Immigration Bill Advances in Senate

KingBall

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:mad: Disgusting!!!

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate voted Tuesday to jump-start a stalled immigration measure to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants.
President Bush said the bill offered a "historic opportunity for Congress to act," and appeared optimistic about its passage by week's end.

The pivotal test-vote was 64-35 to revive the divisive legislation. It still faces formidable obstacles in the Senate, including bitter opposition by GOP conservatives and attempts by some waverers in both parties to revise its key elements.

Supporters needed 60 votes to scale procedural hurdles and return to the bill. A similar test-vote earlier this month found just 45 supporters, only seven of them Republicans. This time, 24 Republicans joined 39 Democrats and independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, to back moving ahead with the bill. Opposing the move were 25 Republicans, nine Democrats and independent Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., an architect of the bill, said he was proud of the vote, calling it "a major step forward for our national security, for our economy, and for our humanity."

"We did the right thing today because we know the American people sent us here to act on our most urgent problems. We know they will not stand for small political factions getting in the way," Kennedy said in a statement following the vote.

Tuesday's outcome was far from conclusive, however. The measure still must overcome another make-or-break vote as early as Thursday that will also require the backing of 60 senators. And there is no guarantee that it will ultimately attract even the simple majority it needs to pass.

The Senate was preparing to begin voting as early as Tuesday afternoon on some two dozen amendments that have the potential to either sap its support or draw new backers.

Republicans and Democrats alike are deeply conflicted over the measure, which also creates a temporary worker program, strengthens border security and institutes a new system for weeding out illegal immigrants from workplaces.

Bush has mounted an unusually personal effort to defuse Republican opposition to the bill, appearing at a Senate party lunch earlier this month and dispatching two Cabinet secretaries to take up near-constant residence on Capitol Hill to push the compromise.

He called the measure a deal worthy of support. "In a good piece of legislation like this, and a difficult piece of legislation like this, one side doesn't get everything they want," he told business leaders and representatives of religious, Hispanic and agricultural communities earlier Tuesday. "It's a careful compromise."

The vote suggested that key senators and White House officials had succeeded—at least for now—in bargaining with skeptical lawmakers for a second chance to pass the bill. Several senators who have been promised votes on their amendments, including Sens. Kit Bond, R-Mo., Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Norm Coleman, R-Mo., Pete Domenici, R-N.M., John Ensign, R-Nev., and Jim Webb, D-Va., switched their votes to support moving ahead with the measure.

Still, after a chaotic several weeks in which the legislation survived several near-death experiences, it remained buffeted by intraparty squabbles.

As senators were preparing for the showdown vote Tuesday morning, House Republicans meeting privately on the other side of the Capitol were plotting to register their opposition through a party resolution. The measure never saw a vote for procedural reasons, but an attempt to kill it failed overwhelmingly, signaling deep GOP skepticism.

"It's clear there's a large number of the House Republicans who have serious concerns with the Senate bill," said Rep. John Boehner, R- Ohio, the minority leader.

Several of the Republican amendments slated for upcoming Senate votes would make the bill tougher on unlawful immigrants, while those by Democrats would make it easier on those seeking to immigrate legally based solely on family ties.

Particularly worrisome to supporters, including the Bush administration, is a bipartisan amendment by Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., that would change the bill's new program for weeding out illegal employees from U.S. workplaces.

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The bill is S 1639



http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8Q0KO6O0&show_article=1
 
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It could be worse. Most of the people who voted yes on cloture will vote no on final passage; they only voted for cloture so they could have a chance to vote on amendments to gut the thing.

Overall, I'd say there's maybe a 75% chance the thing will fail in the Senate. Failing that, there's probably a 95% chance it will fail in the House.

I'm watching C-Span as it's unfolding so I'll provide updates here.
 
And the bill's dead. They had their fun with amendments, all the good ones were shot down, and so the bottom fell out of the "grand bargain." They couldn't even get a majority to keep it alive when they needed a 3/5 supermajority.

Good riddance. Hopefully Sessions in the Senate and Tancredo in the House will use the momentum to put some useful legislation up front.
 
And the bill's dead. They had their fun with amendments, all the good ones were shot down, and so the bottom fell out of the "grand bargain." They couldn't even get a majority to keep it alive when they needed a 3/5 supermajority.

Good riddance. Hopefully Sessions in the Senate and Tancredo in the House will use the momentum to put some useful legislation up front.

I say, enforce the existing laws. Primary importance, close the border! We may have problems with the old bill that are unenforceable. But with the improved technology today we should be able to solve these problems.

It's ridiculous that they thought this new 700+ page bill (yep, it went from under 200, to 250, to just over 300, to just under 400, then about 600, and finally this monster of 700+!) that no one has read totally, or can even manage to organize into a cohesive summary could be a tool in solving illegal immigration. I'm convinced that Congress in general (yeah, a few exceptions) has no clue of of the KISS methodology - KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID!!

Well, for today, HOORAY!
 
To be honest, if they locked down the border with a fence, I might be able to bring myself to accept another amnesty bill.
 
To be honest, if they locked down the border with a fence, I might be able to bring myself to accept another amnesty bill.

sheesh thats as likely as marijuana being legalized secured border.simple pipe dream is all that is the border is going to basically be eliminated
 
Not as disgusting as this solution....

This is a bit of history we never learned in school ... :confused:


“Operation Wetback”
Illegal Immigration’s Golden-Crisp Myth

Pierre Tristam / daytona beach news-journal, april 5, 2007

Three weeks ago I wrote about Dwight Eisenhower’s 1959 “peace and friendship” tour through several Asian countries, a trip characterized by an outpouring of warmth from millions in countries where Americans aren’t as welcome anymore— Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even India. A caller termed the piece “disingenuous” for not mentioning that Eisenhower was reviled in Mexico, because Eisenhower was the last president to solve the illegal immigration problem.

The caller, who didn’t give his name in the recorded message he left but seemed precisely informed, described how Eisenhower approved an operation that had 1,000 federal agents rounding up thousands of illegal immigrants in California and Arizona and deporting them deep into Mexico beginning in 1954. Two ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio, even took them hundreds of miles down the coast. Within months, up to a million illegals had left, most of them supposedly on their own for fear of being rounded up. The voice on the phone called it “Operation Wetback,” and said the best thing the United States could do now was repeat it and throw every last one of “them” back across the border. I thought the caller was kidding. Could this country ever have officially called something “Operation Wetback”?

Stupid question, considering the country’s racist heritage. A quick online check immediately produced the articles the caller must’ve been referencing, including a 2006 column in the Christian Science Monitor by that paper’s former managing editor, John Dillin, recalling “Operation Wetback” and those two ships admiringly. It was as if I was reading a transcript of the caller’s message.

The story has a ring of simplicity well suited to this age of one-dimensional solutions framed by force. The reality of “Operation Wetback” wasn’t so simple. Eisenhower’s sweep was effective because it was mass deportation on the Soviet model, not because it was admirable, let alone fair or, in thousands of cases, legal. Mexicans were especially targeted whether they were legal immigrants or not. Children of Mexican parents, who were American citizens for having been born on American soil, were deported, too. We just learned that Americans by the thousands (and their children) are being denied Medicaid benefits because they can’t produce proof of citizenship under a new law designed to target illegal immigrants. Imagine how many Mexicans were wrongly targeted for deportation in the mid-1950s.

On March 9, 1955, Immigration Commissioner Joseph Swing triumphantly declared mission accomplished to a House subcommittee: “The wetback situation will be definitely under control,” he said, with just 300 illegal migrants caught daily, down from 3,000. The figures are as suspect as the government’s precise tallies of people leaving voluntarily (45,953 in Texas alone by July 1954) — as if illegals were going up to border posts to record their departure and say farewell. More likely, they did what they do today. When enforcement intensifies in one sector, they move to another.

The government’s deportation methods were beyond suspect. A congressional investigation described the Mercurio as a “hell ship” where abuse of deportees may have been rampant. According to a United Press report from August 1956, “The Justice Department permitted the Immigration Service to crowd 500 Mexicans aboard a ship that normally carried seventy to ninety persons.” The Mercurio’s two lifeboats had a total capacity of 48. Less than a week after the House Government Committee investigation was made public, Mexicans mutinied aboard the ship after 40 people jumped overboard and seven drowned in an attempt to reach shore. Deportations by ship were halted. Airlifts replaced that method until the late 1950s, but even Stalinist sweeps can’t be sustained forever. “Operation Wetbacks” ended in the sunset of Eisenhower’s presidency.

Forgotten in that bullying decade and since was the Truman commission on illegal immigration that came closest to solving the issue, but at a price: Better wages for migrant laborers and strictly regulated working conditions. Federal agents wouldn’t be raiding workplaces to check on the legality of workers, but to verify employers’ documentation of fair pay and the kind of working conditions Americans would not consider beneath them. Employers’ advantage of hiring illegal immigrants would vanish. No demand, no need for supply. The recommendations never became law. The West’s big farmers defeated them, because that, in the end, is who enables illegal immigration — the employers who profit from it and the consumers who demand it by way of low-cost food, nannies, maids, fern-cutters.

Illegals” are the most despised, most abused, most punished and most condemned for the problem. But they’re the least to blame and the worthiest of praise. They’re busboys to American extravagance.
 
Eisenhower approved an operation that had 1,000 federal agents rounding up thousands of illegal immigrants in California and Arizona and deporting them deep into Mexico beginning in 1954. Two ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio, even took them hundreds of miles down the coast. Within months, up to a million illegals had left, most of them supposedly on their own for fear of being rounded up.

Where's Ike when we need him?
 
With proper modifications, an Operation Wetback-style mass deportation could be applied today without being cruel or unconstitutional.
 
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Mass deportation without first securing the border would be very inefficient, as deportees can easily currently break back in. While the borders are being secured the country could start gearing up for mass deportation. Deporting 20 million illegals, certainly no easy task, would be greatly helped by cracking down on the scumbag employers of illegals. By drying up the jobs for illegals, the reason most come here in the first place, most illegals would have to go back home of their own accord. Natural attrition. Millions would not self deport, including all the criminals that have come in, so we would still have mass deportation.

We need to end ridiculous chain migration. Citizenship should only be granted to the best and the brightest on an individual basis. Let's do what's best for the future of America, not what 3rd worlders think is best for themselves.

The anchor baby abuse has to end. Only those children born to legal parents should have automatic citizenship. What a no brainer.
 
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