“The ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union.”

Atlanta (Journal) Constitution newspaper

Constitution Home Edition
Friday, 9/7/2001
Editorial
page A18

OUR OPINIONS: Bush, Fox should pursue union similar to Europe

/ Staff,

Mexican President Vicente Fox envisions a North American economic alliance that will make the border between the United States and Mexico as unrestricted as the one between Tennessee and Georgia.

Though neither Fox nor President Bush expects to dissolve the 2000-mile border overnight, the Mexican leader clearly prefers sooner rather than later. In Washington this week, Fox surprised his friend and fellow rancher president by calling for sweeping American immigration reform by year’s end.

Currently, U.S. government immigration policy echoes its position on gays in the military: Don’t ask, don’t tell. The nation essentially winks at the estimated 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants toiling in fields, poultry plants and construction sites. If America cracked down and rounded up all those workers, the nation’s agricultural and construction industries would collapse, says Jagdish Sheth, Emory University’s Kellstadt professor of marketing.

Despite American dependence on their labor, undocumented workers still live in the shadows and under threat of deportation, and Fox is right to insist that Mexicans working, paying taxes and obeying the law have ”all their legal rights when they’re living here in the United States.”

Those rights don’t have to spring from legal residency. Some sort of temporary guest worker visas stand a better chance with congressional conservatives than the blanket amnesty suggested last month by the White House. Opponents shot down that trial balloon before it even cleared the tree tops.

In the short-term and during this country’s economic downturn, Bush ought to concentrate on a work permit program that concedes the need for Mexican workers but imposes controls to stem illegal crossings. By loosening border restrictions, Mexicans may eventually return to their homeland, a journey that now entails too many perils. Reflecting the new policy of encouraging citizens to return, Fox said Thursday, “We need you to come home one day and play a part in building a strong Mexico.”

The United States also must play a part in sustaining Mexico’s economic growth. “For marginal workers, leaving his or her country is not an easy proposition. It is not a lark. It is a risky, dangerous proposition, ” says Juan M. Del Aguila, an Emory University associate professor of political studies. “If we can create incentives for them to stay in their own country, many of these potential immigrants would.”

In boom states like Georgia, it’s been painless to absorb Mexican immigrants. But in the unlikely scenario that the economy hits the skids, migrant labor — whether illegally coming from Mexico or legally from rural Alabama — could snatch jobs away from the local unskilled labor pool.

; ” Unlike the varied landscapes and cultures of European Union members, the United States, Canada and Mexico already share a great deal in common, and language is not as great a barrier. President Bush, for example, is quite comfortable with the blended Mexican-Anglo culture forged in the border states of Texas, California and Arizona.

Of the three North American players, the United States clearly holds the place of dominance. By joining with its neighbors to the north and south, the United States would have the strongest voice in coordinating fiscal, energy and drug enforcement polices that affect the continent.

An erroneous public perception exists that Mexico would be the main beneficiary of a U.S.-Mexico partnership. In the aftermath of the 8-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has become the third-largest importer of Georgia products, $1.2 billion worth of goods last year. Mexico is the United States’ second-largest trading partner.

“Fundamentally, our economic integration with Mexico is inevitable, ” says Emory’s Sheth. “Out of nowhere, Mexico has become a $200 billion a year trade partner. We think that will grow to $500 billion.”

“If you look at the European process, not all countries benefit equally all the time, ” says Del Aguila. “But the commonwealth as a whole has improved, the standard of living has risen.”

Historically, immigration has enriched America culturally and economically, as demonstrated most recently by the Cubans in South Florida. The challenge with Mexico is to better manage the natural flow of a people who are not only America’s fastest-growing immigrant group, but also its closest neighbors.

“Our choice is to fight it and lose, ” says Georgia State University economics professor David Sjoquist, “or embrace it and all come out better for it.”AJC a

The anti-enforcement and  liberal AJC long ago became an advocacy outlet on “Americans last” state legislative issues. Sometimes they tell part of the truth on the bills they push…sometimes they don’t.

Take HB 120 – please. The legislation from Republican Kasey Carpenter had several variations, but bottom line would have granted the much lower instate tuition rates to illegal aliens in Georgia’s public colleges than Americans and legal immigrants who came to our public university system while living in other states. We are proud to have led the successful campaign to educate voters and convince legislators that putting illegals ahead of Americans is bad policy. We hope the Republican legislators who supported this goop see primary opponents and lose their coveted seats of power under the Gold Dome.

It should be noted that even after we had killed the bill for 2021, the AJC hung in there in promo work.

• Related: “For academic year 2020-2021, the average tuition & fees for Colleges in Georgia was $4,739 for in-state and $17,008 for out-of-state.

HB 932 is a prime example of the severely arrogant and pretense-free “journalism” from the AJC editors. The bill was conceived and supported by the massive and growing refugee resettlement industry in Georgia and sponsored by an outgoing Republican, Rep Wes Cantrell. Cantrell turned out be less of a plotting villain than a dimwit.

How bad was HB 932? House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones went to the House Clerk’s office and scratched her name off the bill two days after we made its contents known to voters.

• Related: Refugees before Americans in Georgia? Dustin Inman Society board member Inger Eberhart pushes for a vote on Rep Wes Cantrell’s HB 932

Here is an AJC “news” story on HB 932 early in the 2022 session when it was first introduced. The measure would have changed state law to allow refugees, Special Visa Immigrants and thousands of Afghans to access the lower instate tuition rate in state public colleges the same day they arrive in Georgia. Note that the reporter and his editors omit the fact that the change would not apply to Americans moving here from other states or anywhere else in the world.

Here is a promo story eleven days later on the refugee industry’s event in the state Capitol to see both bills (HB 120 & HB 932) – Try to find any balance.

Then, ten days later, the AJC ran a LTE from a well-known liberal immigration lawyer, Charles Kuck, who served for years on the board of the Coca-Cola/Georgia Power-funded GALEO Corp selling the idea that we need to put “immigrants” and refugees ahead of Americans in the name of “workforce shortage. The goal here is to create a larger cheap workforce of college education skilled workers then to demand an increase on legal immigration numbers of low skilled workers and another amnesty for black market labor already here. Including the “migrants” crossing the river as I type. Not for the first time, we note things would be much different of the hordes of illegals were English-speaking, potential conservative voters streaming in from Saskathu

“Advocates for the bill declined to include language that would exclude illegal migrants from the funding stream, King said”

Breitbart News

March 15, 2022

Neil Munro

The Georgia Senate has blocked a draft bill that would have sent taxpayer funds to illegal migrants, says D.A. King, an activist for pro-American bills.

“Senate Bill 601 was voted down about 2.10 in the afternoon here in Georgia and I’m extremely happy and very proud,” said D.A. King, the founder of the Dustin Inman Society, which advocates for pro-American immigration policies.

The bill was backed by the GOP leaders, including state Sen. Butch Miller (R-49), who is the Senate President Pro Tempore. Miller is also a candidate for the Republican nomination in the state’s pending lieutenant gubernatorial election.

“I can tell you, them being hammered with enough facts on the illegal immigration angle and the facts that the students in the country illegally could easily be put in private school while American citizens were skipped over,” King added. “Having illegal alien parents in charge of not only disbursement of the money — but oversight of the expenses — did not help them.”

The legislation would have created a small-scale school choice program for all students, including illegal-migrant youths. The bill also allowed illegal immigrants to play a role in overseeing the funding.

However, the program would have been funded by appropriated funds, so minimizing the scale and benefit to ordinary Americans who are seeking to escape the government-run schools, especially in less-populated rural districts.

Advocates for the bill declined to include language that would exclude illegal migrants from the funding stream, King said.

The language in the bill was drawn from legislation drafted by an advocacy group, the American Federation for Children. The group’s website says its research director works with the pro-migration, business-based Cato Institute: “Corey DeAngelis is the national director of research at the American Federation for Children, the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at Reason Foundation.”

“I would urge every other state which is considering school choice bills from the American Federation for Children to take a close look and see how much at risk they are putting the American students because of illegal immigration,” King said.

King helped to block a matching bill in the Georgia House, so the push is likely dead for 2022.

Breitbart has covered the immigration debate in the GOP-run, business-dominated Georgia legislature.   See here for the entire report from Breitbart.

“From everything I’m seeing in Tapachula right now – the huge numbers of migrants rioting, demonstrating, and agitating to Let My People Go – I expect the next ant operation any day.”

“Which makes the only real loser the American taxpayers, who had no say in allowing city-sized populations of foreign nationals every month into their schools and emergency rooms, for starters.

AUSTIN, Texas – Russia’s war on Ukraine has seized America’s attention from the mass migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than two completely full Superbowl Stadiums worth of foreign nationals (150,000) are still crossing each month.

But worse news closer to home is coming.

In the far south of Mexico, the central government is about to release a sea of U.S.-bound migrants it has dammed up behind the bureaucratic barrier in the southernmost city of Tapachula. The coming swell has risen to more than 73,000 angry, mobbing, rioting migrants from January 1 through March 8, according to the Americas edition of EFE.

Mexico has been blocking migrant forward movement under an agreement with the Biden administration as a kind of artifice that makes mass migration numbers at the American Southwest Border seem less than if Mexican just waved them all through. But instead, the agreement with Biden has Mexico using its National Guard to block roads out of Tapachula while requiring migrants to apply for Mexican humanitarian visas necessary to proceed unchecked north to the American border. The Mexicans slow-roll processing as the migrant population grows and agitates for release from what they call an “open prison city.”

This has happened before, just like this, and always led to mass release. But if Americans aren’t paying close enough attention, the Mexicans will trick them into missing that it even happened.

The last time this brawling, violent, disrupting migrant population built to an intolerable threshold, 50,000 of them in December, the government of Mexico released them all north employing a tactic known as an “ant operation.” The term connotes a tactic usually attributed to criminal organizations that ship large volumes of drugs using small distributed parties and individuals in many single-file lines so that most avoid public notice or politically unwanted media attention.

That’s what happened in December last year. Tapachula was experiencing much migrant indigestion as it is right now: 50,000 blocked and angry migrants brawling, fighting, demonstrating, and disrupting city life every day. Mexico’s central government ordered that special “QR Code Visas” be made available to all 50,000. The QR Code Visas required migrants to board hundreds of government-arranged buses that were heading to 14 different designated Mexican cities in the north.

When it was all over, no one noticed that tens of thousands headed for the border in an “ant operation” exodus over about a week’s time between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

“The whole city [of Tapachula] was collapsing because there were so many here in town and they were blocking the roads and causing disruptions … so that’s why they were moved out,” Clemente Miguel, director of the local newspaper Noticias de Chiapas told me when I was in Tapachula in January. “There’s no infrastructure to hold them all in one area, and no other Mexican state wants them, so they’re intentionally spreading them all out.”

The ant operation served everyone’s political and diplomatic interests well, just about, anyway. It worked for the Mexican government for not having to withstand the public outing as failing its end of the migrant block-and-hold bargain with Biden.

And the ant operation worked well for the Biden government, which abhorred potential media coverage of thousands more migrants tallied in the already terribly polling monthly Customs and Border Protection apprehension reports… More here from Townhall