Immigration

I have a bill in draft form ready to be considered in the 2009 session. It mirrors the Oklohoma law that shut off social welfare to illegal immigrants and punished those businesses knowingly hiring illegals in preferance to citizens. I have already been told by members of my own party, GOP, that the bill is dead on arrival because implimenting such a law would bankrupt the state.

Here is my problem with that: when we take office, we are sworn in. This means we swear an oath to uphold the law and the constitution. There is a reason these people are called illegal immigrants, they have broken our law. If they have been sent back and crossed the boarder illegally a second time they are guilty of a felony. If a business hires a group of illegals...all of them using the same social security number on their fake IDs, then that business is breaking the law. Nowhere in the oath of office that I took did it say that I was to ignore lawbreaking if I found that law to be inconvenient. Expediency is the currency of cowards and the avenue of cretins and a sure path to a life of corruption.

I say, build the wall. Put it up 40 feet high and send it 40 feet deep. Make it impossible to climb over and impossible to tunnel through. Sure the United nations will scream and Mexico will call it an act of war, and our president will be uninvited to bridge games by our southern neighbor...so what? We can help the farmers by putting Ellis Island structures every 50 miles and allowing those who want to work to be checked out, set up with a temporary visa, tracked, taxed, and sent on their way...legally. We can also filter out the bad guys, the terrorists, those carrying the next plague virus and the drug runners. If Mexico gets upset becasue their drug profits drop, again, so what? This is our country. It does not belong to the UN or to any of Bush's foreign friends, at least not yet. We have over a hundred thousand homeless combat vets without jobs in this country. They have earned a job, not one illegal can say that, at least not honestly.