Gnat-brained Excuses on Illegal Immigration
The Common Gnat- useful for making excuses as to why no bill to combat illegal immigration is ever the right bill. Apparently a consultant to several members of our state legislature.**********************************
Let me start off by saying that I am not about to claim that the State Representatives who were against the bill have tiny brains, nor even that they are necessarily unintelligent. But their stated reasons in this Jon Lyon article for opposing Rep. Rick Green's HB 1024 were unintelligent. Sometimes when an otherwise smart person gives a stupid reason for their position, it does not mean they are stupid, it just means that they are not giving you their real reason.
(continued, click WEDNESDAY below and scroll down for article or if sent straight here just scroll down)
posted by Mark Moore (Moderator) at Wednesday, January 17, 2007
1 Comments:
HB 1024 would prohibit state agencies from entering into or renewing a public contract with a contractor "who knows or should know" that it or a subcontractor employs an illegal immigrant, and as amended, give contractors found to be in violation 60 days to correct the problem.
Rep. Daryl Pace, R-Siloam Springs, made the gnat-brained excuse that employing illegal immigrants is already a violation of federal law. "I think we are just piling on here" he is quoted as saying.
Rep. Pace, I urge you to fire or swat your consultant. The American People are "piled on" with laws just about everywhere you can think of. Since when has fear of "piling on" ever stopped a legislature from passing a bill? Only on issues like this one. The one place where we are NOT piled on is in the area of illegal immigration. We barely enforce the laws we have.
The feds are not enforcing their laws, at least not very well. Are we so dependent on the feds that we can't take care of our own business, even in the area of state government contracts?
Anyway the "piling on" charge makes zero sense because the offenses are not even the same. The feds get the subcontractors, but the ones who hired them can get off the hook all too easily. This bill would close that loophole on state contracts.
Rep. Willie Hardy, D-Camden, interpreted the buzzing sound in his ear as wanting him to say that since it would only address the public sector then it was not worth doing. No solution is better than a partial one, by Rep. Hardy's estimate.
"I just think this is a short step and it does not fix the problem. It just moves these people that we have identified as illegal immigrants ... from state jobs over to the private sector,"
Do they even think about what they are saying? The law applies to PRIVATE CONTRACTORS who are doing jobs for the state, which is getting to be just about everybody with government getting so huge. The feds did the same thing years ago by saying if you weren't an "Equal Opportunity Employer" then you were not eligible for federal contracts. Now, about everyone is.
Voting against a bill because it is not "a pancea" is a read herring. No bill is perfect, the question is, "is it better than what we have now". A bill that fixes half of the problem is better than no bill at all.
Now I guess at this point, the consultants at Gnat and associates ran out of their A-list excuses and they had to use the really bad ones. Rep. Stephanie Flowers, D-Pine Bluff, said that if the illegal aliens that are here can't find work, they are more likely to need state services!
"We can't help the fact that they're here. We cannot dismiss all of them from this country. Somebody is going to have to pick up the slack on what the needs for daily living are for these people and their families," Flowers said.
Wait a minute! I thought when former Senator Jim Holt tried to pass SB206 last year to deny all non-federally mandated (and thus at least mostly federally funded) public services we learned that "the bill would not change a thing, no programs would be affected." Now Rep. Flowers tells us that if they went on the state dole it would cost us all this money. Were they telling us wrong about SB206 then or are they telling us wrong now?
And I won't even bother to mention the obvious answer to Rep. Flower's dilemma. It is just too easy.
Look, I don't like using this acidic, sarcastic tone. I tire of it. I want to be respectful. But they need to give us something to respect, not lame excuses that a child could see through. It is obvious that the people want illegal immigration curtailed and certain business interests don't. MAybe that is all that is going on here, they have sided with the check-writers, so why don't they just say that?
I don't mind people disagreeing with me on policy. I have had a number of polite debates on this forum over policy. I don't mind people disagreeing with me, but I DO mind people feeding me a line of mushroom-food. And so should you.
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