No Republican sponsors for driver’s cards and state ID to illegal aliens bill yet
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*Update July 5, 2022: Nguyen has also staked out her position on immigration enforcement.
“A Georgia Democratic nominee repeatedly called to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and argued that carrying out the country’s immigration laws is rooted in “white supremacy” and “xenophobia.”
Washington Free Beacon, Judy 5, 2022
“This Georgia Dem Wants To Abolish ICE and ‘Shut Down’ Illegal Immigrant Detention Centers
Bee Nguyen called immigration enforcement agency ‘rogue,’ ‘cruel’ – read the full story HERE.
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Democrat Rep and candidate for Secretary of State Bee Nguyen (“Access, Equity, Efficiency”) wants to give drivers licenses (“Driver’s Cards”) and state ID cards to Georgia’s estimated 400,000-ish illegal aliens. That’s the goal of her HB 833, that was introduced three days before the end of the 2021 legislative session. The measure would include commercial driver’s licenses (“Drivers Cards”) for the illegals. Yes, it is still illegal to employ illegal aliens. Nguyen calls it the “Freedom to Drive Act.”
Bee Nguyen’s bill is so ridiculous that we assume it is more of a campaign maneuver than a serious attempt at legislative success. The illegal alien lobby loves it. The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute loves it. The liberal Atlanta Journal Constitution loves it and is carrying out an aggressive sales campaign. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce loves it – but quietly. So far, the bill has no Republican cosponsors.
In today’s “new Georgia” a candidate to lead the state office that organizes and oversees all election activity, including voter registration and municipal, state, county, and federal elections is trying to document “the undocumented.” And she is willing to accept the unverifiable ID foreign governments give to illegal aliens as acceptable documents obtain that documentation. An example is the Mexican matricula consular ID.
How insecure are the Mexican matricula consular cards? I have two of them.
In 2003 testimony titled “Consular ID Cards in a Post-9/11 World” the FBI told congress the matricula consular is “not a reliable form of identification.” Also in Nguyen’s bill is a provision to accept passports issued to illegal aliens by foreign governments after they cross our borders illegally and set up housekeeping in Georgia.
Illegal aliens would also be allowed to bring in phone bills, rent receipts and deportation related papers to “prove” their identity and residence on applications for Bee Nguyen’s proposed new Georgia ID.
Nguyen and her cosponsors are apparently hoping to move Georgia closer to becoming the California of the east. We call it “Georgiafornia.” In 2004 Tennessee Democrats tried the “drivers cards” and ID to illegal aliens idea. They ended that adventure after two years and a federal investigation that exposed the extreme level of fraud, bribery and the fact that illegal aliens from other states were flocking to Tennessee to get “documented.” Georgia is already home to more illegal aliens than Arizona. Most of us don’t want to make it easier for them to vote.
In Bee Nguyen’s proposed change to state law, documents used by illegal aliens on the application for ID and driving credentials could not be used for a state criminal investigation unless there was an order by a federal judge. That includes the application itself.
This dangerous bill would be laughed out of a legislative committee in Mexico where illegal aliens have a zero chance of legally obtaining driving credentials. – It should be treated with even less seriousness here.
Rep. Bee Nguyen is going in the wrong direction. This is a clear effort to make Georgia even more illegal alien-friendly and to appeal to the far left. It’s an anti-enforcement immigration bill.
Nguyen’s bill expands on existing Republican policy
It is important to know that Republican-ruled Georgia already quietly issues drivers licenses and ID cards to about 20,000 illegal aliens who are DACA recipients. They are identical to the documents given to legal immigrants and guest workers and foreign students here on legal, temporary visas.
Pro-enforcement voters should be active in stopping Nguyen’s dangerous legislation.
There is a much better idea in the works
Update July 5, 2022: HB 228 described below was killed by GOP leadership in the Georgia House without ever seeing a committee vote.
Rep Charlice Byrd. Photo: Ga General Assembly
For additional voter and identification security, we direct attention to the pending HB 228 sponsored by Rep Charlice Byrd (R, Woodstock) which would mark all non-citizen driving and ID credentials, with “BEARER NOT U.S.CITIZEN – NOT FOR VOTING PURPOSES.”
Amazingly, Rep Byrd’s common sense bill did not come out of the House ‘Committee on Election Integrity’ in the 2021 session. It is still alive for 2022, but faces baseless and ill-informed resistance from the Republican leadership.
Georgians concerned about election integrity should be pressing for passage of Byrd’s bill.
Kent Kobersteen, former Director of Photography of National Geographic
“The pictures are by Robert Clark, and were shot from the window of his studio in Brooklyn. Others shot the second plane hitting the tower, but I think there are elements in Clark’s photographs that make them special. To me the wider shots not only give context to the tragedy, but also portray the normalcy of the day in every respect except at the Towers. I generally prefer tighter shots, but in this case I think the overall context of Manhattan makes a stronger image. And, the fact that Clark shot the pictures from his studio indicates how the events of 9/11 literally hit home. I find these images very compellingÑin fact, whenever I see them they force me to study them in great detail.”
Center for Immigration Studies
Andrew Arthur September 8, 2021
On September 7, the Biden administration filed a spending request with Congress to cover its ongoing needs as the fiscal year ends and provide “urgent” funding for a grab-bag of projects. Among the items in that “continuing resolution” (CR) is authority to give green cards to Afghan nationals resettled here under “Operation Allies Welcome”. (My colleague Rob Law has also written about this.) The proposal includes — somewhat disturbingly given the fact that it came four days before the 20th anniversary of September 11th — a waiver of the terrorism grounds of removal.
The federal government operates on a fiscal year schedule, which runs from October 1 to September 30. Congress is supposed to pass appropriations bills for the various departments and agencies in advance of that October 1 date, but has failed to do so since 1997.
There are six main components in CRs (coverage, duration, funding rate, new activities, anomalies, and legislative provisions), but the latter two are the most significant in the Biden proposal.
As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) explains, “the duration and amount of funds in the CR, and purposes for which they may be used for specified activities, may be adjusted through anomalies.”
It continues: “Anomalies may also designate a specific amount or rate of budget authority for certain accounts or activities that is different than the funding rate provided for the remainder of activities in the CR.” That is, anomalies give the administration authority to move money around from one spending account to another.
By my count, there are 59 separate anomalies in the Biden administration’s proposed CR, including 11 that relate to Afghan resettlement. There are several others that relate to immigration-enforcement spending, which I will discuss in my next post.
Then, there is the big legislative proposal: Green cards for resettled Afghans.
Appropriations bills are not supposed to be vehicles for big legislative proposals. In Congress, there are “authorizing” committees that have (or are supposed to have) expertise in the finer parts of various areas (like defense and immigration) to authorize specific programs. Then, there are the appropriations committees (one for the House and Senate, respectively), whose job it is to write the checks.
CRS explains that substantive legislative proposals sneak into appropriations bills because “they are often widely considered to be must-pass measures to prevent funding gaps.” You can oppose a mass amnesty in this appropriations bill if you want, but that means that grandma won’t get her Social Security check and the Smiths will have to cancel their trip to the Grand Canyon.
As even the Washington Post admits, many of them have “minimal identification and did not appear to have worked closely with the United States”. Mayorkas promises to “use multiple databases and a multilayered approach” to vet those Afghans, but such vetting is only as good as the “minimal identification” documents those parolees present and whatever information intelligence agencies have.
I was the acting chief of the former INS’s national security law division, and the staff director for the National Security Subcommittee at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, so I know a few things about vetting aliens. It is an “exclusionary” system — it does not identify the “good guys”; at best, it can only hope to identify some of the bad ones.
If you read the final report of the 9/11 Commission, you will see that vetting failures and a lack of intelligence sharing among U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were largely to blame for the fact that the 19 hijackers (all of whom were foreign nationals on various nonimmigrant visas) were in the United States to begin with.
In the case of the Afghans being resettled in the United States who have minimal documentation and few if any ties to the U.S. government, that should be a red flag. The Biden CR compounds that.
It would immediately provide any Afghan national paroled into the United States who passes that exclusionary background check with the same resettlement funding as refugees (although they would not count under the refugee cap), make them eligible for driver’s licenses (which you need to board an airliner or enter a government building), and give them access to welfare programs.
Oh, and it gives the same benefits to their spouses and children, or to their parents if they are children and arrived unaccompanied, who are paroled or admitted to this country in the future.
Photo: CBS News.
Here’s the second red flag: It gives DHS the ability to run new background checks on any alien who is paroled and given these benefits. If the first background check were so good at spotting the bad guys, why would you need to run a second, third, or fourth one after you gave them cash and driver’s licenses?
To ask the question is to answer it: The Biden administration knows that its vetting of most Afghan refugees will be questionable, at best. But it gets worse.
That’s because one year after those aliens arrive here (not one year after the first background check is completed and they are given this special status), they would be eligible to apply for green cards, or more precisely apply for adjustment of status under section 245 of the INA.
Note that to adjust status under section 245 of the INA, an alien must be “admissible to the United States”, that is, not inadmissible under any of the grounds of inadmissibility under section 212(a) of the INA.
The Biden CR would just throw out three of those grounds of inadmissibility, specifically the ones that exclude aliens who will become “public charges”, the ones whose employment will adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers who are already here (both citizens and lawful aliens), and that pesky one that actually requires aliens to have visas to get green cards.
But wait, there’s more. Because the legislative proposal in the CR would also allow the DHS secretary to waive any other ground of inadmissibility “on a case-by-case basis for humanitarian purposes, to assure family unity, or when it is otherwise in the public interest”. Who would benefit from such waivers?
Aliens who are inadmissible because they “have a communicable disease of public health significance”, as well as criminals (including drug traffickers, child molesters, and murderers), to name two categories.
And those who have “engaged in a terrorist activity” or who the U.S. government “knows, or has reasonable ground to believe, is engaged in or is likely to engage after entry in any terrorist activity”, to name a third….
“When I got to the Capitol, I quickly realized it wasn’t as advertised,” stated Pullin. “The Republican leadership was more interested in growing government and maintaining power than focusing on liberty and small-government policies. Leadership would routinely partner with Democrats to push through big government policies, and showed no interest in unconstitutional gun laws, civil asset forfeiture, cannabis laws, lack of ballot access, or school choice. There is basically zero difference between Republicans and Democrats in Atlanta.” Former Rep Ken Pullin.
Having been a reluctant denizen of the Georgia state Capitol since 2004, I couldn’t agree with Mr. Pullin more on his description of the sewer under the Gold Dome. On open borders Libertarians, not so much.
The below is pasted from the AJC’s Political Insider blog from this morning – which doesn’t happen often here.
AJC:
“Ken Pullin, a former GOP state Representative from Zebulon, has switched parties from Republican to Libertarian.
A former state rep’s party affiliation may not be front-page news, but the statement Pullin released when he made his switch caught our eyes, especially for his harsh words about his old party.
“When I got to the Capitol, I quickly realized it wasn’t as advertised,” Pullin said. “The Republican leadership was more interested in growing government and maintaining power than focusing on liberty and small-government policies. Leadership would routinely partner with Democrats to push through big government policies, and showed no interest in unconstitutional gun laws, civil asset forfeiture, cannabis laws, lack of ballot access, or school choice. There is basically zero difference between Republicans and Democrats in Atlanta.”
During his single House term, Pullin introduced legislation to block “red-flag” laws, which would take guns away from a person a judge deems to be a threat to himself or others. He also signed a resolution calling on House Speaker David Ralston to resign from office.”
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