Republicans on Immigration
The New York Times has a recent piece focusing on the huge hole in the Republican position on immigration — namely what happens to the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in this country under their plan.
Except for Mr. McCain, the Republican candidates have skirted the issue or, worse, embraced the restrictionist approach known as “attrition.” That amounts to relentlessly tightening the screws in workplaces and homes until illegal immigrants magically, voluntarily disappear.
Making it work would require far more government intrusion into daily lives, with exponential increases in workplace raids and deportations. It would mean constant ID checks for everyone — citizens, too — with immigration police at the federal, state and local levels. It would mean enlisting bureaucrats and snoops to keep an eye on landlords, renters, laborers, loiterers and everyone who uses government services or gets sick.
Worst of all, it’s weak on law and order. It is a free pass to the violent criminals we urgently need to hunt down and deport. Attrition means waiting until we stumble across bad people hiding in the vast illegal immigrant haystack. Comprehensive reform, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows, shrinks the haystack.
Do you know what I think? I don’t think they’re going to do anything except pass weak, token, piecemeal measures and then pick up the pieces when they have disastrous consequences. DHS is already facing the fallout from this past summer’s doubling of application fees, which resulted in 1.5 million additional citizenship applications filed in a one-year period without the necessary infrastructure in place to process those applications!
The immigration agency’s workload has nearly doubled, Aytes said, with 1.4 million naturalization applications arriving from October 2006 to September 2007, compared with 731,000 applications the year before. Between July and September of this year alone, USCIS received 560,000 applications, he said.
The number of green-card-related applications surged to 876,000 in fiscal 2007, from 497,000 in fiscal 2006, he said. At one point this summer, USCIS had 1 million applications and checks waiting to be opened and acknowledged, Aytes said, a backlog that now stands at 235,000. Overall, USCIS received 7.7 million applications for all types of immigration benefits, up from 6.3 million.
Of course they managed to deny Chapin’s citizenship two months after the new fees took effect. One more off the desk…
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Ah, immigration. The reason nobody is commenting on it right now is because nobody can come up with a solution that isn’t unpalatable to some segment of their voting base. McCain doesn’t give a damn about his voting base . . the others are too scared to say much of anything about it. Eh . . it’s only 12 million people, right?