This Isn’t Amnesty…

It just looks, acts, smells, and sounds like it.

When is amnesty not amnesty, when the President goes out of his way to tell you it’s not.

Some in this country argue that the solution is to deport every illegal immigrant – and that any proposal short of this amounts to amnesty. I disagree. It is neither wise nor realistic to round up millions of people, many with deep roots in the United States, and send them across the border. There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant, and a program of mass deportation. That middle ground recognizes that there are differences between an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently – and someone who has worked here for many years, and has a home, a family, and an otherwise clean record. I believe that illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay should have to pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law … to pay their taxes … to learn English … and to work in a job for a number of years. People who meet these conditions should be able to apply for citizenship – but approval would not be automatic, and they will have to wait in line behind those who played by the rules and followed the law. What I have just described is not amnesty – it is a way for those who have broken the law to pay their debt to society, and demonstrate the character that makes a good citizen.

The dictionary defines amnesty as, “the voluntary overlooking of an offense by the one offended.” So explain to me how this isn’t amnesty?

We have existing border security laws, but we’re not enforcing them and now 11-12 million people are here illegally, so we’re going to pass new laws – that we allow people to ignore – and fine people who ignored the last set of laws.

Here’s where this gets complicated…

We don’t actually know who all the illegals in the US are, because they’re here illegally, live under assumed names and false papers, and rounding them up would be nearly impossible because of this. But it doesn’t prevent us from issuing fines. Gotcha…

I also don’t really understand the rationale behind allowing someone who has been here for a really long time (meaning they have been violating the law for a really long time, not paying taxes, and generally living a lie) getting the benefit of the law, but the guy just over the border gets screwed.

It seems like a strange way to apply the law. Imagine if the rest of the world worked that way. If you’ve been cheating and plagiarizing all through school and your professional career, you get a salary bonus and promotion, but if you’re caught cheating for the first time in college, you get thrown out of school and exiled to a third world nation.

WTF?

Something tells me this plan is going to go over about as well as the Social Security reform we passed with all that “political capital”… oh, wait…

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