just about the only thing Bush has done that has ever even come close to actually ****ing off conservatives.
No, he's created huge new bureaucracies in the department of homeland security, expanded the welfare state, passed every spending bill that came to his desk, transferred significant power of the education system from the states to the federal government, slowed free trade, and ignored the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US. I had a longer list, but these are a few reasons for conservatives to be angry with Bush.
Immigration. The last major thing congress did with immigration involved tightening border security and granting amnesty. Through the amnesty program, we discovered that temporary migrant workers in the country illegally number over four times as many as estimates had predicted. Tightening the borders winds up preventing these workers from going home more often than it prevents them from coming here. We desparately need to reform our immigration policies and focusing on this group of people may be the way to start. I'm not sure if that's the intent of this proposal or not, but it sounds a bit like it. Of course, the President is not responsible for the details of the bill. That's the job of congress, so we'll have to wait and see, but since this is a republican President and a republican congress, I would bet lots of money that Barbelith will overwhelmingly oppose whatever legislation results.
Part of me says that rewarding people for breaking the law at the expense of Mexicans who try to get into this country through legal procedures is unjust. This is one of the major difficulties with immigration law. We can't take a libertarian policy of letting everybody move across borders freely, for both economic and security reasons, but neither can we stop large numbers of people from doing so anyway. What to do with illegals, then? They are too often treated as outlaws with no protections under the law. This leads to greater crime, for one thing, and is also unjust.
...official-unofficial status to work in France when there was a need for a large pool of cheap labour; once the economic situation changed, their right to remain in France was revoked.
Actually, that's kind of what the President is proposing, here, although his proposal doesn't sound as sinister as you make France look. His is one that grants worker status to people with jobs, so the number of immigrants in the country is tied to the need for workers at the time. In general, this sounds fine, since there's no reason for immigrants to be unemployed here rather than unemployed in Mexico, but it does mean that employers here will have to follow strict regulations in their treatment of immigrant workers. The power to have an employee deported is substantially greater than the power to have him fired. There are two things to consider on this point. The first is that this bill has to go through a tight Senate, and there's no way the democrats and moderate Republicans will pass anything that doesn't address this concern to some degree or another. The other is that, now, the emplyers already have this ability to get their workers deported, so this law can't make things worse on that front, and will probably make problems more apparent to the public. |
). And there's the problems with rights. Just take them away and send them back? Plus the quote about business I posted really got my hackles up. Plus creating the new underclass: them on the bottom, everyone else like it is now above them.