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| BUSH: A recycling? |
It
was the point in which the man who had been raised much of his life in Texas
and wasn’t uncomfortable being around Mexican people started talking about ways
to incorporate them into our society.
IT
WAS IN 2006 that President Bush, the younger, came up with a proposal for a “guest
worker” program – by which all those non-citizens living in the United States and
working at jobs without a valid visa or work permit could keep the jobs.
They
could come out of society’s shadows. They could live openly. They would no
longer have to fear the possibility of a stupid, trivial incident (such as a
traffic stop) uncovering their status, and resulting in their deportation.
It
didn’t offer them anything in the way of citizenship (anybody who got a permit
from this program would specifically be prohibited from ever being eligible to
apply for U.S. citizenship).
At
the time, I wrote a commentary for United Press International saying that if
this program could evolve into something more substantial, then it was
worthwhile as a first step toward immigration reform.
BUT
THE IDEOLOGUES didn’t want to take any steps – unless they were wearing
steel-plated combat boots that they could use to stomp all over anybody they
wanted to believe “doesn’t belong here.”
Republican
officials in Congress crushed Bush’s plan, and like I wrote earlier it was at
that point that the Bush favorable ratings began their decline to the record
lows in the mid 20s (as in about one of every five people approving of Bush)
that he was at when he left the presidency in January 2009.
Since
then, Bush’s image has gone up somewhat.
Perhaps
that is why the ideologues are now trying to resurrect Bush’s old guest worker
program (albeit, under a different label).
THEY’RE
CALLING IT the ACHIEVE Act, and the Republicans in Congress who are touting it
as immigration reform are trying to claim it is substantial enough to be the
immigration reform that our nation desperately needs.
Of
course, that old policy only went part way. Which is the point. These
ideologues don’t want to take the real steps toward reform. But they’re also
tired of having the masses “call them” on their nonsense.
So
they’re deluded enough to think they can dredge this up and get the rest of us
to pipe down with our objections.
It
isn’t going to work that way!
IT’S
GOING TO take something that realizes there is no legitimate reason to deny a
valid visa to most of the roughly 11 million people suspected of living in this
country without proper documentation.
It
is the people who are more focused on exclusion who are the problem in our
society. Any policy whose primary purpose is to mollify their attitudes is a
flawed one.
Which
is why we ought to be paying attention to those members of Congress who are
Latino and who came up with their own alternative reform package – a nine-point
plan that calls for these people to be put through a process to work them into
the system.
It
even includes having them submit to thorough criminal background checks and
have to submit to a thorough review to see if they owe income taxes from all
the labor they have done in this country previously.
THERE’S
NOTHING WRONG with either of those two goals – although I think anyone who
believes all these non-visa’ed people will suddenly be paying significant amounts
of cash to the federal government are misguided.
For
in many cases, their employers have been withholding taxes and the money has
been getting lost in the federal bureaucratic mess.
Auditing
the “illegals” might come to the revelation that we owe at least some of them a
significant tax refund that they were never able to collect in the past.
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