Is El Presidente backing down on amnesty?

"We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals. We need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country — without animosity and without amnesty." George W. Bush, State of the Union speech, January 23

Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, thinks he perceives signs in the speech that Bush is dialing down the saccharine rhetoric about all those your-land-is-my-land "migrants" and is notably less confident about what he can get in an immigration bill. Beck comments, in an action alert to the e-mail list, on the quote above:

To our President, the tradition of the melting pot apparently means we have to take away the stigma of illegality from those foreigners who have violated our laws to be here!

But here is the place in the speech where the President and his speechwriters obviously got cold feet. What is the term "resolve." Notice that he didn't dare use the terms "earned legalization" or "regularize" or "legalize." But "resolve?" He is not talking about "resolving" the illegal alien problem. No, he wants to "resolve" their "status."

Now, you and I might want to resolve whether the person is an illegal alien, and once doing that, begin deportation proceedings. But I don't think that is what the President wants to resolve. Again, the fundamental problem with Pres. Bush and his advisors is that they believe the problem with illegal aliens is their "status." If they just weren't illegal, they would be wonderful to have, according to them.

To NumbersUSA, the primary problem with illegal aliens is not that they are illegal but that they are here -- all 12 million of them crowding our infrastructures, congesting our quality of life, helping drive the destruction of natural habitat, farmland and open spaces, and driving down wages and benefits in the occupations where they settle. They aren't primarily bad people. But they are 12 million people who aren't supposed to be here. We don't need them. Their presence harms Americans.

But the President wants to "resolve" their status -- which I am sure means that he wants them to remain in our communities forever.

Beck analyzes the other references to immigration in the speech, and the style in which they were delivered. He askes, "Did he look like he really wanted to be talking about immigration on national TV tonight? He got in and out fast. It was almost like he couldn't wait to start talking about energy."

I like Roy Beck and I have contributed to his organization. He understands that "illegal immigration" is a phony issue — if the "illegal" part were all there was, we could solve it in an instant, by making the illegals legal. That, basically, is the argument the president and his masters in the corporate world want us to swallow. But NumbersUSA, as its name implies, puts the focus where it needs to be: on the numbers. Why does our country, whose population has increased by 100 million in 35 years, need another couple of hundred million — a widely quoted estimate of what will happen if the open borders lobbyists get their hearts' desire. Don't we have enough environmental problems already? There's not a one of them that isn't caused, or worsened, by overpopulation.

The only reasons for millions of "guest workers" are to keep labor costs as low as possible for big businesses (while they pass the social costs of a Third World proletariat onto the public treasury) and the belief on the part of both parties that they can buy the votes of a huge hispanic bloc.

It's not a done deal yet, though. And there's hope the American public, which was supposed to be a clutch of suckers and pushovers, is beginning to make even Sombrero George feel the heat.