I understand that congressional debate is often larded with fakery and silliness (such as the Social Security “trust fund”), but immigration has got to take the cake. Sen. Craig, in arguing this morning for his and Ted Kennedy’s huge illegal-alien amnesty for farmworkers, is warning of a “collapse of American agriculture” if his bill isn’t passed, and how American agriculture is at a “dangerous precipice” and that his amnesty will somehow address the fact that the United States may soon become a net importer of food (which is particularly absurd, since illegals work mainly in harvesting fresh fruit and vegetables, which represent only a small part of all agriculture, the rest of which has already mechanized and doesn’t use illegals).
Sen. Craig has also repeatedly argued that the Bracero Program, which imported Mexican guestworkers from the mid-1940s to the mid-60s, was responsible for lower levels of illegal-alien apprehensions in the 1950s. This is simply hilarious. Illegal-alien apprehensions went down in the late 1950s because the Eisenhower Administration carried out “Operation Wetback,” the very kind of mass roundup (1 million people arrested and deported over a short period of time) that simply isn’t going to happen again, and also because the illegals who were caught by the Border Patrol after that were taken back to the border and simply signed up for the Bracero Program, i.e., amnestied, in what was called at the time “drying out the wetbacks.
This is the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body? What a joke.