AMNESTY TALKING AND DEBATE POINTS A project of The Conservative Caucus 450 Maple Avenue East, Vienna, Va. 22180 703-938-9626
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"Based on my current research, I estimate that if all the current adult illegal immigrants in the U.S. were granted amnesty the net retirement costs to government (benefits minus taxes) could be over $2.5 trillion." Robert Rector

AMNESTY TALKING POINTS:

• Ask Congress where the 700 mile fence is they voted to build in 2006? The Bush administration built only a few miles of the fence, and the Obama administration has reportedly halted construction completely.

• Amnesty is amnesty, no matter how they try to disguise it or rename it. The "Dream Act" is amnesty.

• Obama's plan to have illegals pay a "fine" and fill out some paperwork for amnesty is rewarding illegals, and penalizing all those who are waiting for legal approval.

• Amnesty will attract even more millions of illegals because they will see how easy it is to ignore our immigration laws.

• Amnesty will allow every illegal to bring many all their family members, resulting in 60-120 million immigrants from the 20 million being granted amnesty in the bill.

• Any and all restrictions or protections in the amnesty bill which are included to entice conservatives can be expected to be ignored, repealed or weakened as soon as the bill has been passed or in future years. This includes promises to spend billions on border security, expensive citizenship fines and return-home visa application requirements.  Amnesty activists, often receiving taxpayer funding) can also be expected to sue in court to block any restrictions.

• Keep American jobs American. Today's economic crisis is costing millions of Americans their jobs. Illegals should be returned home and the border closed so Americans will not lose more jobs to illegals.

• Illegal entry to the United States is a criminal violation.

• Illegals under amnesty will be able to become legal residents and citizens far easier than honest immigrants who followed the law.

• Only 22% of Americans are for amnesty!  Please listen to the people and keep amnesty dead.

• Amnesty will NOT stop the flood of illegals across the border, but will greatly increase the flood because they know they will be eventually awarded the same amnesty deal. The amnesty bill only required a friend claim the illegal has been in America at the qualifying date--hardly real verification.

• The only effective way to stop illegal immigration is to build a full and secure 2,000 mile fence, not to reward illegals with immediate legal status and easy citizenship.

• A "virtual fence" will only stop "virtual illegals". By the time sensors and cameras detect illegals freely walking across the border and the Border Patrol is able to respond, the illegals will be across the border and able to hide or blend into the population. We need a real fence to stop real illegals; and only as a backup, use the Border Patrol, cameras and sensors to make sure nobody tries to dig under it.

• Would you trust only a "virtual door" on your house?  No!  You want a real door that will actually stop real thieves!  You may ALSO want a burglar alarm or even a guard, but you won't want just an alarm without a door!

• If the illegals are only needed to "do the jobs Americans won't", why the preference given in the amnesty bill for highly-skilled immigrants?

• Millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal are doing not just hard labor jobs but office and skilled work--talking the jobs of Americans.

• Even a small recession will cost millions of Americans jobs, which will be given to low-paid immigrants.

• Support an immigration moratorium: no visas, no immigration at all for 10+ years until the current millions assimilate and learn English.

• Rather than importing highly-skilled labor from everywhere else, how about teaching American students engineering and science like we did in the 1950's, instead of teaching our students recycling, diversity, global warming and political-correctness--anything but reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and science.

• Why are there suddenly millions of jobs which former President Bush said "Americans won't do"?  Who used to do them?  Americans!

  • It's not the job but the pay. Most Americans won't and can't afford to take jobs for illegal-alien/unskilled/unreported immigrant pay. Pay Americans a decent wage and they'll happily do the work.

  • Many industries are now nearly out of reach for Americans seeking work due entirely to cheap imported labor; including construction, landscaping, retail, restaurant, and service industries.

  • Amnesty and unlimited legal & illegal immigration is nothing less than the wholesale replacement of the American workforce with low-paid imported labor. Americans will increasingly be unemployable at American middle-class wages as 3rd-world wages become the norm.

  • Amnesty will further destroy the middle class.

  • Where will your kids and grandkids find summer and entry-level jobs to gain the skills they need to build their career--so many entry-level jobs are now filled primarily with cheaper immigrant labor.

  • Un-patriotic corporations have demonstrated their goals: Any job that can't be "outsourced" to China or India will be "insourced" with low-wage immigrants.  American workers are always the loser.

  • The usual government solution is to spend tax dollars to "re-train" skilled manufacturing workers, often for poor-paying service jobs. Save our jobs, don't give them away!

  • 150 years ago the debate was also on importing "cheap labor" for plantations.  It was called slavery then, and it's called "insourcing" or "guest workers/day laborers" today.  Too many companies still seem willing to do anything to avoid paying people a decent wage!

  • Henry Ford invented America's middle class with his idea to pay his workers enough to buy the cars they made.  Corporate decisions to use mostly immigrant labor at sub-standard wages will destroy our middle class and eventually result in millions of middle class Americans only able to find work at immigrant pay.

  Amnesty supporters claim it's ineffective, impossible or too expensive to build the 2,000 mile border fence:

  • Homeland Defense Secretary Janet Napolitano says "Show me a 50' fence and I'll show you a 51' ladder."  She is totally wrong and the truth can be seen in Israel where daily attacks from suicide bombers were stopped cold by construction of effective fences. A fence will work as well on our border as in Israel to stop drug cartel violence, murder, smuggling and the flow of millions of illegals a year.

  • The reverse argument also works:  If a border fence won't work here, why does it work so well in Israel?

  • No fence means drug lords have unrestricted access to America.

  • No fence means if Mexico collapses into a drug war, tens of millions of Mexicans will take the easier route of fleeing to America rather than banding together and reclaiming their nation from the drug lords. America will be swamped and bankrupted by housing and caring for tens of millions of refugees, as well as fighting the massive waves of violence and theft that may result.

  • A "Virtual Fence" will only stop "virtual illegals."  Simply putting sensors and cameras on the border will do nothing to stop anyone--by the time border patrols are able to respond, the illegals will have entered our nation and dispersed. Only a real fence will stop real illegals.

  • A "Virtual Fence" also assumes the political will to actually respond when a virtual alarm sounds. We can't expect Obama to do this.

  • Is this not the same country which put men on the Moon and rovers on Mars, built the Panama Canal, conquered dreaded diseases, and won WWII?  How insulting to the American people to say that we are incapable of building a fence.  This is not a comparatively great engineering challenge!

  • The Great Wall of China is 4,000 miles long--and was built over 2,000 years ago! It was also built in very difficult mountainous terrain, far more difficult than is found on the U.S. border.

  • The Roman Empire had little trouble building Hadrian's Wall across the Scottish border in just 8 years without power tools. Are we somehow less capable than the ancient Chinese and Romans?

  • The cost of greater welfare services and the cost of more crime from unlimited immigration would exceed the cost of even a gold-plated fence: Costs of Amnesty 

  • The costs of caring for the tens of millions of refugees from a collapsed Mexico will bankrupt America.

  • The cost of a full 2,000 mile fence would only be a few billion dollars.

  • The cost of a full 2,000 mile fence would be the cost of only a few weeks of the Iraq war.

  • "Build it and they WON'T come". A 2,000 mile border fence, that is.
    

• Instant Amnesty: The amnesty bill's requirement to check the background of 12 million illegals in just 24 hours is a joke! If the government takes many months now to issue passports, how will they be able to check even a hundred illegals in 24 hours?  They would have just "approved" everyone without any checks, resulting in great numbers of "legalized" criminals, drug smugglers and potential terrorists.

• Perhaps half the world's population (3 billion people) would like to come to the U.S. to share in our prosperity, freedom and even our government benefits. With cheap airfares and the un-defended Mexican border, this is easier than ever. We just can't handle everyone who wants to move to our country!

• Where would the amnesty supporters draw the line? 25 million immigrants? 50 million? 100 million? 500 million immigrants? Is there no limit? What will extreme 3rd-world-style overpopulation do to our country and environment, or your own city and neighborhood? The previous amnesty bill would have resulted in 60-100 million total immigrants from family members, not counting even greater floods of illegal immigration which amnesty will inspire.

• 60-100 million more immigrants mean at least a million more immigrants in every major city in America (can your city handle 3rd-world style overcrowding?) and perhaps 1,000 in every town and village (can your town handle that?).

• The real reason Mexicans (and people from many other countries) want to escape to America is poverty and oppression caused by their Socialist, corrupt governments, and drug violence from ineffective and corrupt police and politicians. The solution is for citizens of those countries to free (not flee) their own countries and create American-style economies where they and all their fellow countrymen can live in freedom and work prosperously.

• Millions of illegal and legal immigrants are NOT assimilating, by learning English and adopting American values. Stop all immigration, legal and illegal, until they assimilate; or American values, culture and the English language will be endangered. America won't be "America" anymore.

• What will happen when unassimilated immigrants reach an electoral majority in border states? This may happen in coming years in southwest states. Would they vote to secede from the United States and join Mexico, as many immigrant activist groups actually advocate?  Will it be Civil War II?

• Both Canada and Mexico have tremendous natural and intellectual resources. Each are neighbors of the United States. Why is Canada so prosperous but Mexico plagued with such great poverty that millions flee annually?  The answer is government, and only government.  Mexicans have long suffered under corrupt Socialist regimes and while there has been some progress in recent years, Mexicans still do not have a real free-market, a real free press (see article on censorship in Mexican media), or a legal, economic and political system free of corruption. If Mexico had the same levels of freedom as in the United States and Canada as well as no corruption, they would become just as prosperous, and would not need to flee to the US.

• Most areas of our border have little or no barrier to stop anyone. See our photos of the 3' tall "fence" east of San Diego.

• The open border is a virtual superhighway for drug smugglers and potential terrorists, quite in addition to millions of illegal aliens every year.

• The Swine/Mexican/H1N1 flu outbreak could have been halted and contained if the US had acted immediately to seal our border. Yet it was not done and the flu spread from Mexico to the world. Had the epidemic been more deadly, millions of Americans could have died because the official policy of the US government is to intentionally NOT close the border in a pandemic--in defiance of all disease control procedures.

• The amnesty bill would have awarded instant and full amnesty to those who crossed the border up to the enactment of the bill. How soon would pressure grow to include the next group of illegals?  Once started, the amnesty cycle will never end!

• Amnesty is expensive! (Trillions) Read the Costs of Amnesty from policy expert Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Immigration/bg1936.cfm

• It's NOT just 12 million illegals: 61+ Million Immigrants under Senate Amnesty scheme - by Robert Rector. http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed070206a.cfm.

• Watch and share our TV show "Stop Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants" on YouTube for more information. Put this link on your website or in your emails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrF9V2e4A1o.
   

• Visit our web page frequently for updates: www.ConservativeUSA.org

We'll keep these talking points here for your reference because amnesty will be dug up again and again and we will be forced to defeat it again and again. Obama will keep trying to force it through as long as he is in office.