“The selection of Gov. Mike Pence as the Republican vice presidential nominee offers both some concerns and reasons for optimism to those who seek true reform that recognizes the American people as the primary stakeholder in our nation’s immigration policies.
“Throughout his public career, Gov. Pence has had a mixed record on immigration. As a member of the House of Representatives, Pence was very much a part of the Republican establishment that paid lip service to the public’s concerns about immigration enforcement, while promoting the agenda of the Chamber of Commerce. As governor of Indiana, he has had to deal with the fiscal and social costs of policies made in Washington.
Pence’s record in the House
“In Congress, Pence supported proposals to allow illegal aliens to gain legal status, even while denying that such policies amount to amnesty. During the 2007 debate on amnesty legislation, Pence originated the pointless idea of requiring illegal aliens to leave the country and then being permitted to return legally – an idea that Donald Trump has flirted with during the course of his presidential campaign.
“Pence opposed efforts to strengthen cooperation between state and local law enforcement and ICE. He also supported cuts in funding for border fencing, technology, and infrastructure.
“At the same time, during his tenure in Congress, Pence voted against the DREAM Act amnesty and generally championed measures aimed at enforcing immigration laws. There can be little doubt that opposition to amnesty and support for meaningful immigration enforcement is heavily favored by voters who propelled Trump to the nomination.
Pence’s record as Governor
“As governor, Pence has had to deal with the effects and the costs of our nation’s failed immigration policies. He has opposed the resettlement of Syrian refugees in his state and has publicly blamed Obama administration policies for the surge of unaccompanied alien minors entering the United States. In addition, he challenged President Obama’s illegal use of executive power to grant de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, joining with Texas and 24 other states in a lawsuit that blocked two sweeping Obama executive amnesty programs.
“We hope that the perspective Pence will bring to the ticket and to the White House, if elected, will reflect his experience as governor, a job that required him to deal with the burdens imposed by our nation’s failed immigration policies.”
19 Comments
4.5
All of you guys car k me UP!!!!!!! Your beautiful president Trumpet starting with its first decision A MISTAKE….imagine the rest!!!!
As a longtime supporter of FAIR, I claim to be anti-immigration, i.e., favoring no amnesty, no DACA, mandatory e-verify, etc. My support of FAIR is based on environmental and economic concerns, i.e., more immigrants = more people in this country, causing more demands on our limited resources, degradation of wildlife habitat, etc, as well as lowering our standard of living due to wide availability of unskilled labor.
Unfortunately, many of the anti-immigration Republicans also tend to be anti- birth control (e.g., anti- Planned Parenthood), and therefore pro-population increase, whether they think of it that way or not. As is the case with Trump, their stance on immigration tends to be racist in nature, and for that reason I have trouble siding with them. Like many voters in this country today, I will probably be voting for “none of the above” in November.
I agree with you on birth control, but that’s not the main reason for our rapid population increases. It’s immigration. And is it racist to point out the facts? The illegals that the Democrats and some Republicans want to make citizens are going to cost us many trillions in government assistance programs over their lifetimes, compared to the paltry amount of taxes they will pay, because the big majority are low income. Low income people use more government services. That’s simply a fact. Label it what you want but it’s true.
Wow, are you aware that ISIS plans on infiltrating their terrorists into the Syrian refugees that Hillary wants to bring into the country, and that Obama is currently bringing into the country, and that our FBI director says that we can’t adequately screen these refugees? Whatever Trump’s flaws, at least he doesn’t want to bring potential terrorists into the country.
I still can’t understand why so many Americans are willing to risk being killed in a terrorist attack just so they can continue to believe in a utopian, multicultural worldview that there are no differences whatsoever between any cultures and religions anywhere.
As a way of educating yourself, I would suggest a trip to Riyadh Saudi Arabia, where you can visit “Chop Chop Square’ where people are publicly beheaded for leaving Islam, witchcraft, sorcery, and other crimes. Then maybe you will realize that the whole world isn’t like Berkeley, because obviously 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the attack in Orlando, the attack in Paris, the attack in Nice, etc. hasn’t made an impression on you.
Or the Oklahoma N others attacks in the US
Hillary Clinton Wants a One World Government Just Like 666?
Dr. Ben Carson just brought this factoid out in the open…Hillary [and the Clintons] base their philosophy on Saul Alinsky. This author she worships dedicated his writing to LUCIFER [Satan]. No joke.
http://thepulse2016.com/ralph-benko/2016/06/15/ben-carson-hillary-clinton-saul-alinsky-and-donald-trump/
Do you need a better reason to vote Trump anyway?
I understand the concerns noted, but at the end of the day Hillary Clinton will push for more legal immigration, amnesty and work permits for illegal immigrants, and few if any measures to stop future illegal immigration. Not voting is in reality a vote for Hillary whether meant or not. We might have little affect on out-of-control population growth around the world, but we do not need significant amounts of that population growth moved to the USA.
Let’s also not forget we do very limited and weak security background checks on any of the one million immigrants coming now to the USA legally and no security checks on those arriving illegally.
I truly hate it when politicians say that letting millions of trespassers remain in the country is somehow not amnesty. They are hiding behind the dictionary definition of amnesty being let off scott-free. If the amnestied illegal is made to jump through some sort of hoop then it not amnesty! Meanwhile, millions are allowed to remain and millions more will come. Amnesty is victory for the trespassers and defeat for Americans. In my view, anyone who supports amnesty is betraying the country. Secure the borders, repatriate the trespassers, enforce the laws, give us back our sovereignty. I truly hope that Pence DOES NOT UNDERMINE Trump’s desire to deal with continued mass trespassing.
It sounds like Pence really didn’t understand just what kind of a expensive burden that not only the refugees coming to the U.S. were but the high cost of the Illegal aliens too. Both the refugees and the illegal aliens have large numbers of kids that are signed up on not only welfare but food stamps, housing , medical you name it. They grab everything they can get and then some but that was before he was a Governor and had to worry about the high cost of all of this that the taxpayers in his state had to pay for that’s what changed his mind. On Hannity’s show he was in total agreement
with Trump on building the wall on our border with Mexico and interior enforcement. That’s what I wanted to hear I doubt Trump would have picked him if he disagreed about the wall. Another thing I found out about our immigration service is that when legal immigrants arrive here and they want to bring in a older relative like a father or mother they have to sign a legal document that as the sponsor of the person they will pay all medical bills on that relative the trouble is if the older relative becomes ill the sponsor generally claims they can’t afford to pay the relatives bills or support any longer so the relative is signed up on SSI. This happened to a coworker of mine a number of years ago the coworker was drawing her SS at the time the other employee was the person with the relative which turned out to be a couple this employee’s grandparents from Russia. My friend asked the granddaughter how much they were getting and it turned out to be more than my friend’s SS check which she like all of us have to pay into all our working lives. But this stupid government of ours is handing out SS and SSI to these immigrants like its candy. I wish Fair would take a look at what is going on about this if the public was aware of this there would be hell to pay over it. This is where a lot of out future benefits are going this is what is driving the SS benefit system toward failure.
Last October the South Florida Sun Sentinel ran a series about welfare use by Cubans who came here and stayed, which they are able to do under our laws. Over 600 million a year, and a lot of it was retirement benefits for people who never lived here and never contributed a nickel to SS. A lot of them go back and stay in Cuba for months at a time while still collecting benefits, which proves that they came here only for the cash goodies, not because of any political reasons.
The same paper also did a series earlier in the year, The Cuban Criminal Pipeline, detailing the huge amount of economic crimes done by people born in Cuba. While those people account for 4% of the population of Florida, they committed more than 70% of the cargo theft and healthcare fraud in the state. Many go right back to Cuba when the heat starts growing and that country refuses to return them here for trial, even though we now have full diplomatic relations with them.
We have absolutely no control of who is coming. If they make shore on a boat or cross the border in Mexico they are here to stay. A lot of people don’t realize that Castro emptied out his prisons during the Mariel boatlift and we did nothing about it.
This whole situation is the perfect example of why it doesn’t matter if our present immigration helps this country or hurts it. In most cases, it hurts us. But since Florida is the largest swing state, and Cubans vote in extremely large percentages, no one is going to do anything about this because they don’t want to lose votes. Meanwhile the American citizen gets the shaft.
I feel certain that Trump went into great detail with Pence over immigration. After all, that is the main ticket on which Trump has run. I not only trust Pence, because he does what he says he’s going to do, but I think he stabilizes the ticket beautifully. We have several months and hopefully many debates between both the presidential candidates and the vice presidential candidates. I think by the time November rolls around, there will be no question as to which team is best for our country.
Let’s tell the truth. Trump is where he is at because he is rich and well known and had the money and clout to fund his primary campaign. Good for him, but not a really good commentary on this country. I really was hoping for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to be the nominee, because he made good sense on immigration and otherwise well qualified, but he had to drop out very early on because he could not get the financial backers. Meanwhile, there were buckets of money going to compromised losers like Jeb and Rubio, guys who stuck it out despite almost no support because they had the cash backers.
The Republicans really need to examine what they are doing. Every four years they spend a couple months virtually enthralled with guys like Ben Carson who have no qualifications for the office, which eventually becomes painfully obvious, or they have all these perennial losers like Huckabee running. Not that the Democrats get any prizes on the subject. The fact is that the best of the 4 Democratic candidates, moderate former senator Jim Webb, got zero funding and support from the get go. Meanwhile the party ignored all the obvious flaws that would come up about Hillary, like the Clinton Foundation, which represents a major conflict of interest.
In the end, it’s the voters. They have little interest in the actual issues, pay no attention most of the time, and are far more likely to name the contestants on last season’s Survivor than name 5 Supreme Court justices and their ideology.
Very true. If all the people in this country who follow every move that the Kardashians make educated themselves on how mass illegal/legal immigration is impacting their country and their lives, things would be much better. If FAIR had 30 million members instead of around a quarter million members it would make a huge impact.
And we are now at the point where Europe and the US are becoming more and more like Israel, with terrorist attacks occurring on a regular basis. And the reality is the only way this is ever going to stop, or be dramatically reduced is for Muslim immigration to be shut down. We can fight wars in the Middle East forever, but as long as we are bringing Muslims into this country and Europe does the same, welcome to the new normal.
So the US and Europe has to decide, do we want to live more like the Israelis do, with terrorist attacks becoming a regularly occurring part of life, or do we want to live more like the Japanese, who haven’t had a Muslim carry out a terrorist attack because they have never allowed many Muslims into Japan in the first place. We’ll see what people decide.
Israel is unapologetic about profiling. Before Richard Reed the shoe bomber failed in his mission to bring down a plane, he flew on EL AL, the Israeli airline. They were highly suspicious and searched his luggage three times, and then they put him in a back row seat with an air marshal right beside him, and probably prevented a tragedy because he could not try anything. Here we play this game where we pretend there’s no difference between a young Muslim man from a foreign country and an American grandmother with an Irish surname.
I saw some poll a couple days ago where over half the respondents said they thought Islam and western civilization were compatible. Never mind that large majorities in many Muslim countries think you should die if you leave Islam. Liberals fall all over themselves to defend a religion that has beliefs that are straight out of the 15th century. But they’re “peaceful and tolerant” or so Hillary assures us.
Flip floppers…..if you like Trump support his decisions…….
I don’t trust Pence. I think Trump looks weaker, not stronger by picking someone with a mixed record on enforcing our immigration laws. I just hope Trump doesn’t turn into just another politician trying to have it both ways, because if he does there are going to be a lot of angry people out there and he can kiss whatever chance he has of being elected goodbye.
I don’t like the choice because Pence champions free trade and giving jobs to foreigners instead of Americans. He also has a mixed up immigration policy. Trump is clearly going both ways with Pence, which is the way of politicians. James
I guess you didn’t listen. Pence was for documented immigration while he was in the House of Representatives but as Governor, he listened to the FBI warning that the Syrian Refugees included radical jihadists, and he realized criminals and drugs had gotten by coming in thru the Mexican border, so he changed his mind about immigration and the wall.
Trump knows what he’s doing.