January 23, 2007

Senators on Swift raid; "designed to fail"; Chertoff "not in the business of doing amnesty"

[See the first update] Reading about yesterday's Senate meeting where they discussed the recent immigration raids at Swift and Company locations in various states left me feeling like I was having an intense spell of vertigo inside a House of Mirrors. Who's doing what and what are they trying to get at here?

Were the Swift raids a setup by the Bush administration designed to provoke outcry from far-lefties and from various representatives and thereby encourage "comprehensive immigration reform"? Are the Senators at this meeting in the pocket of pork producers?

The lawmakers said they'd heard worries from companies that use a government document-verification system that's intended to screen out illegal workers.

Participation in the program "in good faith" immunizes companies against prosecution for hiring illegal immigrants. But the widely known loopholes in the system – in which companies share their records with the government – have also made thousands of employers susceptible to costly shutdowns of their facilities.

Is the Bush administration trying to scuttle the Basic Pilot Program, perhaps to be replaced with something else?

The senators said they would push for a better approach to verifying workers' identities by pushing to remove restrictions that inhibit some federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service, from working with immigration officials due to privacy concerns or other interests.

That sounds like a good thing, but are there downsides such as one might expect from proposals being pushed by those who support massive immigration?

Michael Chertoff of the DHS showed up and uttered one of his most ludicrous comments yet:

"It is not an acceptable alternative for us to say that if a company is cooperating they can continue to use illegal workers... That would be in effect an amnesty, and we are not in the business of doing amnesty."

And, Sen. John Cornyn said:

"I can't imagine a system that would be better designed to fail than our current laws."

To a certain extent that might be true, but unfortunately his solution is a massive amnesty.

UPDATE: My vertigo is not helped with this post from John Hawkins in which he recounts a Tony Snow teleconference he attended today:

With immigration, we're being aggressive on the borders. We're catching heat for being too tough on businesses that hire illegals. We're building fences. We're putting state of the art technology on the border. We got rid of catch and release. We get the message. But, what's the best way to deal with the people who are here? We have laid out the most difficult path to citizenship in history. They have to pay taxes and social security, they can't break the law, they have to keep working. They have to master the English language, pay back taxes and fines. We want to work with the base on this and we think we don't get enough credit for what we do right on illegal immigration.

Posted to Immigration2007a at January 23, 2007 10:42 AM

Comments

Immigration has been in a tailspin since 1965. What else is new? That government can't figure out that THEY are the source of the problem? Halt all immigration, NOW. Deport the criminals, NOW. Seal the borders, NOW. Argue about who was driving when we struck the iceberg, or how big the hole is, later. Save the sinking ship of state, first.

As to Chertoff and the employers, ignorance of the law is no excuse for everyone else. Jail, fines, or prison are in order for your infractions and evasions of the intent of the law.
Governments job is to write the law and then ENFORCE it. If boosh, chertoff and gonzales can't handle part two...step aside and we will elect someone who can.

Posted by: Jeebie at January 23, 2007 01:09 PM