McCain Fears Riots if Illegals Deported

I fully expected that this morning, considering that the second Democratic candidates’ debate occurred last night, it would be easy to select the most asinine comment of the weekend from a wide variety of choices. Thanks to John Hawkins at Right Wing News, it was easy to identify by far the most ludicrous statement made over the weekend, but it dismayed me that the comment did not come from any of the Democratic candidates and was not uttered in last night’s DNC debate on CNN. Instead, it came from a leading GOP presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, who may have quashed his presidential ambitions through his continued political jihad against true conservatives who oppose giving amnesty to America’s illegal aliens.

As quoted by Right Wing News:

McCain went back and forth with one audience member, who said he was upset that the immigration proposal before Congress is not tough enough. The man told McCain that there were already adequate laws on the books — they just aren't being enforced.

McCain said that was a misnomer.

``The old rules are not workable and enforceable,'' he said. ``We've certainly proved that over the last 20 years.''

Congress ``failed you,'' McCain said. ``We passed a law in 1986 that said we'd give amnesty to some people and now we have 12 million more,'' illegal immigrants.

The man wasn't satisfied with McCain's answer. He asked McCain why the U.S. couldn't execute large-scale deportations, as he had heard they did in France and other countries.

The question seemed to pique McCain.

``In case you hadn't noticed, the thousands of people who have been relegated to ghettos have risen up and burned cars in France,'' McCain said. ``They've got huge problems in France. They have tremendous problems. The police can't even go into certain areas in the suburbs of Paris. I don't want that in the suburbs of America.''

For a lover of history and politics, John McCain here demonstrated a remarkable ignorance, particularly through his analogy with France. Of course there have been and continue to be neighborhoods of young Muslim immigrants in France who riot and burn cars, but McCain leaves out the salient fact that most of these young Muslims in France are not illegal aliens at all. They are not rioting against the government because France is deporting those who are in France illegally. They riot because they came to France expecting “the good life” but have discovered that living on France’s socialist welfare and unemployment benefits is becoming more difficult. Anytime anyone (such as newly-elected President Sarkozy) proposes reducing welfare benefits and forcing these idle hooligans to find jobs or face deportation they riot and burn their own neighborhoods in suburban Paris. The comparison by McCain is completely disingenuous. So disingenuous, in fact, that Sarkozy’s opponent warned French voters that if Sarkozy were elected, France would be torn apart by rioting immigrant workers. Senator McCain might want to remember that she lost that election, and fear-mongering did not sway the French, nor will it sway the American voter.

Yet, even if the riots in France were solely to oppose deportation, McCain’s invocation of them as an example of why America cannot and should not deport its illegal aliens is quite revealing about McCain’s leadership potential. McCain survived the Vietnam War and imprisonment as a POW for 5 years, yet his primary reason not to deport illegal aliens is fear. He fears an illegal alien uprising; he fears riots in American streets; he fears cars burning and police unable to go into certain neighborhoods in America. He fears all of these more than he fears the gangs, drugs, murders, rapes, DUI’s, and other crimes that are already attributable to illegal aliens in disturbingly high numbers in America. I sense that McCain does not take many occasions to venture outside his protected comfort bubble and witness firsthand with law enforcement that America has plenty of neighborhoods and entire suburbs where police will not go.

Notice that when asked why America does not deport illegal aliens like France, McCain became condescending to the audience member and tried to scare the audience with mental images of rioting illegal aliens (isn’t that profiling?), but he did not answer the question. He did not claim that the government lacks the ability to deport, only that it fears the social consequences of doing so. Why is there no fear among our elected officials about the consequences that result when a nation does not enforce the laws it enacts? If Congress cannot agree that enforcing laws governing legal entry and presence is critical to living up to their sworn duty to defend the United States, how likely is it that Congress is in any way serious about any of its other duties? Every election year brings a slew of incumbents and challengers, each of whom vows to “change Washington” or “restore public trust in government.” That trust will never be renewed until government learns to enforce existing laws that the people demanded in the first place.

The question the audience should have posed to McCain was “since you already granted one time amnesty in 1986 and continue to fail to enforce deportation laws already on the books, why on earth should we believe you have any intention of enforcing any measures in the Kennedy amnesty bill?” McCain made the ridiculous claim that the government has proven that the old laws are “unworkable” or “unenforceable,” yet this, too, is simply false. The government has never made a concerted effort to try to enforce the deportation provisions of our immigration statutes, whether out of misguided compassion (President Bush), fear of social unrest (McCain), or political pandering to Hispanic voters (the GOP and DNC). The truth is that since the 1986 amnesty, the government has made only a token effort to enforce deportation. It is an issue of will rather than capacity. Are we supposed to believe that a nation that can send men to the moon, harness the energy of the atom, and make powerful computers that fit into shirt pockets lacks the logistical capacity to secure its borders or systematically deport illegal aliens, especially those who have committed criminal acts? Why would anyone vote for a candidate who lacks the faith and optimism to believe that America is capable of surmounting any obstacle?

Senator McCain is likely to discover, to his chagrin and well in advance of any state primaries, that Americans do not appreciate fear-mongering from their leaders, nor do we want our leaders to be held captive by their own fears of burning cars and riots. Should we forbid the Tigers, Red Wings, or Pistons from ever playing for championships because their fans have a tendency to riot in, loot, and burn various sections of Detroit when they win? Should we never hold another Democratic Convention in Los Angeles because protesters overturned and set fire to vehicles and threw bottles at police in 2000? What about the violent riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention? If fear of potential rioting were the determining factor, large events of every kind would be banned for safety reasons. Fortunately, Americans are not ruled by their fears even if some of its prominent leaders and political candidates think otherwise.

Technorati: John McCain Presidential Candidates Immigration Reform Illegal Immigration Riots Nicolas Sarkozy Deportation Amnesty Illegal Aliens

Should National Security "Bow to Reality?"

The old adage “don’t shoot the messenger” is nowhere more applicable than in the debate over the Bush-Kennedy amnesty for illegal aliens bill currently before Congress. Those who oppose President Bush’s “path to citizenship” (amnesty) for an estimated 12-20 million illegal aliens are branded as racists by Latino groups, as nativists lacking compassion, or as fear mongers by the president himself. Latino groups assume that all opposition to illegal immigration reform is directed solely at Mexicans, but that is ethnic vanity. They would like to believe the issue is all about them, but it not. Illegal immigration is illegal, whether the violator is Mexican, Canadian, German, or Tibetan. Of course, due to geographic proximity, the vast majority of illegal aliens are Mexican, but violators should not be allowed to profit from their illegal action simply because they violate in bulk.

The most effective media messenger thus far in the illegal alien immigration debate has been Ann Coulter. Of course, because Coulter is blunt and opposes the proposed “reform” legislation, she is portrayed by the liberal media as a radical hate monger. It is unfortunate that few seem capable of looking beyond Coulter’s biting sarcasm of past columns to discover the gems of logic in her most recent and quite astute assessment of the Bush-Kennedy bill.

Coulter’s column, “Importing a Slave Class,” unintentionally became a forceful rebuttal to comments made later in the day by Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff. Let’s examine Chertoff’s statements, and then apply Coulter’s arguments to determine who makes a better case.

Chertoff, in an extensive interview with USA Today’s editorial board on May 23, made some comments that were extraordinary coming from the man charged with protecting homeland security. The most telling remark may have been his criticism of Bush-Kennedy bill opponents for demanding deportations that are “not going to happen.” There it was, in black and white print; Homeland Security throwing up its arms in surrender to 12-20 million lawbreakers and admitting they will not be deported, apparently regardless of whether the Bush-Kennedy bill passes. The following excerpt from USA Today’s report provides a sample of Chertoff’s embrace of amnesty:

Chertoff acknowledged that there is "a fundamental unfairness" in a bill allowing illegal immigrants to stay. But trying to force them to leave would be impossible, Chertoff said, "We are bowing to reality."

He dismissed the argument of Republican conservatives, such as Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., who argue that illegal immigrants will leave if strict enforcement of U.S. laws makes it impossible for them to find a job.

"You're not going to replace 12 million people who are doing the work they're currently doing," Chertoff said. "If they don't leave, then you are going to give them silent amnesty. You're either going to let them stay or you're going to be hypocritical."

Bilbray said his idea hasn't worked because "there's been a conscious strategy of not enforcing the law."

Chertoff, whose department has staged a number of recent raids that have resulted in mass roundups of illegal workers and sharp protests from religious groups, warned there will be more if the workers don't get a chance to become legal. "We're going to enforce the law," he said. "People all around the country will be seeing teary-eyed children whose parents are going to be deported."

There is a lot in that excerpt to turn one’s stomach, but I will begin with the white flag attitude that deportation is impossible. No one asked Chertoff to deport all 12-20 million illegal aliens overnight, but his response is very clear; if you can’t deport them all, why try to deport any? Remembering that Coulter wrote her column before Chertoff’s interview, here is Coulter’s rebuttal to the notion that deportation is impossible:

…The jejune fact that we "can't deport them all" is supposed to lead ineluctably to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to illegal aliens – and fast!

I'm astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100 percent.

We can't catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can't do that. We can't even catch all murderers. What we need is "comprehensive murder reform." It's not "amnesty" – we'll ask them to pay a small fine.

If it's "impossible" to deport illegal aliens, how did we come to have so much specific information about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens and will take jobs other Americans won't. Someone must have talked to them to gather all this information. Let's find that guy – he must know where they are!

…If the 12-million figure is an extrapolation based on the number of illegal immigrants in public schools or emergency rooms and well-manicured lawns in Brentwood, then shouldn't we be looking for them at schools and hospitals and well-manicured lawns in Brentwood?

There are a lot of well-manicured lawns in the Metropolitan Washington DC area too, but I am SURE that has no bearing on the Bush-Kennedy amnesty bill debate.

I keep hearing President Bush and others claim that this is our best chance for reform, or something similar, but Americans should not accept the “either/or” choice placed before them. Coulter’s point is valid; No one is demanding 100% deportation or overnight deportation. For that matter, everyone hopes for but few expect Homeland Security to identify and catch 100% of the terrorists in America. Americans do, however, expect a 100% effort to do so, and should demand the resignation of anyone who considers less than 100% effort to be acceptable. What Americans have wanted all along is an honest, adequately funded, and consistently applied effort to enforce the illegal immigration laws already in place. What Americans did not request was for someone in Washington to unilaterally decide that it was not in America’s best interest to actually enforce immigration laws. That decision is not Chertoff’s to make, nor is it the president’s responsibility to interfere with a law enforcement function. Does America want a Homeland Security Secretary who thinks his tasks are impossible? Should Homeland Security be in the business of “bowing to reality” or creating reality through determined application of the law?

The number has reached 12-20 million precisely because the government has not enforced existing laws. The goal of law enforcement is often as much to produce societal deterrence as it is to punish individual offenders. By granting previous amnesty (1986) and then not enforcing existing laws, no deterrent was ever applied and now officials like Chertoff are unwilling even to try enforcement. Instead of rolling up his shirtsleeves and going to work, Chertoff wants to roll up his shirtsleeves and wash his hands of that 12-20 million figure.

It has been claimed that there is not enough money to hire additional Customs, Border Patrol, or Immigration and Citizenship personnel to handle any large scale deportation effort. Yet Chertoff is convinced that he could secure additional funds and staff to handle performing 12-20 million background checks in a gradual process to legalize (amnesty) the illegals he claims it impossible to deport. Hugh Hewitt recently interviewed Chertoff and the Homeland Security Secretary made it quite clear that while he is willing to gradually legalize illegal aliens, he will not consider gradually deporting those same aliens:

HH: I know it’s a little more prosaic what I’m getting to, Mr. Secretary, which is you’ve got 12 million applications.

MC: Right.

HH: Who’s physically going to pick them up and handle them? Which department’s going to do that?

MC: We’re going to use…DHS will collect the applications, collect the fingerprints. The process of background checking then will occur in cooperation with the FBI and its databases, our databases, and all the databases that are currently kept in the terrorist screening center.

HH: And have you allocated staff time? I mean, an 11 million, if it’s on the low end, 12 million investigations, 12 million interviews, have you got an analysis of where that’s going to funnel to, and who’s actually going to do that work, because from my time in the government as deputy director of OPM running the securities investigation, it takes days to do a decent investigation, and this is all going to hit at once. I don’t know where the people are.

MC: Well, it’s not going to hit at once. It will hit over a period of time, because there will be an enrollment period. And as I know you know, Hugh, obviously, we’re not going to be doing background checks of the kind that you do for a top security clearance. What we’re going to be doing is running fingerprints and names against various databases, which is a process we currently use, for example, in screening people who get visas to come into the country for all kinds of purposes. So we already do millions of these through our existing processes. There’s no question we’re going to need money to increase the staff and the capability for these 12 million. But I want to put it in perspective by saying that we process 80 million air travelers every year coming through our airports, so we already deal with a very large volume of people that we are screening to let them come into the country legally.

It is incredible that the head of Homeland Security would ask for additional funding and staff to help streamline the legalization process but adopts a “bowing to reality” posture when it comes to enforcement of current laws. Chertoff attempted to cast the debate in compassionate terms, citing examples of federal raids that resulted in a press conference, some token arrests, and news coverage of crying children. Americans should reject this clouding of the issue. Raids and deportations are rare, not because of the negative press or crying children, but for reasons Ann Coulter captured most effectively:

The people who make arguments about "jobs Americans won't do" are never in a line of work where unskilled immigrants can compete with them. Liberals love to strike generous, humanitarian poses with other people's lives.

Something tells me the immigration debate would be different if we were importing millions of politicians or Hollywood agents. You lose your job, while I keep my job at the Endeavor agency, my Senate seat, my professorship, my editorial position or my presidency. (And I get a maid!)

The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants – unlike you lazy Americans – are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us chip in for the immigrants' schooling, food and health care.

These great lovers of the downtrodden – the downtrodden trimming their hedges – pretend to believe that their gardeners' children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but 1) they don't believe that; and 2) if it happened, they'd lose their gardeners.

The Bush administration is busy casting verbal stones at those who oppose the current immigration “reform” bill, but there should be no surprise that Americans are angered by the proposed legislation. The federal government has proven unwilling to enforce existing laws for decades, but now a new bill with new laws will magically be enforced and seal up our borders? Rather than granting amnesty, government should work to earn our trust by securing America’s borders, not just the one with Mexico, and then enforcing laws already in place. “Sanctuary cities” became sanctuaries because local law enforcement encountered illegal aliens, reported them to INS-CBP-ICE, and then waited eternally for a response or sign of interest in taking custody of the alien. When those agencies demonstrated no effort to take immigration status seriously, local governments adopted the same stance.

Illegal immigration, like Iraq, is a difficult national security situation. The president refuses to “cut and run” in Iraq, but amnesty would be to illegal immigration what surrender in defeat would be to Iraq. America can afford neither.