http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/28/demint-oil-border/Last night, the Senate rejected Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) amendment to the $59 billion supplemental spending bill asking for the completion of a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border within a year. Before the vote took place, DeMint attempted to persuade his colleagues to vote for his amendment by comparing the influx of undocumented immigrants to the deadly oil spill that is currently poisoning the Gulf of Mexico:
If any member of the Senate stood up today and said that we should not seal the oil leak in the Gulf until we have a comprehensive plan to clean it up, we would all say that that is absurd. Certainly we need to seal that leak as quickly as possible to minimize the cleanup later. But that is exactly the kind of logic that the President and my Democratic colleagues are using when it comes to immigration. They are insisting that we will not secure our borders until Republicans agree to a comprehensive plan with some form of amnesty and road to citizenship for those who have come here illegally.Other than the fact that
DeMint is offensively equating undocumented immigrants with a toxic gusher of oil, his insulting analogy doesn’t stand. Contrary to what Republicans might claim, there is not a constant flow of undocumented immigrants crossing the border every single second of the day. Immigration from Mexico to the U.S. slowed at least 40 percent between mid-decade and 2008. The Department of Homeland Security has documented that “the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States declined from 11.8 million in January 2007 to 11.6 million in January 2008.”
DeMint also attempted to emphasize the toxicity of immigration by citing the violent Mexican drug war. However,
FBI statistics show that crime is declining in U.S. border towns across the U.S. Tim Wadsworth, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, studied U.S. cities with more than 50,000 people and found that “the cities that experience the greatest growth in immigration were the same one that were experiencing the greatest declines in violent crime.”What’s absurd is that Republicans like DeMint would rather address the immigration issue with an ineffective and costly band-aid approach. DeMint has introduced similar failed amendments to the financial reform bill and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) $42.9 billion appropriations bill. DeMint was the fourth Republican border security amendment to fail in the past 24 hours. Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) was the only Republican who opposed it.
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I see DeMint worked "amnesty" into his soundbite. His republican buddies will be upset, however, that he forgot to add "for illegals". He has got to remember all the emotional code words that poll so well. ;)
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