CPAC, Phyllis Schlafly, and Immigration

Art credit: libertymusings.com

Katherine Connell at NRO’s The Corner reports alarming disagreement over GOP immigration and amnesty policy:

Two participants in a panel on immigration at CPAC today expressed confidence in their closing statements that Hispanic immigrants will be a source of future votes for the Republican party. “Latino voters are the Reagan Democrats of today,” said Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. “I believe that the majority of them can actually be members of CPAC in the future,” concurred the Reverend Luis Cortés Jr.​

The panel was supposed to answer the question: “Can there be meaningful immigration reform without citizenship?”

Derrick Morgan, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, was the only one of four panelists to basically reject the premise of the question, saying that he wasn’t the best person to say whether legalization should include a path to citizenship since he didn’t think that Republicans should be pursuing a policy of comprehensive immigration reform at all right now: “I respectfully disagree with the policy of legalization with or without citizenship,” he said, instead favoring a piecemeal approach, beginning with enforcement. He noted that the current laws are not being enforced so “why would you trust this current administration” to implement a deal?

Aguilar vehemently disagreed: “Conservatives need to address immigration, and they need to do it now,” he said, adding that “our conservative base wants us to lead and legislate” on the issue. Alfonso said that in addition to immigrants doing the “jobs that Americans don’t want,” immigration “creates good-paying jobs for working-class Americans.”

Read the rest here.

Good timing: Here is Phyllis Schlafly warning that “Republicans are ‘fools’ to back ‘any kind of amnesty’.”  Katie McHugh at The Daily Caller reports: 

Eagle Forum president and conservative author Phyllis Schlafly condemned GOP leadership efforts to compromise with Democrats on immigration, telling her audience that Republicans are “fools” to back any kind of deal that includes citizenship for illegal immigrants.

“Republicans are fools to to support any kind of amnesty, or to import foreigners who will support big government and big spending,” she said during a blunt speech at The National Security Action in Washington, D.C. “Why is anyone surprised that three fourths of Hispanics and Asians voted for Obama during the 2012 election? … Sixty-nine percent of immigrants support Obamacare.”

Schlafly cited a battery of polls that drew stark contrasts between Americans and naturalized immigrants — which didn’t include recent legal or illegal immigrants. While 67 percent of native-born Americans cited the Constitution as a higher legal authority than international law, only one third of naturalized citizens believed the same, a Harris poll found.

Immigrants tend to vote Democratic not because they’re withdrawing their support from Republicans until the GOP works with Democrats on immigration reform, but because they benefit from generous social programs, she added. (RELATED: Oregon shifts 4,000 illegal immigrants into Obamacare)

“They’re not for amnesty,” she said. “They’re for the goody handouts of Democratic party… [A]mnesty is suicide for the conservative movement and the Republican party.”

Efforts to grant millions of illegal immigrants citizenship will dilute the pool of labor and drive down wages, hurting recent immigrants and Americans alike, Schlafly said.

“Bringing in more cheap labor is a direct attack on the people they’re amnestying and bringing in,” she said. “Amnesty is a complete betrayal of the people we let in the last few years.”

But Schlafly saved her most scathing remarks for Republican supporters of immigration reform: “Everything they’re saying is just a complete lie.”

Requiring illegals to repay back taxes is “the laugh of the day — a complete farce.”

“Of course the aliens will never learn English before they get amnesty,” while their background checks will be as thorough “as the Boston bombers,’” she added heatedly.

“The immigration bill is a disaster for unemployed, a disaster for people with low wages,” she said. “It’s a disaster that the people coming in will not vote the way we want them to vote, to cut overspending.”

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