Is the Senate Finally Getting Serious on Immigration?
by Whymrhymer

The Associated Press Story that leads the U.S. news front today declares that Congress is hard at work addressing border security and immigration.

To say ‘it’s about time’ would be an understatement.

The debate underway in the Senate concerns proposed legislation to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S./Mexican border, which would go a long way to securing the most porous one-third of that border. The House, this week, is working on three bills that will 1) criminalize the building of unauthorized tunnels between the U.S. and Mexico, 2) make it easier to deport illegals who belong to gangs or commit crimes and 3) clear up the gray areas that will allow state and local authorities to assist U.S. Customs and Immigration officials with the capture and detention of illegal immigrants.

That all of this is being so vigorously pursued in the run-up to the November mid-term elections, in an attempt to schmooze voters, is irritating — but that it is being done at last is gratifying.

The House seems to have had the best grasp of the problem for some time now. Last December they passed bills that were intended to tighten the border to stem the flow of illegals across our borders and to implement rules that would more effectively prevent U.S. employers from hiring illegals — both critically important items — but the legislation was ‘debated to death’ in the Senate. The Senate was, at the time, under the influence of President Bush’s pie-in-the-sky guest worker program. Since then, the Senators have apparently become better informed about the realities of the immigration problem and have been ignoring the President’s still continuing pleas for a program that he refuses to admit is just another amnesty program. The fencing bill being worked in the Senate was approved last week and sent up to the Senate this week.

200 miles of the 700-mile fence under debate would be built in Texas, from Laredo to Brownsville. The two Republican Senators from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, are in favor of the fencing bill but have a quarrel with the fact that the U.S. government is telling the states where the fencing should be built; they feel that that decision would be better made by local and state officials. There are, no doubt, many other issues to be cleared up and one can only hope that, when the debate is over and the bill has passed, the final product will not be as porous as the border it is meant to protect.

News Links:

Border lawmakers, officials resist fence proposal

Enforcement is focus of immigration bills

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