As the saying goes, if you play with fire, you risk getting burned. Well, the Republican Party has been playing a dangerous game with the incendiary immigration issue for several years, and now it looks like it might be burning them badly:
The immigration issue threatened to cleave the Republican Party yesterday, as a key GOP House member chided President Bush's top political adviser and labeled a central element of the Senate's hard-fought immigration bill a "non-starter."House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a prominent player in the approaching House-Senate negotiations over immigration legislation, told reporters that the two chambers are "180 degrees apart" and that compromise is possible only if the Senate jettisons some of its bill's most prized provisions...
Further, according to , "Immigration Issue Splits the GOP:"
So there you have it: Republicans deeply divided over immigration; Democrats united behind the Senate approach. Oh, and guess which Republican Senators from Virginia are supporting and opposing the Senate immigration bill? That's right, John Warner is supporting it (along with George W. Bush and John McCain), George Allen is opposing it (along with people like Sensenbrenner). Virginia's two U.S. Senators, in other words, are 180 degrees apart on this issue. Interestingly, Allen is the "only one" of "five Republican senators weighing presidential bids in 2008" who voted against the Senate bill.
How serious is this "wedge issue" for Republicans? Extremely serious, according to Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker:
How this will play out over the next few months could well determine the long-term future of the Republican Party, and its short-term prospects this November. Unfortunately for Republicans, this "wedge" is not going to be an easy one to reconcile.
So, it's fairly shocking that Allen would be against the bill since he co-sponsored another corporate labor arbitrage bill called the Skil Bill, just in case the corporate cheap labor lobby cannot get their agenda through S.2611.
So, this is a loser issue in my view for a candidate to take on and the polls are showing a huge majority actually do not want the Senate bill to pass.
I think the most damning is the Zogby poll.
I don't' think there is a poll out there that says "are you a Democrat and very poed because S.2611 was passed in the Senate".
Would be nice if they asked. My understanding of the letters, faxes phone calls to Democratic Senators was 99% against S.2611.
But the problem with the Senate bill is not really the question of do you want amnesty or not, but unfortunately that's how it's framed...
We have the H-2C guest worker Visas, which the AFL-CIO is against because it gives control of the person to the corporations and is most definately a labor arbitrage technique, I just listed the problems with the H-1B. The nursing and medical professional societies are poed on the H-2B because the wages/working conditions and the educational opportunities for nurses is horrific and this enables importing foreigners instead of fixing what's wrong internal to that profession.
the list goes on and honestly it's not conservative Republicans in some minority and it's because the bill is so broad, so each group that just got sucker punched inidivually is very very upset. I do believe most who are against the H-1B increases, escalator and want the Pascrell bill passed are Democrats and I do know they are turning to Republicans since the Senate abandoned them.Sensenbrenner's remarks suggest that GOP leaders face a formidable task in bridging the party's divide on an emotional issue five months before the midterm elections. The Senate's 55-member Republican caucus fractured over the immigration bill that passed Thursday, with 23 voting for it and 32 voting against it. By contrast, Democrats were nearly unified, backing the measure 38 to 4.
...the immigration issue poses a serious threat to the party. Since the Reagan administration, he said, "it's been a stable coalition between the party's business and chamber-of-commerce wing and its social conservatives." Now, Baker said, the first group cherishes the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide, "while many Republicans, especially in the Sunbelt, really feel the country is being overwhelmed by the alien tide."
Comments
and the answer is actually in the details...
the problem is there are so many amendments and provisions.
The Bill itself is 614 pages.
There is an F-4 automatic green card for students in math and science and once again engineers are extremely poed because of the debt load, lack of financial support, working conditions of graduate school...
Then there are the budget people who are very poed because of the costs involved. The social security solvency people are poed because they are giving retroactively benefits with no documentation to illegals...
the abide the law people are poed because they are giving social security benefits when those numbers are stolen and are a identity theft felony and just messed up some American's credit history as well as what they are entitled to via social security since it's their number, the border people are pissed because they gave the DoD contracts and didn't consult with the local officials...plus now having to consult with Mexico on building fences and so on..