(D)Amnesty! by Doug Wrenn

(D)Amnesty!

By Doug Wrenn

May 31, 2007

"Just when I'm finally out, they pull me back in!" exclaimed an exasperated Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino in "Godfather III." The Mafia don, weighted down by his sins of the past, finally sought to run a legitimate business empire, but was dragged back in to the real "family" biz by an errant nephew and some shady dealings involving the Catholic Church. Right about now, I know how he must have felt.

Generally speaking, I don't like to write about the same topic twice consecutively, although that is no rule engraved in stone. For subject material, the illegal immigration issue for writers is the gift that keeps on giving. This is Memorial Day weekend. I should be writing about our brave heroes, past present, and sadly, future, and their noble sacrifice to country, liberty, and that most precious liberty of all, life. But unlike certain charlatan elected officials, and aspiring wannabes, we cannot and must not differentiate between the current war, our open borders and the ominous overshadowing of the coming North American Union (NAU). These three issues are intertwined and any political candidate whose stances are inconsistent with these three issues is undeserving of any vote. That pretty much wipes out all the Democrats and the entire top tier of the alleged Republicans, AKA: "The Three Stooges," John, Mitt and Rudy.

Unlike Michael Corleone, none of my nephews drove me back to the contentious topic of illegal immigration, but like with Michael Corleone, Holy Mother, The Church did. The Catholic Church calls her faithful to decide between faith and country very day in many countries around the globe. Those who live up to that call often soon die by it. They are martyrs, and their sacrifice is noble. I never thought I would ever live to see the day that I would actually have to choose between faith and country in the freest nation on earth, but such is now the case. I don't fear nor expect imprisonment or execution, but I have made my choice, and on this issue, it isn't with Holy Mother The Church because her cause on this issue is not noble. It is utterly foolish, and dangerous for no greater reason, I believe, than well intended, albeit, naïve and misguided liberalism. There are pros and cons to the separation of church and state debate, but one thing is clear, those who don't know what they are talking about should politely excuse themselves from the exchange. I have never kept it a secret that I write out of passion. I don't even approach the keyboard until I already have a topic to write about, and half of it is usually already written in my mind before I even sit down to write it. I don't seek topics to write about. They find me. Then wild horses could not drag me from the keyboard. I often wonder if that quirk is a gift or a curse. I'm a devout Catholic. I'm not going to enjoy writing this column, but I'm also a patriotic American, therefore, I must write it.

I was supposed to go to a minor league baseball game Friday night. It was supposed to be a big game, celebrating the beginning of Memorial Day weekend with lots of activities, including a big fireworks display. I didn't go. At work this past week, I already worked my average 55 hours and drove my usual thousand or so miles, and on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, I had already had my share of sitting in traffic and hearing the radio continuously blurting out the usual plethora of traffic jams and crashes on literally all the major highways. I was hot, tired and exasperated by the massive and spontaneous infusion of hooky-playing, beach-seeking out-of-state tourists, clad in loud Hawaiian shirts and mindlessly gabbing away about nothing of significance on their trendy cell phones while bashing into other cars and spilling their boogey boards and ten speed bicycles off their respective car racks attached to their screaming rug-rat filled mini-vans and SUVs and all over the roadway to impede the rest of us who still have to actually work for a living. Given the choice of going back into a car and subjecting myself to that torturous insanity once again, or having a molar extracted without anesthesia, I would actually tell the doc to go for it and even yank a couple of them out. It's not like I'm a big baseball fan anyway. Frankly, I have found much more entertainment in watching paint dry than to sit on hard metal bench on a sweltering summer-like night, watching grown men spend three + hours playing an exceedingly tedious kids' game that should have ended two hours ago, had it not been for all the traditional delays of the players idly standing around, scratching, spitting and incessantly readjusting their athletic cups. If I wanted to see grown men continuously fondling their crotches, I would go to a rap concert. Not that I like rap, either, but at least so-called rap "artists" move around once in a while and show some semblance of life. And by the way, for all this romantic nostalgia of the glorious "ball park frank," I would submit to you that whoever started that urban legend never ingested one of these little over-rated horrors on a bun, nor had to deal with their horrendous after effects. So my wife left without me to meet our friends, who know me and what my job entails. From what I understand, they took it well and incredibly, I was barely even missed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it was just the hounds and I and all three of us had staked out our favorite piece of living room furniture on which to rest. The A/C was cranking along nicely, and the answering machine was on to filter out the usual pests such as pushy telemarketing sales people who poorly read off a script and pretend they are naturally speaking to you, biased poll takers who read from similar scripts and just as badly as telemarketers, and apparently blind idiots who dialed the wrong number, and obnoxiously insist on knowing what my number is before they hang up because they don't believe me when I tell them they reached the wrong number. Both dogs were already blissfully snoring and I, the only human in the house, now had sole control of the TV remote. I was contently planted in my recliner, with my other "dogs" elevated and pointed in a northerly direction. Ah! Life is good! I started clicking away.

I'm a guy. I don't watch. I click, which is something that drives every woman about as crazy as when we guys leave the toilet seat up. (Hey, take a breath. It's part of our charm, and we guys can have as much charm as women can have "prerogative.") As I was clicking past the channel for The Eternal Word Television Network (ETWN), correspondent Raymond Arroyo grabbed my attention by reporting that Governor Rell had just signed the "Plan B" law into effect, which mandated that Connecticut's four Catholic hospitals give abortifacients to rape victims, while ignoring the alternative, easy, and legal accessibility to the drug and defying religious liberty to Catholics in a state that has a history of religious persecution since its inception. Then Arroyo said something I didn't think I would typically hear on that station: "immigration." (Hmm…) I then parked the remote on the strategically placed end table.

On ETWN's program, "The World Over," Arroyo interviewed Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow for Domestic Policy at the Heritage Foundation and Kevin Appleby, Director of Migration (emphasis added) And Refuge Policy Of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). That's it. I was hooked. Arroyo had me. Now, if the darned dogs would just snore a little less loudly, maybe I could actually hear the dialogue. One item caught my attention right away, as it should have done for you as well; that often manipulated word, "migration." Migration means to move with a group, but immigration means to "move into," as in across a border. Those who interchange the phrases, "migration" with "immigration" and "undocumented immigrants" (or just "immigrants") with "illegal immigrants" have pretty much already telegraphed their less-than objective stance on this issue.

God bless Robert Rector. The man is a true patriot and a genius at analyzing public policy. This past week, since a handful of self-appointed framers of this immigration debacle in the Congress let their dirty little behind closed doors secret out to the fleeced sheep known as the public, the news has been aflutter with more specific details coming out about this horrendous bill, that we, the American people must stop. Robert Rector, our modern day "Paul Revere" deserves the credit for sounding the alarm. The full analysis of this bill can be seen and downloaded on the Heritage Foundation web site at www.heritage.org.

Among the illuminated ugly tidbits that have crawled out from this slimy rock of a bill that our lying, traitor President still refuses to call "amnesty," is a ridiculously naïve proposal that allows illegal immigrant gang members, such as those in the predatory and rapidly growing MS13 gang, now prevalent in 33 states, to simply "renounce" their gang membership and they will be allowed to remain here. That rank absurdity is like having officials from the US and Israel meeting and negotiating with Ahmadinejad in Tehran over falafels and tea and actually expecting him to keep his word and the peace. A "Z" visa can be granted to any low skilled worker and renewed every two years…. indefinitely! US taxpayers will be required to pay the legal expenses for illegal immigrants seeking to stay here. Any immigrant with even one forged document who claims to seek amnesty must be given an adjudication, which could take years. Before this bill can go into effect, all pending cases must be disposed in the immigration courts, exasperating the backlog and effectively shutting them down. Our Border Patrol and Immigration, Customs Enforcement ("ICE") Agents will effectively become little more than traffic cops, directing these illegal invaders to the nearest immigration office to trade phony documents for real ones. The Border Patrol, which is now having trouble maintaining it's grossly demoralized ranks, must be increased by an unrealistic figure of 18,000 before this bill supposedly goes into effect. We already saw that happen in the very divided last session of Congress, in which a figure of 10,000 or 20,000 proposed positions were whittled down to a token 2,000. More of the fence must be built, but already little of it has, with the appropriations, and the intentions behind them still wearing a Congressional bull's eye.

These are only some of the dirty little secrets the pro-amnesty members of our government don't want you to know about. When you factor in that once here, each illegal immigrant will then have a much easier chance to bring in family members, do the math. It is mostly the unskilled and undereducated coming here, and that demographic tends to have many more children, but even at a modest estimate, of two parents and two children, excluding siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents, etc., if we supposedly have 12-20 million illegal immigrants here now, at a very conservative four times that amount, we are looking at 48-80 million within a very short span of years, even as little as five years by some estimates I have heard. Robert Rector says that these illegals typically cost much more tax revenue than they pay in, and that each illegal immigrant will cost the American taxpayer $400,000-$500,000, with a total cost to the American people into the trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, Congress, the trusted guardian of our money, has not conducted any cost analysis of the impact of this bill if passed. Like with the unfunded and monstrous Bush Medicare boondoggle, that's much more than just pennies in a gumball machine. This amnesty bill will enable illegal immigrants to be entitled to 60 different welfare programs and hold back scores of legal, skilled, educated immigrants, patiently and legally waiting for years, and these people are the ones who would actually contribute to, as opposed to drain our country's resources. This amnesty bill will cripple our economy and lead to our ultimate demise as a nation. As it is, we are already borrowing money from countries poorer than us. Meanwhile, a growing and menacing China patiently waits like a cat about to pounce on a mouse. China's growing military, thanks to a surplus of hundreds of millions of dollars, thanks to myopic and greedy dim-bulb "free traders" among our ranks grows exponentially, but in the end, when ready, all China will have to do is call in our debts, and bankrupt us with the exact same strategy by which we brought down the Soviet empire and ended the Cold War, and again, without having to fire a shot.

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