Gutierrez On Immigration

I'm starting to get a little tired of the immigration debate. It is rapidly becoming the purview of demagogues and cause junkies. Instead of firing off another metaphor laced screed, I'm going to take the lazy bloggy way out and refer instead to what has already been said. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) on yesterday's Meet The Press eloquently summed up my own beliefs on this topic.

It isn’t amnesty. What it is is a pathway to legalization. We have an immigration system that is broken, that’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for American citizens. We saw the specialist missing in Iraq, Jimenez, from Massachusetts. His wife is being deported. That’s how broken our system is, that those that are on the front line, defending us in the war against terrorism and in Iraq are having their wives deported from the United States of America...Look, it’s a broken system, but I think what we say is, “What are you going to do with the 12 million people?” If you listen to Pat this morning, we have had the most aggressive enforcement in the last 30 years in our interior enforcement, 160,000 people deported this past year. At that rate, it would take us 65 years to rid this nation of all the undocumented workers. It’s not realistic, it’s not humane. It isn’t practical to our national security, or does it secure our economy. The fact is we create, in the United States, this vibrant economy, 400,000 low skill jobs a year, but there’re only 5,000 visas. We eed new workers to keep our economy vibrant and strong.

On yesterday's Georgia Gang, Dick Williams and Phil Kent poo-pooed Stephanie Ramage's assertion that those who would scream "amnesty" are for deportation as a strawman. It certainly had a whiff of hay, but only because the anti-amnesty brigades steadfastly refuse to offer any concrete idea of how they would deal with the 12 million people already here.

We need solutions, not rhetoric and scaremongering. Some people, including President Bush, are attempting to find a way. Others only believe in walls.