I’ve always considered myself a pretty liberal guy, and I think I am on most issues. But I can say with some certainty that I am definitely fiscally conservative, believing that you should not go deeply into debt, and that if you do, you should pay back that debt as soon as you can, and not waste money on anything frivolous before it’s paid back. I just finished watching an interesting piece on C-Span on the immigration issue. Bush, Kennedy and McCain have incredibly joined forces to foist upon us a worthless, fiscally irresponsible bill. It was most interesting to me because it was a group of conservatives (including Alan Keyes) that have vocally distanced themselves from the Bush administration and the Republican led Congress. They publicly announced that they would withhold support for any politican that voted for this, or any similar bill that offers any form of amnesty for the millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country, without dealing with our porous border first.
I never thought that I would agree with anything that had Phyllis Schlafly associated with it, but this issue and the eagle forum’s stance on this issue resonates with me. A similar bill in the 80s (under Reagan) was essentially amnesty as well, and it promised tightened border security too. But as we can now see, that kind of deal doesn’t work. You need to secure the border FIRST. You need to be able to define where our country begins and ends, and you need to be able to regulate entry and exit before you pass any otherwise meaningless laws.

Another interesting point the conservatives made was that they cannot trust anything the Bush administration says anymore. On the one hand they remind the public that there are people who want to enter the country to do us harm, but on the other hand they are willing to not regulate entry into the county or enforce immigration law at all. These two stances are clearly not compatible.

Republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa has a list of ten reasons why the bill should be defeated here.

The conservatives didn’t only blast the administration, but the businesses who hire illegal immigrants and create the problem. They point to the real costs of this practice, of which social services are not necessarily the largest portion and paint a fiscal picture that will inevitably lead the US to an economic disaster not unlike that seen in France today. The mantra often repeated by those who support illegal immigrant’s rights is that they are taking jobs Americans won’t do. This is a half truth, because it denies the essential point that it is only true that Americans will not do these jobs at the pay rate offered by those who are used to paying illegal immigrants (and bypassing all taxes required by law).

Although I am not unmindful of the contribution that immigrants have made throughout history and currently make to the economy of US, there is no reason that the US should not regulate immigration. If you do not even know how large an immigrant population you have, you are certainly not regulating it very effectively. Interestingly, I am all for legal immigration with a favoritism for Canadian and South American emigrees. The US needs to build a stronger economy that can compete in the global marketplace and educating and employing those folks from our own hemisphere is the most cost effective way to do that. This doesn’t mean that we should allow this immigration to proceed in an unregulated fashion. At the very least, we need to know who is coming into this country. At best, we should be able to enforce our own immigration laws. We can’t do that without some way to regulate entry and exit which essentially means securing our border. This is even more critical now in the age of global terrorism. As Phylis said, if your basement floods, you don’t start pumping it out until you can stop the water filling it up.