Is Donald Trump serious about immigration reform?
Well, if what you are about to read, excerpted from Stephen Dinan’s article in the Washington Times is accurate, I think we’ve got our answer:
Determined to finally solve illegal immigration, the White House submitted a 70-point enforcement plan to Congress Sunday proposing the stiffest reforms ever offered by an administration — including a massive rewrite of the law in order to eliminate loopholes illegal immigrants have exploited to gain a foothold in the U.S.
The plans, seen by The Washington Times, include President Trump’s calls for a border wall, more deportation agents, a crackdown on sanctuary cities and stricter limits to chain migration — all issues the White House says need to be part of any bill Congresspasses to legalize illegal immigrant “Dreamers” currently protected by the Obama-era deportation amnesty known as DACA.
But the plans break serious new ground on the legal front, giving federal agents more leeway to deny illegal immigrants at the border, to arrest and hold them when they’re spotted in the interior, and to deport them more speedily. The goal, the White Housesaid, is to ensure major changes to border security, interior enforcement and the legal immigration system.
In other words, “yes, we’ll give the DACA people (not “children”, because some of them are in their 20’s and 30’s) a path to legality. But the cost of that path is that we finally, at long last, do something truly significant to stop illegal immigration.
I rarely make predictions in here. But I doubt anyone on any side of this issue would disagree that this is going to cause a maelstrom among people on all sides of this issue.
And that’s good. Let all sides have their say, let all the facts come out, and let’s see if a a trade-off arrangement which gives hundreds of thousands of illegals a path to come out from the shadows can successfully used as leverage to reinstitute our borders.
I only wish that this dialogue would include something I’ve railed about for years, but never seems to be discussed: why something like 10% of the entire Mexican population (that’s not a typo or a sarcasm, it is real), whether legally or illegally, has left the country to come here. Why is Mexico so deficient a place to live that this astonishing level of migration – the kind you usually see only when there is a violent civil war – has occurred.
For years and years, we have heard little other than attacks on the United States by advocates for illegal immigration. In that regard, two question:
-If the United States is such a bad place to be, and Mexico is a faultless paradise, why are they not staying right where they are?
-If the United States is such a bad place to be, and Mexico is a disgrace, why are they not migrating to other Latin American countries?
Y’know, the United States just might not be such a bad place after all.
