Immigration: While in America we have Chuck"Iran ass kisser" Hagel and McCain defending their amnesty program.
| The Senate labored to complete work by next week on immigration legislation that generally follows an outline Bush set out in a nationally televised speech this week.
The measure includes provisions to strengthen border security, create a new guest worker program and crack down on the hiring of illegal immigrants.
Most controversially, it offers an eventual chance at citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country. Senate Republicans staged an impromptu, occasionally emotional debate over whether that amounted to amnesty.
Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said it did. "Surely this is a pardon from what present law says must happen," he said of provisions in the bill that require immigrants to undergo background checks, pay back taxes and take other steps before they can become citizens.
Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel replied heatedly it was not amnesty.
"Let's stop the nonsense," said Hagel, addressing fellow Republicans. "You all know it's not amnesty." Said McCain, addressing Vitter, "Call it a banana if you want to ... to call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."
Vitter sought the last word. "Methinks thou dost protest too much." |
We
got a fence!
| The Senate voted to build 370 miles of triple-layered fencing along the Mexican border Wednesday and clashed over citizenship for millions of men and women who live in the United States illegally.
Amid increasingly emotional debate over election-year immigration legislation, senators voted 83-16 to add fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers along the southern border. It marked the first significant victory in two days for conservatives seeking to place their stamp on the contentious measure |
Meanwhile in France, Sarkozy gets his
immigration bill passed.
| PARIS, May 17 -- France's lower house of parliament approved a tough new immigration bill Wednesday that would allow the country to selectively chose which foreigners can live and work here and require that they learn the French language.
The bill, which passed the National Assembly 367 to 164 after 54 hours of debate, was a reaction to rising complaints that the country's problems are being caused by immigrants. It was authored by France's tough-talking Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and is vital to his plans to run for the presidency next year, political analysts say. The legislation now goes to the Senate, where it will be debated next month.
The proposed law would dramatically change several longstanding French immigration policies. It would make it easier for the country to screen out low-income, poorly educated immigrants in favor of highly skilled workers; it would tighten restrictions under which immigrant workers can bring their families to France; and it would abolish the right of illegal immigrants to receive residency papers after living in France for 10 years.
....With elections coming in about one year, Le Monde newspaper recently said it detected "ulterior motives -- presidential ones" in Sarkozy's embrace of the immigration issue, and some analysts accuse him of pandering to nationalist sentiments. His recent comment that if people don't like France, "they shouldn't hesitate to leave a country they don't love," was a striking echo of the slogan popularized by France's far-right, anti-immigration leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen: "France, love it or leave it."
But Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, defended a more "selective" process in an interview this week on French television, saying the country cannot continue to welcome "all those who want to come and for whom we don't have either lodging or jobs to offer."
"Why should France be the only country in the world that cannot freely decide who has the right to come into our home, and who is not welcome?" he said.
|
People in Mali are pissed off about France actually protecting their borders and Senegal has a strange notion
of their citizens.
| Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade, in Paris to receive a Unesco peace prize, said he opposed the proposal - echoing concerns about the possibility Sarkozy's bill would foster a brain drain from Africa.
"Those who I train should be left to me," Wade said. "I do not train people so that they come develop France."
Sarkozy, asked about Wade's comments, said they were a "misunderstanding" and called for dialogue, but briskly suggested that France's immigration policy was not the Senegalese leader's problem.
"I don't define the condition of immigration to Senegal; it's not up to him either to define the condition of immigration to France," the minister said.
Sarkozy said France "cannot continue to welcome in France all those who want to come - and for whom we don't have either lodging or jobs to offer." - Sapa-AP |
Did slavery become acceptable again in Senegal? Whats with the "Those who I train should be left to me," bit?
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