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In their tirade today A Failure of Leadership, the New York Times’ editors openly admitted what neither President Bush, Senators Reid, Kennedy, and McCain, and other Senatorial proponents of the ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007’ will — it is amnesty. Then the Times added the race card:

The tragedy is that the compromise bill was written to bring these restrictionists along, with punitive, detestable provisions that many supporters of comprehensive reform agreed to endorse for the sake of a “grand bargain.” The bill was badly flawed but fixable, as long as there was the possibility of leadership and courage in Congress.
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Leadership was desperately needed to stop Republicans from dragging the bill off one of its pillars — the one that would put 12 million people on a path to legal status. It didn’t show up… The anti-immigrant hard-core — no amnesty today, no amnesty tomorrow, no amnesty forever — must not be allowed to hold the nation hostage. Like nativists of generations past, they think the country is being Latinized, and they fear it… The country cannot leave an unlawful, chaotic system to fester, with legal immigration channels clogged, families split apart, crops rotting and state and local governments dreaming up ways to punish 12 million people whose identities are unknown to the authorities, and who aren’t leaving, no matter what Congress does. We cannot simply fortify a wall while continuing to extract cheap labor from cowering workers who risk death to get here…

To reverse the question, if the New York Times can admit it is amnesty, why can’t President George W. Bush? Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) spoke Thursday evening, just prior to the vote to invoke cloture, that failed 45 to 50 (Dorgan was among that 45), and provided the answer:

My colleagues have said, the Senator from Arizona and the Senator from Massachusetts have said, you know, we need to have a temporary worker provision because if we don’t have a temporary worker provision to bring in people who are not now here to assume jobs in this country, they are going to come anyway. They are coming across anyway. They will come in as illegal immigrants. Well, I said: I don’t understand that. You say that this bill would strengthen our border, provide border security, and stop illegal immigration. Now you are saying that in order to stop illegal immigration you have to have a guest worker provision because, if we do not have a guest worker provision, they are going to come anyway. Maybe you are misrepresenting this issue of border security, are you not?

So the Congressional Budget Office comes out with a report. Guess what they said. This bill, the grand compromise, means those who come across the border illegally, 75 percent will keep coming under this bill; 75 percent will keep coming under this bill. Yet the proponents of the bill are out here with big banners and trumpeting that this is a big border security bill. It is not. It is not that.

I have raised the question about American workers because there is no discussion of American workers. You know they have a role in this debate. We are told, in fact, my colleague from New Hampshire said there are not enough workers in this country, so we need to bring in workers. There are not enough workers to assume the jobs that are available. Well, that is a line that I understand. I don’t agree with it, I understand it.

I understand where it is coming from. We have got a lot of businesses in this country that have decided that workers are like wrenches. They are like wrenches. You just use them up and throw them away. Don’t worry too much about them. Make sure you hire them for as little as possible. By the way, keep downward pressure on that income because workers are disposable.

If you wonder about that, by the way, just go back and read the paper from a few weeks ago when a company called Circuit City decided they were going to layoff 3,400 of their workers. Why? Were they bad workers? No. It was not that at all. This is a company with a chief executive officer who made $10 million a year, and his workers made an average of, I believe, $11 an hour. They wanted to have a workforce that was paid lower than that. So they said to 3,400 of them: We are going to get rid of you because we want to rehire people at a lower rate. So if you wonder about this wrench analogy, just check the newspaper one of these days. But we have a lot of people in this country who work at the bottom of the economic scale, bottom of the ladder.

I told a story yesterday about a company from Georgia. The story was from the Wall Street Journal. This was a poultry company. I believe they had roughly 700 workers. Three-fourths of them were illegal immigrants working in that company. They were paying them a pittance. I don’t remember the exact wage, but they were paying them a small amount of money. Then they were raided by the immigration folks. It was discovered they had all of those illegal immigrant workers, so they had to get rid of them.

So then they had to hire other workers. Well, guess what. They went to the newspaper and put a help wanted ad in the newspaper. They said: We are now paying higher wages. Immediately they got a lot of applicants because they were paying better wages. So they filled those jobs. A few years later they began, that same company, to contract with one of those temporary worker groups that was able to bring together illegal workers and package them and sell them to companies. They started doing the same thing one more time. Why? So they could push down wages.

Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that same evening the bill did not go through the normal hearings process. He should know for he participated in the closed-door negotiations that produced S. 1348.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried and failed to rush the bill to a final Senate vote in a week, without amendment, and with little debate. All the bill’s proponents knew a detailed analysis would reveal it actually reduced the length of the border fence and other illegal immigration enforcement measures that were signed into law just last year.

President Bush cannot admit the bill is amnesty for it would provide businesses a flood of legalized workers to employ, crush the federal government’s already harried and fragile documentation and employment verificiation systems to the breaking point, and leave the borders wide open for the even greater onslaught this bill invites. And that latter, massive wave of humanity will ensure the ‘legalized’ ask little of their employers, lest they too price themselves out of their jobs.

That is the utopia the New York Times must hope for, a huge underclass here similar to the masses of the old Soviet Union. Surely the Times would replace its falling English language subscription rates with profits from a multi-languaged and cheaper paper copy, fronted with their usual propaganda. Sounds about right. America’s masses will not waste their meager wages on computers so they’ll need to get a national listing of cheap labor job opportunities from somewhere.

The ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007’ is all about the money. The proponents of the bill on both sides of the politcal aisle want to reap an even larger economic share. No wonder the New York Times, big labor, and big business are all in and President Bush cannot admit it is amnesty. While bloated CEOs, Democrats and Republicans alike, grew even fatter, the middle-class of our nation would virtually disappear.

Dé la bienvenida a América a mis amigos (welcome to Amerika my friends).

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