National Review Hammers the ‘Gang of Eight’ Immigration Team

by Warner Todd Huston | June 20, 2013 4:55 pm

In a new editorial[1], the folks at National Review came out strongly against the immigration plan being sponsored by the so-called “gang of eight” Senators, a group that includes Florida Senator Marco Rubio, calling the bill “Rubio’s Folly.”

[2]

NR urges Senator Rubio to vote against the bill he has helped craft, disparaging the proposed legislation as, “an amnesty-first, enforcement-maybe program drawn up mainly to reflect the priorities of 11 million citizens of other countries rather than the concerns of more than 300 million citizens of the United States.”

NR goes on to point out that many of the bill’s “security triggers” are little else but “paper tigers” that are undermined before they even fairly begin. For instance, the requirement that prospective new citizens must have a “clean criminal record” is undermined by the fact that they can actually have two misdemeanors and up to two convictions for drunk driving yet still qualify.

The editorial also points out that in nearly every case the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is given the power to waive the rules at any time. DHS can even waive the supposed fines the bill claims illegals must pay before becoming a citizen. And the back taxes, NR says, are only those taxes the IRS has already deemed that individual illegals already owe, not an assessment of what every illegal might owe.

Even the border security assessment, the editorial points out, is left to the DHS itself to certify and it would be an “unlikely event” should the agency give it self a failing grade.

The NR piece also says that since “legalization of millions of illegal immigrants happens first, immediately and irreversibly,” this is “especially troublesome.”

“If this bill should be signed into law, the amnesty would go into effect immediately, and the most that any of the so-called triggers would do is delay the process of allowing the formerly illegal immigrants to apply for green cards and citizenship. That is the fundamental flaw of Senator Rubio’s design, and none of his playing Hamlet about the issue is going to change that. The bill is not wrong only in its details, but in its fundamental architecture, including in its guest-worker program and increases in other categories of low-skilled workers.”

“The Gang of Eight bill does not serve the economic interests of the United States,” National Review has proclaimed. Further, the editorial board notes that, “remarkably, nobody in this debate has made much of a serious attempt to explain how or why that amnesty is in the interests of the citizens of the United States.”

An important aspect of NR’s editorial is that the amnesty bill would “create a permanent underclass of foreign workers” by “more than doubling the number of so-called guest workers admitted each year.”

The 2007 Bush-Kennedy proposal was rejected in part because it would have added 125,000 new guest workers. The Gang of Eight bill would add 1.6 million in the first year, and about 600,000 a year after that: That’s the population of Philadelphia in Year One and the population of Boston each year after. That is a lot of taxation without representation. And that is on top of a 50 percent or more increase in the total level of legal immigration.

The editorial also warns that this bill would “entrench” the sort of divisive, class-based political climate that has been miring this country in political strife for some time.

Finally, the NR piece points out that too many Republicans have fallen for the media-created narrative that they must pander to the Hispanic vote as the “future to winning presidential elections.” The piece wraps up noting that even as Hispanic Republicans are leading both the pro and anti-amnesty contingents in the Senate (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, respectively), it’s Cruz who is making much more sense.