Gingrich’s plan for illegal aliens—and Romney’s

On November 23 Mickey Kaus subjected Newt Gingrich’s illegal immigration plan to close analysis and showed how it boils down to amnesty. Here, to get at Kaus’s key points, are the last three of the blog entry’s six numbered sections:

4) [The impression that Gingrich is aiming at amnesty] is reinforced by his additional embrace of the Krieble Foundation’s “red card” proposal. This plan would apparently grant immediate, legal, non-citizen status to all illegals in the country who went home and obtained an easy-to-get guest worker pass from an employer. There would be no “artificial limits on their number”—in effect, as many red cards would be issued as employers demanded. [LA replies: Echoes of President Bush’s proposal that America should allow in as many immigrants as there are “jobs” here, i.e., U.S. salaries drop to the level acceptable to the entire working population of the planet earth, an unlimited number of whom will come here.] The catch is that in theory a red card holder would then be required to re-return “home” when his or her guest worker pass expired in order to obtain another one. How many of today’s illegals—especially the one’s who’ve been here “for 25 years”—are going to take this deal? If they don’t, will Gingrich immediately offer them Selective-Service style review? [LA adds: Kaus is referring to Gingrich’s statement that “you need something like a World War II Selective Service Board that, frankly, reviews the people who are here,” i.e., considers all illegals present in the U.S. for possible legalization.]

5) For recent and future illegal immigrants, the key apparent features of the Krieble Plan—the unlimited number of “red cards” and the ease of obtaining them—effectively means something close to open borders. Millions of impoverished workers now living abroad could flood the U.S. labor market legally. Krieble’s plan is similar to the Papoon for President drug plan, which would “eliminate all illegal drugs” by simply making them all legal. Krieble similarly ends illegal immigration effectively legalizing it (“a country where there’s no more illegality,” as Gingrich put it).

And these unlimited legal “red card” workers would all return home, of course, right? And they’d be happy with second-class, non-citizenship status?

6) In embracing the Krieble plan, Gingrich fatally abandons the logic of “enforcement first,” which is that if you secure the border you can eventually have an amnesty—because the secure border will then be able to keep out future waves of wannabe illegals whom the amnesty will inevitably attract. If you really have a secure border, after all, you don’t need the unlimited Krieble red card plan, which would inevitably have a depressing effect on American wages (especially for the unskilled). Instead, the secure border would allow a numerically limited guestworker program, big enough to serve employers without having a major effect on wages, capable of being increased or decreased as market conditions changed.

Why would Gingrich want to control the border and then allow open borders—effectively unlimited unskilled future immigration—anyway? The main point of “controlling the border” is to prevent that.

[end of Kaus blog entry.]

The obvious answer to Kaus’s question is that the border control which is the first part of Gingrich’s plan is a false front, essentially identical to every other false front that has been put forward by amnesty supporters, particularly Republicans, at least since the debate on Bush’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2006. No matter how many times these amnesty proponents who loudly and indignantly insist that they are not pushing amnesty (remember McCain in 2007?) are exposed as the liars they are, they keep trying yet again. After all, what else can they do? (1) They are absolutely committed to amnesty, but (2) they know that the Republican electorate absolutely opposes amnesty, and (3) they have absolute contempt for the American people and particularly for white conservative Republicans whom they seek to replace with Third-Worlders, so (4) they keep coming up with ever more elaborate lies, hoping that this time the lie will work.

Here, from Newt and Callista’s Exploratory Presidential Campaign site earlier in the year, are the Gingriches posed in front of their ideal nonwhite and female American population, with only one (wimpy looking) white man in sight:

And, by the way, I think that what I’ve said about Gingrich’s illegal immigration policy is also true, though more subtly, of Romney’s. In last night’s debate, as he has done before, Romney incoherently mixed his straightforward-sounding statement that if illegals want to get legal they’ve got to go back to their country and get on line with everyone else, with the suspicious-sounding statement that before going home they should “register.” What is this “registration,” other than something analogous to the Kriegle plan, in which an illegal alien present in the United States is allowed to register as an illegal alien who is about to go home in order to get immediate permission to return legally as a “temporary guest worker?” If a person is to go home and get on the back of the line, why would he “register” in the U.S. before doing so?

UPDATE: I cannot find a transcript yet for last night’s debate, but I see that the language I thought I heard Romney use last night about illegal aliens “registering” was also used by him in an interview last month, which along with his other ambiguous statements on the issue, is analyzed and duly puzzled over by Mark Murray of NBC. Romney said in a November 29 interview on Fox News:

“Those people that are here illegally today should have the opportunity to register and to have their status identified. And those individuals should get in line with everyone else that’s in line legally. They should not be placed ahead of the line. They should instead go at the back of the line. And they should not be allowed to stay in this country and be given permanent residency or citizenship merely because they’ve come here illegally.”

This is the sheerest contradiction, with each of the two key parts of the statement, about “registering” and about “getting on the back of the line with everyone else,” making nonsense of the other. If Romney simply means (which he evidently wants people to believe he means) that illegal aliens must return home and apply to get into the U.S. like anyone else, that would be all that he would need to say. Leave the U.S., and then apply to get in legally. End of subject. Instead, he speaks of the need to give them an “opportunity to register and have their status identified.” Meaning what? Meaning that the U.S. government creates a program whereby illegal aliens’ status as illegal aliens is being identified in advance of their returning to their home country to seek legal entry into the U.S. So obviously they are not getting on line with everyone else. Before “getting on line,” they have already registered and established a certain status with the U.S. government as persons who seek to have their currently illegal status changed to legal status.

I have previously, with qualifications, defended Romney from the charge of being a liar, arguing that he approaches issues as a management consultant seeking to solve practical problems rather than as a person who is focused on truth or the avoidance of truth. But his above statement to Fox News (along his other similar statements on illegal immigration dating back to 2007 which are quoted in full at the linked msnbc.com entry) shows him engaged in a deliberate, devious attempt to fool people on a hugely consequential matter. Such an act I can describe only as lying.

- end of initial entry -

Stephen T. writes:

Mickey Kaus wonders if red card immigrants would be “happy with second-class, non-citizenship status?” Well, Mexicans would be euphoric. Perhaps Kaus thinks they are all itching to rise up and agitate for the right to wave little American flags in a citizenship ceremony. But illegal Mexicans have never demanded American citizenship. Bush/Rove Republicans, National Review readers and Midwesterners on the Christian right still don’t get it: Mexicans here illegally have no interest in becoming American citizens. Instead, they demand AMNESTY. The Mestizo Mexican culture learned long ago that they prevail not by meticulously filling out paperwork and slowly moving up waiting lists and becoming “legal” as defined by some book on a shelf written by someone from northern Europe. Mexicans know they prevail simply by getting here by the tens of millions and being allowed to stay, produce babies and claim territory by occupation. The successful, history-making conversion of the American Southwest into a degraded Third-World outpost of Mexico has been accomplished entirely by NON-U.S. citizens from Mexico (soon to be known as Gingrich Red Card holders.) As long as you can swamp a country with tens of millions of immigrants and blot out its existing culture with this force of numbers, who cares about this abstract Anglo concept of “legal citizenship”? All you need is a red card.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 16, 2011 07:58 AM | Send