Bush’s fanatical immigration stand hurting him on other fronts

According to the Washington Times, President Bush’s unyielding insistence on open borders “is beginning to erode lawmakers’ support for such presidential policy priorities as trade deals and extending the Patriot Act.” Right on. The president, who is mandated under Article II of the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” refuses to enforce our most basic laws preventing illegal immigration into the United States, particularly from Latin America, yet he expects Congress, under the increasingly open-border conditions that he has permitted and encouraged, to form open trading relations between the U.S. and Latin American countries, and to legislate ever-more intrusive security measures on Americans. A group of Republican lawmakers are saying, “no mas.” They wrote a letter to the president recently in which they argued, “Asking for such advanced tools as roving wiretaps while ignoring basic border security is like asking for the installation of a state-of-the-art video surveillance system in a house without door locks—it simply doesn’t make sense.” Such reasoning is unlikely to sway the president, whose commitment to the open-borders idea is absolute. Furthermore, when we consider his recent stunning remark that “my great friend Al Gonzales” should not be criticized as a potential Supreme Court pick, even though Gonzales is not the type of conservative that Bush himself promised to nominate (in other words, Gonzales is above politics because of his friendship with the president, as though he were a member of Bush’s family rather than a political appointee), it does start to become a reasonable supposition, as some have argued at VFR, that what drives Bush to embrace open borders and multiculturalism is a personal loyalty to Hispanics and foreigners in preference to his historic countrymen.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2005 11:43 AM | Send