2007-06-28

Mel Martinez, you're fired.

Mel is "dissapointed" about the defeat of the latest amnesty bill to cross the Senate floor. I'm sorry that you felt it necessary to vote for it in the first place, Mel. Deeply sorry.

I must admit that after I heard about the first successful cloture vote concerning S. 1639, I was a bit livid. I was disappointed that our Senate would say "Well, the existing laws weren't enforced properly, but by God, we will make shure that the resources are available to enforce these!" and actually expect us to believe that the enforcement would happen differently than it has in the past. I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen, I'm not buying it.

These are my desires concerning illegal immigration currently:

  1. Seal the borders. With a fence and concrete car barriers. Make shure that it's prohibitively difficult to get in. No cameras, no UAVs. FENCE and CONCRETE. This will be passed in an independent bill with simple language that will have no more than a few pages to it. All other legislation concerning immigration will be put on indefinite hiatus until this first provision is resolved. We work hard to keep tabs on those arriving by plane or boat, placing huge checkpoints in those points of entry. Why should the land border be any different?

  2. Make it easy for employers to verify identifying papers that people present for employment. I'd be happy with a 10 business day turnaround for verification. This should be plenty of time to search a database for a green card/Social Security number/work visa. This process will need to be streamlined over the next few years to bring the turnaround time to less than 5 business days.

  3. Penalize the crap out of employers that give illegals jobs, after number 2 has been enacted. Make it painful to get caught employing illegals. Extremely painful. Something on the order of a significant percentage of the company's gross income.

  4. Require existing illegal immigrants to contact the US Embassy in their country of origin IN PERSON to get a work visa. Limit the number of these visas to the number of employers asking for employees from this labor pool. Each of these work visas will have the employee's sponsor's name attached to it. The work visa shall be valid for 1 year, renewable indefinitely annually by the visa's sponsor. If the employer does not employ the number of people requested for a minimum of 1 year, slap a stiff fine on them. If the employee finds work for another employer, it will be the responsibility of the new employer and the employee to have the sponsor name changed on the employee's work visa. These work visas will be cataloged in the database mentioned in number 2. If it is discovered that the employee is gaming the system, or shell corporations are being set up to bring people over, all of those involved will be brought up on racketeering and human transport charges. Immigrants convicted of these charges will be deported immediately, with no hope getting another work visa or hope of returning. Natives will spend a very long time in a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, with all assets seized.

  5. One of the primary requirements of attaining a work visa will be a semi-fluent grasp of the English language. We are not going to conform to your society here. You are being welcomed into ours. The phrase "When in Rome..." applies here.

  6. One of the primary requirements of attaining a work visa will be a clean criminal record in your country of origin. Those who break their society's mores are not welcome here, as you will probably be breaking ours as well.

  7. Those getting work visas shall be held to the same standard that the rest of us are: Obey the law in their area. Anything more than a misdemeanor charge means they lose their work visa and are deported back to their country of origin with no hope of getting another work visa or no hope of returning.

  8. Illegal immigrants that refuse to leave in a timely manner after the passage of the legislation above shall be arrested and held in a local Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison until another group of deportees are being escorted out of the country. This should help with the cost of deporting people by doing it in groups rather than individuals. Deportations will happen by bus if the deportee is going to Mexico or Canada. Deportees to other countries would go by boat. Pending approval of the Pentagon, in the brig of our U.S. Navy ships. Forgoing that, other means would have to be worked out.



I believe these steps will be a great start to meaningful immigration reform: Control the flow of immigrants. Make it difficult for illegal immigrants to get work and many will go home. Those that don't get arrested and held until they get to ride home with several of their closest friends. Regulate the number and quality of those coming back. There are probably loopholes (some may be gaping) in my statements above, and I would hope that people smarter than me would help us find and close them, but I feel that it's a good baseline to start with.

Mel, this bill didn't do any of that in any sort of meaningful way. You can point to provisions that hinted at it, but most of those provisions are on the law books already. This sir, was the last straw. You have lost my vote in 2010. Have fun in the private sector. Hope you liked being a lawyer.