We read that dire immigration threats will soon be on the Senate floor for a “debate”—actually an exchange of slogans among ignoramuses and posturers, mixed with input from a few adults like Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Robert Byrd (D-WVA)—to start this coming Monday, May 14th. (“Reid sets immigration bill debate,” Washington Times, May 5th.)
Meanwhile, forces of the Treason Lobby (sporting the misleading official name “Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform”) are geared up to flood the Senate with phone calls from the astroturf (i.e phony grassroots) this week. Plans and talking points for their “NATIONAL SENATE CALL-IN DAYS” are out there for all to see.
As they wrote in an email alert:
“We have extended our National Call-In Days to include all of next week! We want to send a strong message every day to all of our Senators. We thank you for all the calls you have made over the last few months but we need to keep our numbers high. The more calls you can make over the next week, the stronger our message becomes. So, don’t be shy! Call as much as you can in support of comprehensive immigration reform.”
Well, we shouldn’t be shy either. They provide a dedicated 800 number—1-800-417-7666—for connecting to one’s senators. I tried it out Sunday and, sure enough, after listening to a brief bout of their babble, I was connected. alternately, to the DC offices of Montana’s Max Baucus and Jon Tester. (Baucus’s answering machine picked up. Tester’s phone rang and rang.)
Of course, phone calls are cheap nowadays, so using their phone system to press our message isn’t necessarily a financial boon for us. But it has to cost them something, and if enough of us take advantage of it, we might load their system down significantly. Plus this saves us the bother of looking up our senators’ phone numbers!
What to say when you call your senators’ offices? Calls can be quite brief. You could make the basic point that “comprehensive immigration reform” is a euphemism for comprehensive capitulation to Mexico. You could note that all the bills being bruited about amount to “No illegal alien left behind.” Or you can mix-and-match among the items I’ve assembled below from a wide range of sources. Some of them I could attribute, but many of them I couldn’t, so I won’t provide any citations. I figure that all of their authors would want them widely used in our worthy cause!
1. Once you’ve imported foreigners to do all those jobs, what are Americans looking for work going to do? I mean, we can’t all get jobs as Congressional staffers.
2. Should any Senate staffer continue to insist that their boss “opposes amnesty” but will vote for the “compromise” (anything that allows illegal aliens to remain in the US is amnesty), use Judge Judy’s famous reply: “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
3. Bush calls this the “rational middle ground” because it recognizes the difference between “an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years.” Yes, the difference is: One of them has been breaking the law longer. If our criminal justice system used that logic, a single murder would get you the death penalty, while serial killers would get probation.
4. The place to fix the problems of Mexico is in Mexico. The people to do that work are Mexicans. Exporting Mexican poverty, crime and disease to the United States serves only to reduce the quality of life here by accelerating the destruction of our social system.
5. We will never stop illegal immigration until we start denying these people that which they broke the law to obtain: Residency in the United States.
6. The Mexican government’s demands on the U.S. regarding immigration numbers and amnesty for illegal aliens are undoubtedly the greatest hypocrisy by any group of people on any subject in the history of the world.
7. Nor is there any evidence that “we have a shortage of essential workers.” Anyone who has taken a course in introductory economics knows that labor shortages cause wages to rise. Instead, wages have been falling for the past quarter-century, especially for workers without a high school degree. The unemployment rate among high school drop-outs is over twice as high as it is among the rest of the labor force. That, too, is the opposite of what one would expect if there is a “labor shortage” in the low-skill occupations that attract illegal immigrants.
8. We cannot save the world, but we can destroy our country if we fail to act.
9. Calling an illegal alien an “undocumented immigrant” is like calling a drug dealer an “unlicensed pharmacist.”
10. DHS Secretary Chertoff insists on building a “virtual fence,” which will be worth, well, virtually nothing. Perhaps if we paid Chertoff’s salary in “virtual dollars,” he would understand the difference.
11. If the Senate actually does this foul deed to the American people, then I think it’ll be time to start hiring foreigners as U.S. Senators. We could hardly do worse. And they’d fire the existing office staffs and bring in more people like themselves for those jobs. You can count on that.
12. Congress and the President are working to fix our immigration problems by flooding us with enough immigrants to ruin the country, so that immigration will naturally turn itself off.
Charles T. writes:
I agree with Paul Nachman about calling our Republican senators on the immigration issue. Yesterday I did just that.
The Senate staffer I talked with was pleasant, informed, and actually discussed the issue with me—unlike so many other staffers who are not in the know.
He pointed to the Hutchison-Pence immigration bill being touted as bridging the divide in the Republican party on this issue. Summarizing, the bill allows for 1) security measures at the border , 2) SELF—DEPORTATION of illegal immigrants to their home countries over a two year period, 3) then the process of applying to work in the US for a specified amount of time, complete with tamper proof ID cards, and a long 17 year path to citizenship.
The tone changed slightly when the staffer said emphatically that agricultural and construction concerns were telling the senator they could not fill the jobs in their respective industries. I pointed out that the jobs would be filled if the various industries would pay their American workers a fair wage and that these industries wanted and hired low priced alien labor. Silence. Then……uh…….well…….. I continued by asking if he had heard about the chicken ranch in Georgia that lost all of it’s illegal alien labor in a raid by the INS and subsequently filled all of the positions by hiring American workers at a higher labor rate. He stated that he had heard of this. He countered by saying that documented foreign labor would be paid at the same minimum wage rate as Americans. I countered by stating most industries want the alien labor because they can pay them much less than Americans and one of my major concerns was that a flood of low-priced labor from Mexico, either legal or illegal, would continue to destroy the American working class. This proposal will flood the US market with a surplus of labor and will continue to drive wages down—a trend—as I pointed out to the staffer—that has been continuing for 25 years. With that statistic, he thanked me for calling and that he would pass my comments on to the senator.
Well. The staffer in his honesty went right to the heart of the matter. Many of our Republicans are simply out to please big business. Nor do they care about the American working class. If we want our Republican senators to listen to us, we are going to have scream much louder than the other cheerleaders with the big megaphones. Otherwise, we will just have to vote them out, and we all know how hard that is.
As for my thoughts on the bill:
1. Aliens are not going to self-deport. There is no enforcement now to speak of.
2. Tamper proof ID cards will be tampered with, bought and sold—and our government will turn a blind eye to this practice.
3. The borders have not been secured after years of demands from the electorate. I doubt Hutchison-Pence would change this at all. The government can ignore this provision by simply refusing to fund it, as they have thwarted the will of the electorate so many times in the past.
Call your senators. Ask them directly if they want to destroy the American working middle class. The answer you get will be very interesting.