OPINION:
Nobody should be surprised that Newt Gingrich’s immigration enforcement position has devolved from his unworkable gibberish of November down to the Bush-Kennedy-McCain “guest-worker” amnesty schemes of the last decade he has been trying to camouflage.
After months of absurdly asserting that Americans lack the will to enforce our quite liberal immigration laws - and thereby honor the real, legal immigrants who have joined the American family in accordance with the law - the amazingly arrogant Mr. Gingrich reportedly mocked Mitt Romney this week for promoting the concept of “self-deportation” while he simultaneously advanced the transparent “we can write a law that makes them eligible to apply for a guest-worker permit” shtick for the foreign-language press at Univision and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Who is “them” in the Grandiose One’s “guest” scenario? They would be the 11 million to 20 million illegal-alien fugitives who either have escaped capture while sneaking across our still-unsecured borders or have refused to leave when their assorted visas - including guest-worker visas - have expired.
They would be the screaming, angry illegal aliens we see marching in American streets demanding amnesty, citizenship - and the vote.
They would be the resentful “undocumented workers” who make up a Pew-estimated 5 percent of the American workforce while millions of Americans - including lawful immigrants - stand in unemployment lines wondering about “jobs, jobs, jobs” and why their local public services and benefits are fading and asking themselves whatever happened to the American dream of equal justice under the law.
“Compassion” indeed.
Mr. Gingrich is referring to the illegals who drew strength, encouragement and political power as a result of his willing work as a congressman from Georgia who supported the failed 1986 “compassionate” legalization that was to have ended illegal immigration forever.
He is proposing that we legalize the black-market labor that Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich protected when he obediently followed commands from the Chamber of Commerce in 1996 with his failed effort to abort what is now E-verify at its bipartisan inception, successfully using his office and power to help make it a voluntary system instead of the mandatory job-saving tool it was intended to be.
It is clear he needs more education on the self-deportation concept, but Mr. Romney is - so far, courageously - actually promoting the proven and reasonable solution to illegal immigration called “attrition through enforcement.”
The straw-man argument for another amnesty goes like this: Because it is impossible to deport every illegal alien by sundown tomorrow, the only other option must be to begin another fraud-ridden legalization program - the same false choice used in 1986.
The attrition-through-enforcement solution recognizes that it took more than 30 years for the current national crisis to develop and there is no magical overnight remedy. It could take 30 years to solve fully.
Gradual attrition of the illegal population through enforcement of the law is the logical and reasonable choice hidden from Americans by many in the media.
Attrition through enforcement recognizes that border security and law enforcement are fundamental duties of the federal government and not a campaign bargaining chip. It also acknowledges that like all criminals, illegally present aliens flee enforcement.
It is a solution proved successful each time a state passes an immigration enforcement law.
I write from my home of nearly 30 years in what was the 6th District in Georgia - Mr. Gingrich’s former congressional district - where we read daily news reports lamenting the fact that illegals are rushing to migrate out of the Peach State in panicked fear of the state’s illegal-immigration enforcement law, passed last year.
The most vigorously contested component of the Georgia law requires use of E-Verify for most employers. It was a well-funded coalition of the Chamber of Commerce, ethnic organizations, various religious groups, the agriculture lobby and the American Civil Liberties Union that worked feverishly against the law’s passage.
On immigration enforcement, Mr. Gingrich is coming from the left of the late congressional Democrat Barbara Jordan, who, as President Clinton’s chairman of the Commission on Immigration Reform, testified to Congress that cutting off jobs, benefits and services was integral to stopping illegal immigration. This was a decade after the “one-time” amnesty.
A President Gingrich surely would find some “compassionate” pretext to bow again to the anti-enforcement coalition when it came time to enforce the law on his “guest-worker” scam.
The crime of illegal immigration is not somehow a separate issue unconnected to taxes, jobs, culture, common language, education, health care or national security. Or rule of law.
D.A. King is president of the Dustin Inman Society and worked closely with Georgia legislators on the state’s immigration reforms.
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