Amnesty and betrayal: president Bush's proposed immigration reform package is a shocking betrayal of our nation's sovereignty, culture and economy. It must not be allowed to pass.

Bill Clinton uttered countless deceptive words during his eight-year occupancy of the White House, but perhaps none captured the essence of his slippery dishonesty better than these: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." In defending his proposed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. George W. Bush is striving to set a new record for brazen presidential dishonesty.

"This plan is not amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path of citizenship," insisted Mr. Bush at a January 12 press conference in Monterrey. Mexico, as he stood alongside Mexican President Vicente Fox. "I oppose amnesty because it encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration."

As has often been said, crime unpunished is crime rewarded. In his January 7 White House address calling for a "new temporary worker program," the president outlined a plan that would reward those who violated our immigration laws by jumping the queue and taking up residence here illegally:

* The president proposed "legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment here";

* That temporary legal status, the president said, "will last three years and will be renewable";

* Mr. Bush claimed that "our current limits on legal immigration are too low." He added that his administration will work with Congress to "increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to citizenship" for illegal aliens currently residing here, as well as others arriving every day in anticipation of being legalized once the proposal goes into effect.

It's vitally important to recognize that the Bush plan would not be limited to the current illegal alien population, which is commonly estimated to be 6-12 million (but may be 20 million or more). As the president's own words demonstrate, it would also extend to "those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program."

Supposedly, those coming from foreign countries would need a job offer in advance of their arrival. But the president's invitation had an immediate, and quite predictable, effect. "The U.S. Border Patrol marks January 7 as the day illegal crossing numbers surge," reported a January 10 Arizona Star dispatch from the Mexican border town of Hermosillo. "We're starting to see an increase already," commented Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame. It's reasonable to expect that a similar "amnesty rush" is underway elsewhere as millions--or tens of millions--of others race to take advantage of the Bush plan.

Ah, but that plan isn't an amnesty, insists the president, clinging to his official fiction with Clintonian tenacity. Representative Ran Paul (R-Texas) has no use for such evasions. "Millions of people who broke the law by entering, staying, and working in our country will not be punished, but rather rewarded with a visa," comments Rep. Paul. "This is amnesty, plain and simple. Lawbreakers are given legal status, while those seeking to immigrate legally face years of paperwork and long waits for a visa."

More disturbing still is the fact that the Bush plan represents merely the first installment. The Mexican regime has already broadcast demands for further concessions. Mexican President Fox offered honeyed words of support for the Bush plan during his January 12 joint press conference with Bush. But prior to Bush's trip to Monterrey, Fox had told the Mexican press that the Bush plan "es mas pequenito de lo que buscamos" ("it's much smaller than what we're looking for"). And Mexico's El Universal had reported, "The secretary of Foreign Relations, Luis Ernesto Derbez, affirmed that [Fox] cannot be satisfied with George W. Bush's proposal to grant temporary employment to immigrants.... [T]he goal is a total and complete program that protects those [Mexicans] in the United States and those who aspire to go there." (Emphasis added.)

The Mexican regime will be satisfied with nothing less than the abolition of our southern border, and our absorption of as many people as that government sees fit to send north. Eventually, the process begun by the Bush plan would "solve" the illegal immigration problem by simply removing our borders altogether--and by effectively destroying the concept of U.S. citizenship as well.

Anatomy of a Betrayal

Supposedly, the newly legalized "temporary workers" would return to their home countries after the permits expire.

"My proposal expects that most temporary workers will eventually return permanently to their home countries when the period of work that I will be negotiating with Congress has expired," explained the president in Monterrey. Toward that end, he continued, "I'll work with [Mexican] President Fox and other leaders on a plan to give temporary workers credit in their home countries' retirement systems for the time they work in the United States."

The administration's proposal would also "reduce the cost of sending money home to families and local communities," continued the president. Such remittances from Mexican workers in America are that nation's second-largest source of foreign income. Additionally, as the president pointed out, through the Inter-American Development Bank "we"--meaning American taxpayers--"are expanding access to credit for small business entrepreneurs" in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

All of this taxpayer-funded largesse is necessary, insists the president, in order to "reduce the pressures that create illegal immigration" by expanding economic opportunity south of our border. But the amnesty itself creates a powerful incentive for newly legalized immigrants to establish themselves here and begin the process of chain immigration, through which untold millions of new immigrants would be brought in. This is what happened with the most recent immigration amnesty in 1986.

In anticipation of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservative" rhetoric, former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the chief sponsor of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), insisted that the earlier amnesty was "a humane approach to immigration reform." Simpson also admitted at the time, "I don't know what the impact will be." Eighteen years later, we now know the impact: 6-12 million, and possibly 20 million or more, illegal aliens. If amnesty is granted to that population, and it begins the process of chain immigration of relatives from abroad, and it is supplemented by millions of others who come here based on job offers extended through Bush's temporary worker program, we might as well disband the border patrol and discontinue the fiction of having immigration controls at all.

Global "Job Fair"

President Bush's concern for the economic plight of illegal aliens in our midst is as puzzling as his indifference to the economic circumstances of American workers.

"Over the past 10 years, more than 2 million low-skilled American workers have been displaced from their jobs," writes CNN financial analyst Lou Dobbs. "And each 10 percent increase in the immigrant workforce decreases U.S. wages by 3.5 percent." Mr. Bush and his political allies blithely assure the public that illegal immigrants are doing jobs nobody wants. However, points out Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, "what they really mean is that they are doing jobs that they as middle- and upper-class people don't want."

"Massive immigration is vastly more popular among the elites than among the public," Steve Sailer, president of the Human Biodiversity Institute, told THE NEW AMERICAN. "Lawyers, politicians, and business executives won't find their pay driven down much by increased competition. On the other hand, if I was, say, a carpenter, I'd be horrified by what the President of the United States is planning to do to me and my family. What's the global average wage made by carpenters? I'd be surprised if it were more than 33 percent of the average American carpenter's wage, and I wouldn't be shocked if it were only 10 percent as much."

"It's all a matter of supply and demand," explains Sailer. "As they teach you during the first week of Econ 101, when the supply of labor goes up its price [wage] goes down.... The only restriction the Bush people are talking about is that the job oilers to foreigners must meet the minimum wage. That's $5.15 per hour, or $10,712 for a full-time worker."

Sailer describes the Bush plan as "a globalist libertarian's fantasy. It's essentially identical to the Wall Street Journal editorial page's long campaign for a constitutional amendment reading 'There shall he open borders.'" This would mean not only a deluge of low-skilled, low-paid labor from Mexico, but from across the globe. According to Dobbs, "for all the world the president's [immigration proposal] ... sounds like a national job fair for those businesses and farms that don't want to pay a living wage and for those foreigners who correctly think U.S. border security is a joke and are willing to break our laws to live here."

The immediate beneficiaries would be illegal workers from Mexico, and a Mexican government that uses illegal immigration to the U.S. as (in the words of former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda) a "safety valve." But there are literally billions of people willing to work for even less than Mexicans are. "In this age of cheap jet travel, poor Mexican immigrant job hunters might find themselves undercut by even poorer temporary workers from, say, Bangladesh who may be willing to work for even less," Sailer predicts. "According to UN figures, there are several billion people poorer than the average Mexican."

With hi-tech and manufacturing jobs fleeing the country, and millions of low-skill workers flooding in, what will America look like just a few years from now if Bush's amnesty proposal is enacted?

Just the First Step

The January 8 New York Times editorially praised the Bush amnesty as a prelude to a larger effort to reform our immigration system: "For simply reopening what has always been a torturous debate in this country, the president deserves applause. He has recognized that the nation's immigration system is, as he put it, 'broken.'" But the unspoken purpose of the process the Bush plan would inaugurate is to demolish, rather than repair, what remains of our immigration system.

The invited audience for President Bush's January 7 White House announcement included representatives from various "citizen groups," such as the Hispanic Alliance for Progress, the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans, the Latino Coalition, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. The address itself served as an overture for a hastily called "Summit of the Americas" in Monterrey, Mexico, the following week. These two facts underscore the real purpose of the amnesty proposal: It is a significant step toward the amalgamation of the U.S. with Mexico--as well as Canada, and eventually every other country in this hemisphere--into a regional political bloc.

Shortly after taking office, Mr. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox signed a document called the "Guanajuato Proposal," pledging that their governments would "strive to consolidate a North American economic community whose benefits reach the lesser-developed areas of the region and extend to the most vulnerable social groups in our countries."

Within a few months of that declaration, the Mexican government had composed a five-point program to hasten "consolidation" with the U.S.:

* Legalization of "undocumented" workers (that is, illegal aliens from Mexico);

* An expanded permanent visas program;

* An enhanced guest workers visas program;

* Border control cooperation;

* Economic development in immigrant-sending regions of Mexico.

This list of demands, according to then-Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, were essentially non-negotiable: He insisted that the U.S. had to accept "the whole enchilada, or nothing." The Bush administration has dutifully worked to meet that nation's demands--without exacting anything from Mexico in return.

During Fox's 2001 visit to the U.S., the groundwork was laid for the so-called "Partnership for Prosperity" (PfP)--an initiative designed to use American tax dollars to build Mexico's manufacturing sector. According to the U.S. State Department, PfP's action plan calls for U.S. assistance--meaning taxpayer subsidies--to Mexico to boost investment in housing and commercial infrastructure to boost Mexican productivity. This has the unavoidable effect of drawing manufacturing jobs south of the border--even as low-wage jobs are increasingly snapped up by illegal immigrants (pardon me--future temporary workers) surging northward.

The Bush administration's indecent eagerness to eradicate our southern border and consolidate our nation with Mexico was noted by Newsweek political analyst Howard Fineman. "Whatever else George W. Bush does, or doesn't do, he has earned a place in history as the first American president to place Hispanic voters at the center of politics, and the first to view the land between Canada and Guatemala as one," noted Fineman. "It makes sense, if you think about it: Texas, long ago and far away, was part of Mexico. Now a Texan is trying to reassemble the Old Country, and then some."

"The ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union," opined an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial on September 7, 2001. "Unlike the varied landscapes and cultures of European Union members, the United States, Canada and Mexico already share a great deal in common, and language is not as great a barrier. President Bush, for example, is quite comfortable with the blended Mexican-Anglo culture forged in the border states of Texas, California and Arizona."

President Bush has only offered oblique hints of the agenda that Fineman correctly described. Mexican President Fox has been more candid.

During a May 16, 2002 speech in Madrid, Fox boasted: "In the last few months we have managed to achieve an improvement in the situation of many Mexicans in [the United States], regardless of their migratory status, through schemes that have permitted them access to health and education systems, identity documents, as well as the full respect for their human rights." Here Fox referred to the incremental legalization illegal Mexican immigrants achieved when various state and local governments began to accept matricula consular cards as official ID. Those cards are issued by Mexican consulates without regard to the recipient's legal status. Easily counterfeited, the matricula cards give illegal aliens access to employment, health benefits, banking services and--in some states--driver's licenses.

In the Madrid speech, Fox explained that demolishing the distinction between legal and illegal Mexican immigrants is necessary in order to advance the merger of the U.S. and Mexico: "Eventually our long range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes [such as] the future prosperity of North America, and the movement of capital, goods, services, and persons." Such movement of persons would no longer be "immigration" or "emigration"--terms referring to the crossing of international borders--but merely "migration" within one vast political entity. In other words: goodbye to U.S. citizenship.

Significantly, in his remarks at the January 12 press conference in Monterrey, Fox pointedly, and repeatedly, used the term "migration" to refer to the Bush plan, referring variously to "that migration topic," "the migration matters," "this migration proposal," the "migration flow," and so on. Tellingly, he also referred to "the leaders of the countries of America"--rather than to national leaders of separate and independent nations.

Patient Persistence

Amnesty for illegal aliens, a central piece in the agenda for hemispheric consolidation, would almost certainly have been announced long ago were it not for 9-11--an event that demonstrated, in a tragic and lethal fashion, the mortal danger resulting from the failure to secure our borders.

However, merger-minded elites in both the U.S. and Mexico regrouped and continued their campaign for amnesty. Last fall, a coalition of radical groups--including the Communist Party--organized the "Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride." In that campaign, busloads of illegal aliens were brought to Washington to lobby on behalf of amnesty.

Vicente Fox did his part by visiting three southwestern states--Texas, Arizona and New Mexico--to lobby state legislatures to support the amnesty drive. "We share nation and language," Fox told the New Mexico legislature. "In addition to our geographical vicinity, we are retired by inseparable bonds, history, values and interests.... We must join together.... You need Mexico and Mexicans, and we need you."

Acting as the supposed leader of "Mexicans living abroad" (a group that, according to the Mexican government, includes Americans of Mexican ancestry born in this country), Fox demanded that lawmakers in this country "facilitate access to health care and education services for all those who share our border.... Without this, it is impossible to think about the path to greater integration and shared prosperity."

Open borders, amnesty for illegals, subsidies for Mexico's economy, exporting manufacturing capacity south of the border, expanded welfare benefits for foreigners who entered our nation illegally--these are all part of the same seamless design. As Fox himself put it, that design is the "integration" of the U.S. and Mexico into a hemisphere-wide political unit.

Many observers believe that the Bush amnesty plan is part of a political strategy aimed at courting the Hispanic vote--which would be a shockingly cynical and opportunistic venture. But the truth is even worse: President Bush is consciously betraying our nation by undermining our borders, our sovereignty, and the integrity of our laws. And he is doing this as part of a campaign that will--if successful--result in an end to our national independence and our constitutional order.

Every American worthy of the name must not accept this incredible betrayal--and must not allow it to be consummated.

What You Can Do

* Contact your Congressman and demand that he oppose any amnesty proposal.

* Urge your friends, neighbors, and co-workers to do the same.

* Learn more about the "Free Trade Area of the Americas" (FTAA), the deceptively named program to create a hemisphere-spanning socialist superstate.

* Join in the effort to prevent implementation of the FTAA pact, which is scheduled to be completed next year. For more information about the FTAA and how you can get involved, go to: www.stoptheftaa.org.

RELATED ARTICLE: Fedgov as HR director?

by William Norman Grigg 

"I have constantly said that we need to have a immigration policy that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee," stated Mr. Bush on December 15, 2003. The president reiterated that point in his January 7 announcement: "If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.... I propose a new temporary worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs."

This would mean, in effect, putting the federal government in charge of a human resources management program for the entire world. This would require a comprehensive database of both jobs and potential employees--their skills, education, salary requirements, and so forth--with American businesses acting as appendages of the federal government.

Mr. Bush pointed out that under his envisioned program, employers "must report to the government the temporary workers they hire, and who leave their employ, so that we can keep track of people in the program.... There must be strong workplace enforcement with tough penalties for anyone, for any employer violating these laws."

This program would open the floodgates to low-paid foreign labor from around the globe, thereby artificially depressing wages and creating increasing demand for imported labor. In principle, it would put the federal government in charge of employment policy for every American business that employs foreign workers.

RELATED ARTICLE: Bush's "non-amnesty" amnesty proposal.

President George W. Bush made the following statements in his January 7 White House address:

"I propose a new temporary worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs. This program will offer legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment here."

"All who participate in the temporary worker program must have a job, or, if not living in the United States, a job offer. The legal status granted by this program will last three years and will be renewable...."

"Undocumented workers now here will be required to pay a one-time fee to register for the temporary worker program. Those who seek to join the program from abroad, and have complied with our immigration laws, will not have to pay any fee. All participants will be issued a temporary worker card that will allow them to travel back and forth between their home and the United States without fear of being denied re-entry into our country."

"The citizenship line ... is too long, and our current limits on legal immigration are too low. My administration will work with the Congress to increase the annual number of green cards that can lead to citizenship."