Lie, Lie Again!" (My commentary for the CAPS website)

On Tuesday, May 10^th
President Obama traveled to El Paso, Texas to deliver a speech about
immigration and why it is now time for Comprehensive Immigration Reform
(CIR).

Time and time again the citizens of our nation have opposed a
succession of previous efforts to enact such a wrong-headed program and
yet, once again, President Obama went to the border to push exactly
that.

The President made many outlandish statements in support of
legislation that, in my opinion, if enacted would do grave, irrevocable
harm to our nation’s security and decimate the American Dream.

The President resorted to the usual argument that the immigration system is broken.  It is
broken, but not the way he would have you believe. Our nation admits
more than 1.1 million lawful immigrants each and every year and the
level of fraud in the legal system is stratospheric.  But it is not just
the lawful immigration process that is dysfunctional.  Illegal aliens
who run our nation’s borders have no reliable way of establishing their
true identities; they are “undocumented.”  They haven’t a shred of
official documentation to attest to their true identities.  There is no
verifiable way to know their countries of citizenship, their true names,
their true backgrounds or their potential affiliation with criminal or
terrorist organizations.

By running our nation’s borders they create no record of their entry
into our country.  Most efforts aimed at identifying criminal aliens who
are convicted of felonies are identified as aliens by virtue of their
fingerprint records.  An illegal alien who is able to speak English and
lies about being a United States citizen stands a fairly good chance of
getting away with his false claim to United States citizenship. 
Furthermore, an alien who runs the border can claim to have entered the
United States as long ago as necessary in order to qualify for any
amnesty program the politician may concoct.  In part, this is how some
of the aliens who participated in the 1986 amnesty under the Immigration
Reform and Control Act (IRCA) were able to game the system.

Additionally during his remarks, the President unbelievably alleged
that the fence is complete.  Apparently he has yet to read the GAO
report which said that it would take 10 to 15 years to complete
the fence.  The President focused on the Southern border which
currently serves as little more than a speed bump to smugglers and the
human tsunami of illegal aliens. He then proceeded to ignore the
Northern border completely, where only a few percent of that huge border
is under “Operational control.”

The issue is not what the Republicans want, the issue is about what
the citizens of the United States want and what they should be entitled
to.  The Republicans certainly have not demonstrated a real desire to
control our nation’s borders or create an immigration system that has
real integrity and have often been as much as part of the problem as
have the Democrats.

Time and again the GAO and the Office of the Inspector General have
conducted investigations and issued reports about how USCIS (United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services) handles its mission of
adjudicating applications for various immigration benefits including the
conferring of resident alien status and even United States citizenship
upon aliens.  These reports made it abundantly clear that USCIS lacks to
the resources, the leadership, and the integrity to effectively carry
out its critically important missions now; and this is the very same
agency that would be called upon to implement CIR if our government is
sufficiently duplicitous to pass this legislative disaster.

Recently, New York State Senator Chuck Schumer called for the
implementation of a program that would require trains to implement the
equivalent of the “No Fly” list employed by airlines to keep potential
terrorists off airliners.  The fact of the matter is that an illegal
alien who has no reliable identity documents and has been using multiple
false names could easily acquire official identity documents under the
auspices of CIR and use the documents that USCIS would provide them to
acquire driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, library cards, credit
cards and other such documentation in order to embed themselves in our
country and defeat the sort of name-based system that Schumer is now
calling for.  Meanwhile, Schumer, the Chairman of the Senate Immigration
Subcommittee has been leading the charge for the creation of CIR.

The President attempted to create the illusion that the opposition to
CIR is about bigotry–attributing the resistance to a distrust of the
newcomers.  These statements are unfair and divisive.  Our nation is as
multiracial as any country on the planet and, in fact, there is more
diversity to be found among our citizens than in the citizenry most any
other country.  To dismiss the objections of the citizens of our nation
to CIR by playing the “race card” is insulting.

To commend Janet Napolitano, as the President did, for a job well
done in securing our borders is outrageous beyond words.  If our borders
were so secure, how did the Mexican cartels manage to infest more than
230 cities of our nation from coast to coast and border to border?  If
the borders are so secure how do the narcotics that the cartels peddle
in towns and cities across our nation get into our nation to replenish
the supply of drugs as the cartels peddle them to Americans across our
country?

It is also extremely important to remember that it is estimated that
from 5 million to 10 million illegal aliens who are present in our
country did not run our nation’s borders but entered through the
inspections process and then, in one way or another, violated the terms
of their admission.  It is estimated that fewer than 300 special agents
of ICE are on the hunt for those millions of illegal aliens.  This
problem is further exacerbated by the ever expanding Visa Waiver Program
that currently enables aliens from 36 countries to seek to enter the
United States without first applying for and receiving visas.

The President and others who advocate for CIR and the influx of
foreign workers speak glowingly about the work ethic and talent of
foreign workers, spewing the outrageous and infuriating mythology that
somehow American workers don’t meet the high standards to be found in
the foreign workforce. How many times have we heard that we need to
import foreign workers to keep America competitive?

This nonsense is how companies make certain to hire foreign workers
who are willing to work for substandard wages and undercut American
workers who are finding it increasingly difficult, if not altogether
impossible, to support themselves and their families.  This is, in part,
why it is estimated that one in five American families now live below
the poverty level.

There is, however, a place where an influx of new workers would help
improve the prospects for our nation’s future, and that place is
Washington, D.C.