Immigration Reform Now?

 I’ve been watching the immigration reform debate taking place in the halls of Congress, the media, and amongst the public and I’m struck by one thing. Why another piece of sweeping legislation and why now?

We all know that illegal immigration has been a longtime problem that keeps getting pushed off for another day, but do we really need to address this issue now, given all of the problems we have with laws being passed that we’ve come to regret?

The Patriot Act was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It was supposed to give law enforcement agencies and the national security establishment new tools to be able to go after those who would do us harm. We’ve come to find out in the wake of a former federal contractor leaking details of specific programs to certain press outlets (after he hightailed it to Hong Kong) that our privacy was one of the first casualties in the Global War on Terror.

The Internal Revenue Service is supposed to be the Federal Government’s enforcement arm for the Affordable Care Act (more “affectionately” dubbed Obama Care). This law was rammed through Congress without much in the way of debate, introspection, or inspection. We now have a monstrosity on our hands that will do very little of what had been touted by its supporters and cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. It recently came to light that the IRS targeted conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election cycle, was responsible for leaking confidential info on one organization’s tax records to a rival group, and has been embroiled in additional scandals ranging from extravagant conferences to employees behaving badly when it came to taking care of their financial obligations. So the question that comes to mind is: do we really want to put the fox in charge of the hen house?

The financial crisis that put us in the worst recession since the Great Depression was the impetus for the banking and finance reform law known as Dodd-Frank. The problem here is that it really does nothing to keep the very same big banks and investment houses from going down the same road that got us into trouble in the first place. The folks who will suffer the most are the small banks that can’t possibly comply with the mandates of this law (many of which have yet to be written) which by default, means not much competition for the big banks and the legions of compliance folks they have at their beck and call.

Regardless of your politics or party affiliation, as far as any pending legislation on immigration reform goes, ask yourselves these questions:

• Are the immigration laws that are currently on the books being enforced? If not, why not?  
• Do the reforms being planned address loopholes in current immigration law? If not, why not?
• Do the reforms being planned impose additional costs on an already strained federal budget?

My guess is that not much good will come out of any new legislation, since the push to get this out seems more geared towards a lead-in to the 2014 mid-term elections. So here we go again, rushing to pass more legislation that doesn’t look like it’ll stand any chance of genuine debate or scrutiny because one side feels that they could gain political advantage with its passage and the other fearful about what passing or not passing it will do to their chances in future elections.

Here’s my advice to Congress. Quit thinking about your job prospects and start thinking about doing your jobs. You might actually figure out that taking care of the latter enhances your chances at the former.

 

The Falcon and the Snow-Man

Our friends Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are nothing but a couple of useful idiots. Regardless of your politics and whether you consider them traitors or heroes, both of these knuckleheads basically prostituted themselves to what they considered a version of the truth, despite the fact that whatever info they planned on releasing (not withstanding any debate as to whether it jeopardized our national security) will prove to be definite embarrassments for the United States Government.

With Manning, it was Wikileaks and Julian Assange, an individual who had an axe to grind, not only with the US of A, but with western society as a whole. What came out of it all was a series of documents that did very little to jeopardize our personnel in the field or give away our methods, but cast doubt on our ability to keep secret, things that could prove potentially embarrassing to our friends and allies. As a result, they had little incentive to tell us anything in confidence, knowing what could possibly happen to that information.

Snowden’s revelations as to what the NSA and the government by default, were collecting on American citizens, is breathtaking in its scope. The idea that he would seek refuge in Hong Kong due to the fact that it had a record of defending individual liberties is laughable. Hong Kong is a Chinese possession and as such takes its marching orders from Beijing. The idea that even Russia was willing to offer him asylum should speak volumes as to what both of these countries want out of him. Most of us would guess it was intelligence or national secrets, not so. Snowden is a PR/propaganda “dream come true” for both the Russians and Chinese. They can do much more damage pointing to what Snowden has to say about our programs and the hypocrisy that the United States is guilty of when it uses the bully pulpit to promote the democratic process and the rule of law. As we used to say in the military, a mission kill is as good as a hard kill any day of the week.

Now, on with the rest of this sorry story.

There have been and will be those who claim that Snowden should have used official channels to air out his gripes, but then again we’ve seen what happens to whistleblowers at the federal government under this administration. The counter-argument here will most likely be that he was a contractor and not a civil servant. So what? All that it would have taken would have been a well-placed phone call to his employer to try and cut him off at the knees and that would have been that. More to the point, there have been previous NSA whistleblowers under the George W Bush Administration who did file a complaint against the agency about the very program that is making headlines now. They had put together a smaller, less intrusive, less costly program that did everything necessary to keep us safe. That went nowhere as well. Too many of the powers that be at the NSA wanted a bigger piece of the pie that was getting divvied up in the post 9/11 world we came to live in. To them, as with most government agencies, a bigger rice bowl meant more relevancy.

We’ve seen that as the size and scope of government grows, so do the opportunities to abuse that corresponding power. Think IRS personnel targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Think leaking donor lists from an organization’s tax returns (a criminal offense). Think DOJ targeting AP and FOX news reporters, including going to a judge for warrants based on scant information. Think a health care law so encompassing and unwieldy that we are now only starting to discover all of its ramifications.

I’m thinking that we’ve finally hit that saturation point where even the average citizen who’s been caught up in their own little world has to sit up and acknowledge in the words of Buffalo Springfield, “there’s something happening here”.