Hillary picking topic for 2008?

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wingman

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Hillary Eyes Immigration as Top 2008 Issue

More than any other leader of either political party, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton has been focusing on immigration reform and border security - taking hard-line positions that appeal to frustrated Republicans in a move that could guarantee her enough support in red states to win the White House in 2008.

On Wednesday, as the media descended on Little Rock to cover the opening of her husband's presidential library, Sen. Clinton criticized the Bush administration for not using advanced technology to improve border security.




"I don't think that we have protected our borders or our ports or provided our first responders with the resources they need, so we can do more and we can do better," Clinton told Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren.
To enhance border security, Clinton explained, "there's technology now available. There are some advanced radar systems. There are biometric and other kinds of identification systems that we've been very slow to deploy and unwilling to spend money on."

Unnoticed by the big media, Sen. Clinton has been cultivating the immigration issue since last year.

In a February 2003 interview that went unreported elsewhere except by NewsMax, Clinton told WABC Radio's John Gambling, "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants."

"Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country," the top Democrat warned. "And one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry and exit system so that if we're going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let's have a system that keeps track of them."

'ID System Even for Citizens'

Taking a position far to the right of the Bush administration, Sen. Clinton said she would support "at least a visa ID, some kind of an entry and exit ID. And, you know, perhaps, although I'm not a big fan of it, we might have to move towards an ID system even for citizens."

The former first lady also railed against business owners who employ illegal aliens:

"People have to stop employing illegal immigrants," she told WABC. "I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx; you're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work."

And while President Bush continues to press for a guest-worker program, a move that pleases Mexican President Vicente Fox almost as much as it enrages most Republicans, Sen. Clinton has publicly chastised Canadian immigration officials for being too lax on border issues.

In December 2001, for instance, Clinton urged Canadian offiicals to "crack down on some of these false documents and illegals getting in."

A year later, she blasted Canada after reports indicated that al-Qaida terrorists had slipped into New York across the northern border.

Could a campaign that calls for a crackdown on illegal aliens be the political magic bullet that catapults the former first lady back into the White House?

One diehard Bush supporter, who says he can't stand the Clintons, told NewsMax, "If she ran on a platform of promising to do something about illegal immigration, hell, even I'd vote for her."
 
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 24, 2004



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Immigration enforcement efforts actually have become more lax since the September 11 attacks and have had "no meaningful impact" on the growing number of immigrants now in the United States -- which has reached a record high of 34 million, according to a report released yesterday.
A 13 percent increase of U.S. immigrants, more than 4 million, since 2000 included more than 2 million illegal aliens, who now total about 10 million or 30 percent of the immigrant population, the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said in its report, based on as-yet-unpublished U.S. Census Bureau data.
The report said that while visa applicants from some parts of the world may have to wait longer for approval and a "tiny number of illegal aliens from selected countries" may have been detained, enforcement efforts did not constitute any major change in U.S. immigration policy.
The fact that immigration has remained so high, the report said, also showed that immigration totals are not tied to the nation's economy, as some immigration proponents and others have suggested.
"The idea that immigration is a self-regulating process that rises and falls in close step with the economy is simply wrong," said Steven Camarota, CIS director of research and the report's author. "Today, the primary sending countries are so much poorer than the United States, even being unemployed in America is still sometimes better than staying in one's home country."
Mr. Camarota said the countries primarily represented among the nation's immigrant population are much poorer than the primary sending countries in the past. The United States' much higher standard of living, he said, exists even during recessions, noting that people come to the United States to join family, to avoid social or legal obligations, to take advantage of the United States' social services, and to enjoy greater personal and political freedom.
"Even a prolonged economic downturn is unlikely to have a large impact on immigration levels. If we want lower immigration levels it would require enforcement of immigration laws and changes to the legal immigration system," he said.
Maryland was among the eight states with the largest increases in immigrant population, along with Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Washington, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
The report comes just two days after President Bush assured Mexico he would expend "political capital" earned in his re-election to push hard to grant temporary guest-worker status to millions of illegal immigrants now in the United States.
Mr. Bush has tried since the first month of his presidency in 2001 to push an immigration-reform bill through Congress that would allow illegal aliens to remain in this country indefinitely, and others to cross the border from Mexico, if they registered for "temporary worker cards."
CIS, a private research organization that seeks better immigration enforcement, said in the report that the 34.24 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, now in the United States is the highest number ever recorded in American history. It said about half, or 2 million, of the 4.3 million increase since 2000 is estimated to be illegal aliens.
Data collected by the Census Bureau, the report said, showed there are roughly 9 million illegal aliens now in the United States, but that prior research found that 10 percent of the nation's illegal-alien population is missed by the Census Bureau survey, suggesting a total illegal population of about 10 million in March of this year.
Mr. Camarota said the same Census Bureau data also showed that in the years between 2000 and 2004, nearly 6.1 million new immigrants -- legal and illegal -- arrived from abroad, but that the arrivals are offset by deaths and return migration among immigrants already here, so the total increased by 4.3 million.
He said the 6.1 million new immigrants who arrived since 2000 compared to 5.5 million new arrivals in the four years prior to 2000, during an economic expansion.
"The pace of immigration is so surprising because unemployment among immigrants increased from 4.4 to 6.1 percent, and the number of unemployed immigrants grew by 43 percent," Mr. Camarota said.
The report also said:
• Unlike current immigration, evidence from the 19th and early 20th centuries indicates that economic downturns in this country did have a very significant effect on immigration levels.
•As a share of the nation's total population, immigrants now account for nearly 12 percent, the highest percentage in more than 80 years.
• Recent immigration has had no significant effect on the nation's age structure. If the 6.1 million immigrants who arrived after 2000 had not come, the average age in the United States would be virtually unchanged at 36 years.
• The diversity of the immigrant population continues to decline, with the top country, Mexico, accounting for 31 percent of all immigrants in 2004, up from 28 percent in 2000, 22 percent in 1990 and 16 percent in 1980.
The report is titled "Economy Slowed, But Immigration Didn't: The Foreign-born Population 2000-2004," and is available at the CIS Web site: www.cis.org.
 
>>"I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants."<<

Except, of course, when her campaign volunteers get them to the polls to vote for her. :barf:
 
I’ve thought for a while now that illegal immigration will be the main issue of the ’08 election. That doesn’t bode well for democrats because they once again find themselves in the position of alienating their base in order to appeal to the popular view.
 
Whoah, Cobray!! Lighten up. Such extremist terminology is inflammatory and can only bring scrutiny down upon thy brow.

I don't worry about a "national ID" because I already have one. It's called a driver's license. And, oh yeah, my Passport. And, and, and, then there's my 03 FFL and California COE with duplicate sets of fingerprints at BATFE in Texas and the DOJ in CA to go along with the set in the U.S. Army Records Center from 1968. There's also all those DROS forms with CA DOJ. NRA and California Rifle and Pistol Association membership records.

But I sure don't want to be on any government list somewhere. :D
 
. . . and worst of all, when the scrutiny comes, nobody who's threatening to assassinate people will have TFL to get his message out. ;)

Nothing violent or illegal.
 
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