ONE-WAY ROAD
With our current policy, let's just build a highway from Guadalajara to Las Vegas
BY KEN WARD

Ken Ward is opinion page editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla. A Las Vegas resident from 1990-2002, he was a freelance columnist with the R-J and assistant managing editor at the Sun. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com  Other stories by Ken Ward

On the heels of the Dubai Ports debacle, Republicans are preparing yet another security breach by issuing a "Gold Card" to illegal aliens. No, I'm not making this up. Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., came up with this gem in an effort to bridge the gap with breakaway hardliners in the House and forge a "consensus" on immigration. Specter may as well earmark federal funds to build a one-way mass-transit system from Guadalajara to Las Vegas while he's at it.

The Gold Card program would grant illegals two-year work visas, with unlimited renewals and a path to U.S. citizenship. Specter refuses to call this "amnesty," but Arlen's been in denial about a lot of things since he drew the infamous single-bullet diagram in the JFK assassination probe. Like so many other immigration enthusiasts, Specter, an attorney, is more interested in legalizing illegals than in enforcing the law. His campaign is promoted by that big-business mouthpiece, The Wall Street Journal, which blithely dismisses the "small but vocal no-amnesty crowd."

Really? Every public-opinion poll ever taken shows a solid majority of Americans adamantly opposed to any such deals. And no matter how much lipstick the Stupid Party tries to put on this pig, Specter's plan is nothing more than a gold-plated amnesty scheme.

While the Journal & Co. shill for the wonders of global capitalism at the expense of border security and national sovereignty, two other reports made the news.

First, the University of Texas at El Paso details how Uncle Sam stiffs counties throughout the Southwest, forcing them to pick up the ever-growing tab to educate, medicate and generally subsidize illegals. San Diego County spends $50 million a year just to arrest, jail and prosecute illegals. The feds chip in $2 million. Mighty white of them, considering it's Washington's job to protect our borders.

Second, the U.S. General Accountability Office found that federal authorities cited a grand total of four companies "for hiring illegal aliens in 2004" (down from 430 in 1999). This at a time when an estimated 7 million illegals toil in the domestic workforce.

The Journal, which positively swoons over the neoconservative crusade to bring "democracy" to the benighted peoples of the world (even if they must be killed), cravenly admits defeat to mighty Mexico by declaring that this country cannot control its own southern border. In an interesting twist of illogic, the paper editorialized last month that "enforcement along will only create more illegal immigrants."

In Specter's world, though, the most excellent Department of Homeland Security will muster the resources and competence to thoroughly vet and investigate millions of Gold Card applications. All nice and legal. Wink, wink. These absurdities would be risible if the policies pursued by Republican blowhards didn't yield such damnable results. Economist Robert Samuelson has run the numbers and confirmed that the ongoing influx of cheap, illegal labor is indeed driving down wages, particularly for Americans clinging to the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

"Business groups clamor for more 'guest workers,' but these groups seem unperturbed by extravagant increases in CEO pay. Yet they're horrified by anything that might raise the wages of maids, waitresses, laborers or gardeners," he writes.

Samuelson is no Marxist, or even a Howard Dean. He's about as vanilla as public-policy thinkers get. Nor should his data surprise anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to a U.S. job market that increasingly resembles the Third World's.

The fact that Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans are so tone-deaf on immigration helps explain why the GOP consistently loses the black and working-class vote. If the Democratic Party weren't so captive to its own socialist/multicultural agenda, it could score points with the Heartland's disenchanted and disenfranchised bourgeoisie.

And, really, that's the problem with our current political duopoly. Apart from partisan posturing, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Specter and, say, Harry Reid on immigration. For the Beltway elites, it's "just business."

So, amigo, step right up and get your Gold Card while Americans reap the putrid fruits of Jorge Bush's "compassionate conservativism." LW