One question keeps popping up in the debate over the U.S. Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill, S.744. It’s not a question about what’s in the 1,000-page bill, it’s about the packaging. The arguments for the amnesty bill are so blatantly dishonest that they defy conventional logic and analysis. Why is all this dishonesty necessary?
The advocates for the amnesty bill are not content to put lipstick on a pig; they insist that the pig is a good start on a dairy farm.
If the amnesty proponents are so convinced that Americans support amnesty and if it is true that everyone in Congress is eager to pass “comprehensive immigration reform,” why do they need to resort to outright lies to promote it? Why are their paid radio and TV advertisements so blatantly dishonest and misleading?
Corporate billionaire and friend-of-Obama Mark Zuckerberg is financing a million-dollar radio and TV ad campaign featuring Sen. Rubio making statements about S. 744 that are patently untrue. Rubio repeats his mantra of sugary misrepresentations in interviews, and puppeteer Grover Norquist dutifully pushes the party line across his network of open-borders front groups. Yet, the interesting part is that this vast propaganda effort is based on outright lies.
The Senate amnesty bill does not deliver on a single one of the promises Sen. Rubio made in the earlier stages of the debate. The bill that will go to the Senate floor next week does not “guarantee that we will never be in this situation again.” Nor does it “fix our broken immigration system.” Moreover, the Schumer-Rubio bill does not “fix” any of the specific problems Rubio has been so outspoken about.
- It does not require that illegal aliens pay back taxes.
- It does not limit new guest worker visas to “jobs Americans won’t do.”
- It does not deny welfare benefits or Obamacare eligibility to the 15 to 30 million illegal aliens who will qualify for legal status.
- It does not prevent amnesty being granted to criminals or would-be terrorists.
Perhaps most importantly, the bill does not “put border security first” as promised by Rubio from the beginning of this debate. Yes, the bill promises to set a process in motion that may or may not improve border security over the next decade, but there are no serious consequences or impediments for the amnesty agenda if genuine border security is not achieved.
Another big lie in the packaging and selling of the bill is the claim that Republican support for amnesty will result in substantial shift in Latino votes for Republican candidates. There is not a shred of evidence to support that fanciful claim, and in fact, the history of the 1986 amnesty legislation is instructive for anyone who looks into it. After President Reagan supported and signed the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty bill, Republicans LOST seats in the 1986 congressional elections. Then two years later, Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush got FEWER Hispanic votes than Reagan did in 1984 BEFORE the amnesty.
The dishonest elements of the bill are mirrored in the dishonest tactics used to distract people from these dishonest provisions. In a master stroke of showmanship, Rubio has proclaimed that he will not vote for his own bill unless the border-security provisions are strengthened through amendments. But true to the dishonest intent of the bill, the amendments he will consider do not fix the problem; they only disguise it.
Thus, the most surprising thing about the Rubio Circus is not the number of falsehoods in the amnesty campaign but the chutzpah with which they are put forward. You might ask, “Have they no shame?” The answer is, no.
The shameless deceit in the selling of the amnesty bill is almost unprecedented, but the precedent is close at hand: The PR campaign for the Senate amnesty bill has taken a page from Obama’s style of governing. It’s actually a pretty simple formula, used by dictators everywhere: Tell a lie, make it a very attractive lie large numbers of people want to believe, such as the lie that Obamacare will not increase your insurance premiums – and then count on the lapdog media to help sell the lie to the public.
If fact, some astute observers have already remarked that the campaign for the Senate amnesty bill looks a lot like the campaign that gave us Obamacare. First, it is sold as “inevitable,” that “something must be done,” and that “anything is better than what we have now.” Add a dash of Republican panic about “winning the Latino vote,” and presto, we have Congress marching over a cliff and calling it a pool party.
No, a bad 1,000-page bill – which, like Obamacare, no one has read – is not better than no bill at all. Like health-care reform, honest immigration reform would be better served by having hearings and debates over several small bills, each attacking a particular problem within “our broken immigration system.”
But that would be too honest. That approach might actually fix a few problems instead of making matters worse.
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