Thompson advocates attrition

Fred Thompson on Mark Levin’s show last week spoke favorably of attrition through enforcement. Here are excepts:

FDT: Part of our problem is the inducements that we give folks here. You know, I’ve pointed out that I don’t think that we have to have a choice between amnesty on the one hand, and trying to arrest everybody and put them on buses. Practically, that’s not going to happen. But you don’t have to choose between those if you can have attrition through enforcement, if we enforce the law with regard to employers—and we have an eligibility verification system out there that’s voluntary; it should be mandatory—if we made arrests, if we reduced the inducements that especially some of these states give—some of which is against federal law incidentally, and some of that is not being enforced—if we talked a little straighter to Mexico—and the fact that their national policy is dependent upon the exportation of their own citizens—for their own economic benefit, sending money back and so forth—there are plenty of things that we could do, I think, to take care of this problem. If we could do it, but part of it has to do though with the states that are doing these things.

Thompson also indicated that our legal immigration system needs to focus more on skills and to be “more intelligent,” which, he says, includes the right to open the door when it suits our needs and to close the door when it suits our needs. Close the door! You mean we’re not obligated by God and fate and the Declaration of Independence to leave our door wide open forever! The man’s a radical.

FDT: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Peggy Noonan wrote an article not too long ago, and she said, “I think about what my grandmother would say. And I think my grand mother would say, “Let’s have a wall, but let’s have a door in the wall.’” Taking off from that, it occurred to me that we control the door. We have a right to open the door and decide when we want to, how long we want it to be open, who goes through the door, and then we have a right to close it. And that’s what you’re talking about, and the H1B Visas and so forth. There’s no question that we need a more intelligent approach in terms of immigration in general. Oviously, we need good, solid potential citizens, folks coming in here as legal residents, and we need highly skilled people. We’re competing now in a global economy with some of the most skilled people imaginable coming from some of the places in the world that didn’t used to be competitive. Well, they’re very competitive now. They’re coming over here and studying at our universities and going back home and doing remarkable things. Absolutely, we’ve got to open that door in responsible ways, but have the right to close it when we want to.

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George writes:

I hope this doesn’t get people’s hopes up too much, he might waffle later, and his immigration record was rated a C, primarily because he voted to increase “skilled” visas.

Nor is he a race realist (of course, white voters aren’t ready, yet, to vote for one).

On the other hand, when he was in the Senate from 1995-2003, immigration wasn’t much of an issue, in fact I wasn’t focused on the immigration issue until around 2002 because I was still getting my news from mainstream media like CNN.

Overall, I think he has the potential to put up a sane (but not perfect from our perspective) immigration policy.

He hasn’t spent his whole life in Washington, which is good, and his overall record in the Senate was pretty reliably conservative, especially on guns, state rights, and government oversight of corruption.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 25, 2007 05:53 PM | Send