November 02, 2004

Bush Gearing Up For Amnesty—In Spanish and Spanglish.

By Juan Mann

What would President Bush do if he were re-elected?

Here’s one sign: For the past year, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico has been alerting the world in the “U.S. and Mexico at a glance” section of both its English and Spanish web sites about “The Temporary Worker Program Proposed by President Bush in January 2004.”

Read it and weep—in both English and Spanish.

Of course, the President’s Arizona Amnesty has not gotten off the ground in Congress (yet). But it nevertheless seems to have triggered the latest wave of illegal aliens on the Southwest border.

And now that it turns out that the U.S. Embassy in Mexico has been crowing about a prophesied employment authorization amnesty as part of “Migration, Border Cooperation, and Consular activity,” it makes you wonder just who wants the “migration” after all.

The Embassy does temper its amnesty announcement with a telling disclaimer (in both English and Spanish, naturally):

“Note: We emphasize this program is a proposal, not law. Congress still must debate the issue and enact legislation.”

I must have missed something here.

Who says that Congress “must . . . enact legislation” on this particular “proposal”?

There’s not even anything in the Constitution – or anywhere else for that matter—to force Congress to “debate the issue” if it doesn’t want to!

So just for the record, here’s the English version of the Embassy’s “U.S. and Mexico at a glance” announcement as of November 1, 2004.

The Embassy announcement comes complete with a botched Spanish-to-English translation of “woulding [willing] foreign workers with woulding [willing] American employers.”

“In January 2004, President Bush proposed a new temporary worker program that would help further the cause of safe, legal and orderly migration. This program would match woulding [sic] foreign workers with woulding [sic] American employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs. Under this program, undocumented [sic] workers currently in the United States would be able to come out of the shadows and establish legal identities. All participants in the program would be issued a temporary worker card that would allow them to travel back and forth between their home and the United States without fear of being denied reentry in America. 

“All who participate in the proposed program would have to have a job, or a job offer. The legal status granted by this program would last three years and would be renewable, but it would have an end. Participants who do not follow the rules of the program, or who break the law would not be eligible for continued participation and would be required to return their home. 

“This proposal expects temporary workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the U.S. has expired. And there would be financial incentives for them to do so. Under this program, they would work with foreign governments on a plan to give temporary workers credit, when they enter their own nation's retirement system, for the time they have worked in America. It would be easier for temporary workers to contribute a portion of their earnings to tax-preferred savings accounts, money they could collect as they return to their native countries.

“Those who make the choice of pursuing American citizenship would be allowed to apply in the normal way. They would not be given unfair advantage over people who have followed legal procedures from the start. It is not an amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path of citizenship. Granting amnesty encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration [my emphasis].”

Yeah? Obviously, it’s time to restate the obvious about amnesty.

Please re-read the last sentence of the Embassy’s announcement—“Granting amnesty encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration.”

Given the Embassy’s own definition of amnesty, hasn’t anyone at the State Department realized that continuing an official “.gov” web site announcement—of a mere “proposal” by the President—also “encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration?”

Apparently not.

In analyzing the President’s equally ill-conceived no-illegal-alien-left-behind education plan, my VDARE.com colleague Joe Guzzardi recently opined about the “fantasyland” inhabited by the Bush Administration thusly:

“But we have to live in Bush’s world too. He’s sending us a clear signal that, if re-elected, he intends to press on with his amnesty for illegals and his “temporary worker” plan. For all I know, he intends to do it in Spanish.”

Joe’s instinct was right. The Bush Administration has already been pressing on with amnesty. And it’s already doing it in Spanish—and Spanglish.