Senate Votes English as National Language

The US Senate is cobbling together a "comprehensive" Immigration bill. Comprehensive is the latest word they have chosen to mask their effort to buy votes with an illegal immigrant amnesty bill. They have put provisions in that are aimed at getting the citizens to swallow amnesty such as a border security fence and an English only law, but none of these will be mandated before the path to citizenship is thrown wide open. An effort to make achieving border security the prerequisite for any guest worker law to be offered was shot down quickly. The English only provision got sliced and diced so it would not interfere with any existing bilingual mandates.

In an amusing moment during debate Sen. McCain launched into a passionate double speak defending the guest worker program from those who call it amnesty.

McCain, addressing Vitter, said: "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."

Unfair because it is accurate. He was mollified when the Senate eviscerated the English only amendment.

By stipulating that the English-only mandates could not negate existing laws, Inhofe spared current ordinances that allow bilingual education or multilingual ballots. By changing the amendment to label English the "national language" rather than the "official language" of the country, Inhofe may have lessened its symbolic power.

"In my view, we had it watered down enough to make it acceptable," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of the chief architects of the immigration bill.

Watered it down enough to make it worthless would have been a more honest description of what was done. Even this was not good enough for the likes of Sen. Harry Reid and Sen. Ken Salazar who called the English amendment racist and anti American. I just shake my head ruefully when I hear such things coming for the people charged with running this country. A group of school kids could make more sense than these guys. They could at least be more creative in their complaints.

While this comic episode of American history unfolds I feel despair that our nation's sovereignty has been sold cheap by the very people we though were in charge of protecting it. Mexico is actively colonizing our nation with its surplus population because their corrupt socialist government can't afford to keep them. We do ourselves and the Mexican people a disservice by not forcing the issue by having our government enforce the current immigration laws. Spending all this time and energy on some dubious reform is just a smoke screen for our government's belief in the New World Order.

immigration politics Mexico