The Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this week that it completed the 500th mile of the congressionally mandated border fence — 170 miles short of its goal. In 2005, then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for the fence. President-elect Obama now says “he wants to evaluate what’s working on the border as he considers whether to continue building the 670 miles of fencing.” While Obama undertakes this evaluation, he should remember that there is no silver-bullet remedy for our nation’s failed immigration policies. Illegal immigrants are straining federal and state budgets. …
Liberals and their pro-amnesty allies in the White House always try and frame the debate over illegal immigration as a binary choice: either we grant illegal immigrants already here citizenship or we spend massive resources forcibly deporting them. A study released yesterday by the Center for Immigration Studies provides more evidence that this is a false choice. Using data from monthly Census surveys as recent as May of this year, and then extrapolating from previous research, the report concluded that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States dropped …
Odds are the President will veto the defense supplemental spending measure. Not only did Congress junk up the bill with lots of provisions that are not even remotely related to war costs, many of them are down right injurious to the American economy and security. Case in point is Senator Diane Feinstein’s “Emergency Agriculture Relief” Act. Apparently, Feinstein’s agricultural emergency requires granting permanent legal residence to undocumented agricultural workers. Rewarding undocumented workers with an “amnesty” for violating U.S. immigration laws would likely only encourage wide-spread fraud, more illegal border crossings, …
Heritage Senior Research Fellow James Carafano wrote a piece for the Washington Post’s Think Tank Town feature today. Highlights include: “I’m in favor of immigration,” Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) once said. “But we also need rules.” Most Americans probably agree. So why are sensible rules so hard to come by? … An amnesty-first strategy formed the basis of the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli legislation, Washington’s last major attempt at an overhaul. Then, an estimated 3 million were “unlawfully present.” Now it’s easily five times that number. Rampant fraud and a tsunami of …
Once again the president said all the right words. Broken borders are no longer acceptable. Immigration laws have to be enforced. The sanctity of citizenship must be maintained. And America needs the right legal processes to get the workers it needs to fuel economic growth. The White House said the same last year, right before it signed off on a massive “comprehensive” immigration bill that would have achieved none of those goals. The president needed to do more to send the right the signal on the kinds of legislation that …
Sen. Jeff Sessions spoke at The Heritage Foundation today to outline a roadmap for presidential candidates on the issue of immigration reform. During his speech, Sessions outlined 15 questions to ask presidential candidates in order to determine their seriousness about fixing the immigration mess. Mark Krikorian has posted them at The Corner on NRO. We’ve pulled together some of the video highlights of Sessions’ speech, including the clip below on the subject of presidential leadership. The full presentation is available here. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4WqUnPJdZc[/youtube]
A favorite straw man of the pro-amnesty crowd is that the only alternative to granting illegal immigrants citizenship is mass deportation. As a front page USA Today story on the implementation of Oklahoma’s new ‘Taxpayer Citizen Protection Act’ shows, that is simply not true. Referred to simply as ‘1804’ by Sooners (a reference to the House Bill’s number in the state legislator), the bill mirrors recommendations by The Heritage Foundation on how states should respond to the federal government’s refusal to enforce national immigration laws. The law denies driver’s licenses …
