Tom Ridge just cost Bush my vote next year
 

This entire, god-damn faux-conservative administration can rot in hell if they legalize even one illegal immigrant! :mad:

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Tom Ridge: Time to legalize illegals
Homeland security chief wants to 'come to grips' with millions of migrants in U.S.

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

The United States should legalize millions of illegal immigrants living in the country, said Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in a speech in Miami yesterday.

<center>http://w115.wnd.com/images2/ridge.jpg
Tom Ridge</center>

"The bottom line is, as a country we have to come to grips with the presence of 8 to 12 million illegals, afford them some kind of legal status some way, but also as a country decide what our immigration policy is and then enforce it," Ridge said, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Ridge was speaking at a town hall meeting at Miami-Dade Community College, the second forum in a national series organized by the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government.

The group is seeking to develop homeland security recommendations for various levels of government and the public, the Florida paper said.

Responding to a question from the audience of about 300, Ridge said he thinks a consensus is building that it is time to address the situation of illegal immigrants, who, he said, contribute to the country and pay taxes.

A growing number of bills would give residency to some of those people he said, adding one that requires them to leave the country before applying for legal status is "not workable."

"I'm not saying make them citizens, because they violated the law to get here," he said, according to the Sun-Sentinel. "So you don't reward that type of conduct by turning over a citizenship certificate. You determine how you can legalize their presence, then, as a country, you make a decision that from this day forward, from this day forward, this is the process of entry, and if you violate that process of entry we have the resources to cope with it."

Ridge praised Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the state's investment in homeland security, amounting to $403 million this year. Most of those funds comes from the $29.4 billion allotted by the federal government for domestic security.

Bush told a national security advisory council yesterday, "In the event of a disaster, a terrorist attack of any kind, ... today we are better trained, better equipped, better coordinated," the Sun-Sentinel reported.

The paper said the town hall audience was asked if they felt safer than they did a year ago. Fifty-two percent answered yes, 28 percent said no, and 20 percent said they felt the same
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LINK

While normally I'd say wait until something is DONE, everyone is sucking up to the latino vote so it will most likely happen.

Pisses me off too.

BoCo I think you missed something in this. He didn't imply giving them citizenship or anything even approaching that point - he didn't imply that the country should give them the blanket whatever in the hell it was that California did in giving them the right to vote. He just said that, basically we need to know who they are. I deal with a lot of illegals everyday in a business that requires identification as proof of age - many of them don't even have this. We are either unable or unwilling to monitor our borders - they are open on all fronts and all of the illegals aren't from Mexico - in our part of the country we have a large number of Mennonites who are in here from Canada. There needs to be some way to identify these people, to know who they are, and why they are here - they definitely know about all of the entitlement programs and every known government handout that there is - they can at least have some status that would compel them to pay taxes etc.

I think this will end with citizenship, it will be the next logical argument.

Re: Tom Ridge just cost Bush my vote next year
 

You don't reward their disregard for our laws or their disrespect for our sovereignty, but you grant them legal status?

:confused:

When Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants, the number of individuals who illegally entered the country ballooned. He set a dangerous precedent and weakened the sanctity of our borders.

Today, the latin population in the US is the single largest minority, and both parties are actively trying to court this huge segment of the electorate. The party that gets credit for granting illegal immigrants legal status (and voting rights) will stand to instantly gain a huge new base of support.

Its pandering, and its coming from all sides, as the latin population has not yet shown any strong allegiance or loyalty to either party on ideological grounds.

The very first thing any of them did in this country was commit a Federal crime. They deserve to be imprisoned or sent home. It's these people who are bringing you and your family the flu, T.B. and other viruses and diseases, and they are destroying the economy through the welfare system which most of them take advantage of.

They deserve absolutely NO legal status or legal representation of any kind.

Crime? Entry with out inspection is a Federal Crime to about the same extent that getting a parking ticket is-technically a misdemenor, handled with civil penalities, not criminal ones. Meh.

As we're out of money to build new prisons deporting those who don't meet existing refugee guidelines may be an option. However the rest of your rant is baseless.

2Wolves

Goodness, the vitriol! This is the kind of rabid xenophobia that has accompanied every wave of immigrants to this country. Go meet a few of them who are working three jobs and eating one meal a day, and living with 8 other people in a 2-bedroom apartment so they can send money home to their family. They work fucking hard for things most Americans take completely for granted. Most of them are paid under the table, so they don't pay taxes, but most of them don't take advantage of the welfare services that taxes pay for because they're afraid of being caught and deported. Is illegal entry a bit of a problem? Yes. Are they to blame for spreading disease and ruining the American economy? Please. Check your facts, and then check your bigotry at the door.

My quote of the week applies to this thread:

Native Americans have been fighting terrorism since 1492.

The fact of the matter is that the US needs immigrants in order to grow its economy. As it stands the US (as is true of much of the west) is experiencing negative growth in birth rate. Immigrants do much to reverse this.

Add to the fact that second gen children are often over achievers.

I'm not even going to address your rampant xenophobia as I feel lurkette has made the point I would have made.

Pandering or no, this is the first thing I have heard from Tom Ridge that makes a lick of good sense. If it makes conservatives vote for Buchanan, so much the better. Maybe they'll balance out Nader.

True, illegal immigrants break a federal law by being here, but I wouldn't hold it against someone who broke a bad law. It's not as if the bulk of illegal immigrants are taking jobs that Americans want to do. If they are adversely effecting the job market it is purely by keeping wages low in critical areas, resulting in the economy becoming dependant on them. That's bad, but trying to cut off the flow does not work. It's a matter of commitment. Illegal immigrants want to be here more than we as a country want to keep them out. This is as it should be. Being here is their number one priority. To stop them, it would need to be ours, and there are so many other things that should rank higher (even things that BoCo and I could agree on, I am sure. Anti-terrorism, as a f'rinstance.)

So how to solve this? Well, Ridge has one way: Register the ones that are here under an amnesty program, and (and he isn't going to talk about this step so close to an election) turn it into a regularized guest worker program when it wouldn't affect Shrub's re-election. I realize that this might be anathema, but if you agree with free trade, this is just a logical extension. Production already moves freely. The Labor stays in one place. Wouldn't it make sense to hold the production facilities in place and move the labor? It doesn't necessarily make any more sense, but it surely makes just as much.

My solution would be more radical (big surprise there), and, as politics is the art of the possible, probably more in the realm of science fiction than politics. Either one of the following:

Give Aztlan back to Mexico. Texas, Arizona, Nevada, most of California, Utah, and New Mexico, and Parts of Colorado. If they want to be here that badly, make here there.

Annex Mexico. Do it diplomatically, transferring sovreignty on a state by state basis from the north of the country to the south, say, one state every 5 to 10 years. After Mexico, keep moving south if conditions allow.

To complement either of these plans (and Ridge's too) we absolutely must start doing a much more thorough job in checking cargo coming into our ports of entry. It's what, less that 2% checked at the moment? It needs to be better than 50% to put any damper on traffic in contraband, human or otherwise. It really should be up above 90% to prevent terrorism.

Would it cost a staggering amount? Sure, but it could be passed on as security fees, which ought to make the WTO have a shit hemmorhage that they can do nothing about, and can be manipulated in such a way that it would amount to de facto tarriffs. If it blows up one nuke in the Gulf instead of Houston, it's worth it.

I hope I'm not taking this out of context but I disagree with your logic on this point. Texas won it's own independence form Mexico in 1836. Santa Anna surrendered. Do you want to give the East Coast back to England. Texas was an independent nation until 1845 - Texas encompassed a large portion of the geography you're suggesting the US give away. Annexing Mexico would probably be more to Mexico's advantage than it would be to ours - they have as many, or more problems on their southern borders than we do.

Trash the welfare system and I'd be all for open borders.

You know, I don't think the illegal immigrants are providing enough of a benefit for me. Maybe if I got a nickel for every one of them we legalized, then I would be for it. But as it stands right now, I just don't stand to see enough of a personal incentive for me to support them. After all, I was born here! So after all that hard work to benefit from the bounty of the US, I deserve to look down on people who want to come in too!

On the plus side, if Ridge costs Bush votes, maybe he wasn't such a jackass governor after all.

Yes well, let's take a step back and count to ten.
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.

You know where I am on the spectrum. On this issue, however, I'll stand with the human/political/economic realities of the relationships that exist between the US and its neighboring countries. I'll acknowledge those realities, weigh them, and call them - on balance - positive. And I would state my agreement with Tom Ridge's recent statements on the matter. It is the forward-looking view and it is inevitable and best for all concerned.

Well, do you eat food?

Odds are, an illegal immigrant was involved in the planting, and harvesting of that food.

So unless you want to pay about triple what you pay now to eat, you might want to reconsider your stance.

While i understand the rant, one can't help but wonder what would happen if they got rid of all 18 million illegals. Bet you dollars to doughnuts 99% of them aren't on welfare, they are out there hustling a job or two or three.

I never fault a guy who works.

james t, I think Kadath was being facetious. (At least I hope he was!)

I think you are right.

whoops

Nuts, sorry. I forgot that people aren't inside my head. I was indeed being facetitious. Thanks for the catch, lurkette.

What's the problem with legalizing illegals? Seriously, I don't get it, we want to legalize them, because we want people to come here. Just do the process right and there should be no problem. I, one of the most conservative people on the TFP, think this is great, the main goal should be to legalize them (we can keep tabs on them with the PATRIOT Act even better!/sarcasm). Get them into the workforce, boost our economy, this'll be great. And as Chavos said, it's just civil penalties, yes the law is in the United States Code, but it is like a misdemeanor, just legalize them after they go thru the correct process and treat them as citizens as soon as they get their citizenship, I really don't see a problem with this.

Since I live in Arizona and do not want to move or become a Mexican citizen and I think the concept of annexing Mexico is ludicrous, the only way to deal with this issue is a comprehensive overhaul of immigration which will have to include some form of "earned citizenship" and a guest worker program. This is an extraordinarily complex issue, and while I do not think Ridge has it exactly right, I am encouraged that he is looking at alternatives.

Liquor Dealer, you're right, of course. I was lumping Texas in there for other reasons which my political bent ought to render perfectly transparent. :)

Ustwo, What can one say to that but I would be pleased as punch to have folks holding that perfectly valid, but to me morally repugnant opinion continute to fight tooth and nail against any rationalization of the immigration laws. I hope it is understood here that, when I say it makes holders of that opinion easier to marginalize, I mean it from a public relations standpoint only, I intend to make you aware of the possibility rather than inflame or even to argue it, and I will not mention it again in this thread.

Work calls. More by edit later, I think.