patent absurdity peddled by the pro-amnesty crowd. The bill is fundamentally a fraud. Its ''comprehensive solution'' to illegal immigration is simply to flip all the illegals overnight into the legal category. Voila! Problem solved! There can be no more illegal immigrants because the Senate has simply abolished the category. Ingenious! For their next bipartisan trick, Congress will reduce the murder rate by recategorizing murderers as jaywalkers.
Back in the real world far from those senators living in the non-shadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America's immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room. Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That's not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. It's certainly not enough time for any meaningful background check. Under political pressure to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' the immigration bureaucracy will rubberstamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There's never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency.
America has an illegal immigration problem in part because it has a legal immigration problem. Anyone who enters the system exposes himself to an arbitrary, capricious, whimsical bureaucracy: For example, one of the little-known features of this bill is that in order to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' millions of legal applicants are being hurled back into outer darkness. Law-abiding foreign nationals who filed their paperwork in the last two years would be required to go back to their home countries and start all over again. Not only does this bill reward law-breaking, it punishes law-abiding.
The people who are truly ''anti-immigrant'' are the folks who want to send that immigrant from Slovenia or Fiji who applied in May 2005 back to the end of the line. But then ''comprehensive immigration reform'' is about everything but immigration, including subverting sovereignty and national security. Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, the aforementioned Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government's ''visa express'' system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications -- ''Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA'' -- that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.
All the above passed through the U.S. legal immigration system. And, whether they were detained, rejected, approved or posthumously approved, in the end it made no difference. Because U.S. immigration had no real idea who these men were.
But, don't worry, they'll be able to handle another ''12 million undocumented Americans'' tossed in for express processing.
The real ''immigration fraud'' is not Mahmoud abu Halima's or John Lee Malvo's or Mohammed Atta's, but that of the politicians who attempted to foist this sham bill on the nation.
As usual, he cuts straight to the chase. The above paragraphs comes from the last two-thirds of his column, and it's the part where the hammer hits the nail soundly on the head. This is a fraud, and was so from the word go. If you read the bill carefully, he's right. The politicos in DC are content to simply flip these people over to legal with minimal notice to past actions (such as criminal activity, or even connections to terrorism); as far as they're concerned the problem is solved.
Nevermind that, as Mark points out, the backlog for the immigration bureaucracy is at tsunami-like proportions, and they still can't keep up with that. Add twelve-to-twenty million more, and I expect the bureaucracy will crash. "Crash and burn, huh Mav?" That's an understatement, but what won't be is the disaster the integration of all these people into the system will cause. Additionally, he is quite correct about those already legally working through the system. They';re going to get shoved to the back of the line.
How very unfair. Those people have gone through the lengthy, painstaking process to become legal residents of the US. A few likely wish to become citizens. A chance to come to the "land of opportunity" for a better life. Yet those here illegally will be granted legal status in a matter of hours, maybe days if someone in the bureaucracy is actually doing their job; they get the "free ride" that the great compromisers have created, and everyone else -- the nation as a whole included -- get the shaft.
Praying for a miracle right now wouldn't be a bad idea. (Call me selfish, but I raised that up for the Almighty this morning. I guess I'll find out soon enough if he heard me.) At the rate these monkeys in the Senate are moving, they'll get their way. The GOP is obviously rolling over for Senator Kennedy to get their belly scratched and to show the nation they can "work together in a bipartisan fashion." Yes. Wonderful. I'm sure John McCain is happy that his tainted philosophy about how Washington should work will do wonders for the party. In 2008, we'll get our butts kicked like a Narc at a biker rally, and in January of 2009 we'll be inaugurating President Hillary Clinton.
I'd like to close with a simple statement to those in the Senate that seem to have lost the last bit of sense in their tiny pea-brains: WAKE UP! You're not winning friends and influencing people in the nation with these antics. The bill is bad and you damn well know it. The solution is not to do something because the status quo isn't working, and leaving the people of this nation holding the bill and the repercussions from your idiocy. You're ticking the nation off and it broaches both sides -- liberal and conservative; Republican and Democrat. If you guys missed that over the last three weeks, you need to crawl out from underneath your rocks and take a good look around. We're not racists or nativists. We want a solution, but this is hardly sensible or sane.
Mark's right: The fraud is in Washington. That's the only way this bill ever saw the light of day.
Publius II
I don't know whether this sham of a bill is dead or just resting ''in the shadows'' like a fine upstanding member of the Vampiric-American community. But, if it rises on the third night to stalk the land once more, I would advise its supporters to go about their work more honestly. First of all, the only guys ''living in the shadows'' are the aides of American senators beavering away out of the public eye to cook up this legislation and then present it as a fait accomplis to the citizenry (if you'll forgive the expression). That is an affront to small-r republican government, and, if intemperate hectoring mediocrities like Trent Lott and Lindsay Graham don't understand that, then their electors should give them a well-deserved lesson.
Second, the bill's supporters should stop assuming the bad faith of their opponents. On Fox News the other night, I was told by NPR's Juan Williams, ''You're anti-immigrant!'' Er, actually, I am an immigrant -- one of the members of the very very teensy-weensy barely statistically detectable category of ''legal immigrant.'' But perhaps that doesn't count anymore. Perhaps, like Colin Powell's blackness, it's insufficiently ''authentic.'' By filing the relevant paperwork with the United States government, I'm not ''keepin' it real.''
I wouldn't presume to speak for the millions of Americans who oppose this bill, but it's because I'm an immigrant myself that I object to the most patent absurdity peddled by the pro-amnesty crowd. The bill is fundamentally a fraud. Its ''comprehensive solution'' to illegal immigration is simply to flip all the illegals overnight into the legal category. Voila! Problem solved! There can be no more illegal immigrants because the Senate has simply abolished the category. Ingenious! For their next bipartisan trick, Congress will reduce the murder rate by recategorizing murderers as jaywalkers.
Back in the real world far from those senators living in the non-shadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America's immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room. Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That's not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. It's certainly not enough time for any meaningful background check. Under political pressure to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' the immigration bureaucracy will rubberstamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There's never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency.
America has an illegal immigration problem in part because it has a legal immigration problem. Anyone who enters the system exposes himself to an arbitrary, capricious, whimsical bureaucracy: For example, one of the little-known features of this bill is that in order to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' millions of legal applicants are being hurled back into outer darkness. Law-abiding foreign nationals who filed their paperwork in the last two years would be required to go back to their home countries and start all over again. Not only does this bill reward law-breaking, it punishes law-abiding.
The people who are truly ''anti-immigrant'' are the folks who want to send that immigrant from Slovenia or Fiji who applied in May 2005 back to the end of the line. But then ''comprehensive immigration reform'' is about everything but immigration, including subverting sovereignty and national security. Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, the aforementioned Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government's ''visa express'' system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications -- ''Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA'' -- that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.
All the above passed through the U.S. legal immigration system. And, whether they were detained, rejected, approved or posthumously approved, in the end it made no difference. Because U.S. immigration had no real idea who these men were.
But, don't worry, they'll be able to handle another ''12 million undocumented Americans'' tossed in for express processing.
The real ''immigration fraud'' is not Mahmoud abu Halima's or John Lee Malvo's or Mohammed Atta's, but that of the politicians who attempted to foist this sham bill on the nation.
As usual, he cuts straight to the chase. The above paragraphs comes from the last two-thirds of his column, and it's the part where the hammer hits the nail soundly on the head. This is a fraud, and was so from the word go. If you read the bill carefully, he's right. The politicos in DC are content to simply flip these people over to legal with minimal notice to past actions (such as criminal activity, or even connections to terrorism); as far as they're concerned the problem is solved.
Nevermind that, as Mark points out, the backlog for the immigration bureaucracy is at tsunami-like proportions, and they still can't keep up with that. Add twelve-to-twenty million more, and I expect the bureaucracy will crash. "Crash and burn, huh Mav?" That's an understatement, but what won't be is the disaster the integration of all these people into the system will cause. Additionally, he is quite correct about those already legally working through the system. They';re going to get shoved to the back of the line.
How very unfair. Those people have gone through the lengthy, painstaking process to become legal residents of the US. A few likely wish to become citizens. A chance to come to the "land of opportunity" for a better life. Yet those here illegally will be granted legal status in a matter of hours, maybe days if someone in the bureaucracy is actually doing their job; they get the "free ride" that the great compromisers have created, and everyone else -- the nation as a whole included -- get the shaft.
Praying for a miracle right now wouldn't be a bad idea. (Call me selfish, but I raised that up for the Almighty this morning. I guess I'll find out soon enough if he heard me.) At the rate these monkeys in the Senate are moving, they'll get their way. The GOP is obviously rolling over for Senator Kennedy to get their belly scratched and to show the nation they can "work together in a bipartisan fashion." Yes. Wonderful. I'm sure John McCain is happy that his tainted philosophy about how Washington should work will do wonders for the party. In 2008, we'll get our butts kicked like a Narc at a biker rally, and in January of 2009 we'll be inaugurating President Hillary Clinton.
I'd like to close with a simple statement to those in the Senate that seem to have lost the last bit of sense in their tiny pea-brains: WAKE UP! You're not winning friends and influencing people in the nation with these antics. The bill is bad and you damn well know it. The solution is not to do something because the status quo isn't working, and leaving the people of this nation holding the bill and the repercussions from your idiocy. You're ticking the nation off and it broaches both sides -- liberal and conservative; Republican and Democrat. If you guys missed that over the last three weeks, you need to crawl out from underneath your rocks and take a good look around. We're not racists or nativists. We want a solution, but this is hardly sensible or sane.
Mark's right: The fraud is in Washington. That's the only way this bill ever saw the light of day.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 4:48 PM
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