Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Meanwhile, on the Border,.....

If we don't See / Hear it on MSM,....it ain't happening,.....

Right?

Calling it a co-ordinated media blackout would just be right wing fear mongering,....right ?

..........WRONG !

Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/22/ED7N13LTVK.DTL

Candidates don't talk about immigration
Mark Cromer

Wednesday, October 22, 2008


The presidential and vice presidential debates are behind us and yet after nearly eight cumulative hours of the candidates regurgitating sound bites, the nation has heard nary a word on immigration or the challenges it poses to our future.


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As they enter the home stretch of the campaign, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain undoubtedly hope to escape any serious questions on the topic. Both surely breathed a sigh of relief last week when the final debate ended and the elephant in America's living room had gone unmentioned.

CBS news veteran Bob Schieffer, following the template set by PBS's Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill and NBC's Tom Brokaw, allowed the candidates to avoid even a single tough question about immigration policy, a subject that both senators are loathe to take on in front of 70 million viewers of all political and ethnic stripes.

It was a disgraceful journalistic failure.

Immigration permeates virtually every domestic problem facing the nation today: health care, education, jobs and the environment; it also factors into national security and foreign policy. Given the size of the foreign-born population in the United States today - more than 40 million - it's difficult to imagine any policy initiative succeeding that did not first address the fundamentals of immigration.

The candidates have talked about the financial crisis. They've talked about job losses and their plans to create new jobs. And yet they have said nothing about the millions of foreign laborers illegally in the United States today that have driven millions of Americans out of a wide range of employment sectors while suppressing wages for citizens still working in those industries.

They have said nothing about the billions of dollars in tax revenues lost to this mammoth underground economy; or of the billions of dollars citizens pay to subsidize it.

McCain and Obama have talked with ease about greedy corporate villains, such as the executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Bros. and AIG; but have kept mum on the conniving suits that ran Howard Industries in Mississippi or Micro Solutions Enterprises in California, high-tech firms that were raided by the feds this year for employing nearly a thousand illegal immigrants.

The candidates have talked about the dramatic decline in public education, and argued over charter schools, teacher accountability and the merit of increasing funding for a failing educational system.

But they have said nothing about the catastrophic impact that mass illegal immigration has had in thousands of public schools in the American Southwest, where school districts have been forced to cope with overcrowded campuses and parents have watched classrooms turned into bilingual education labs at the expense of their own children's learning.

Both senators have talked studiously about the critical challenges we face in the environment, but have said nothing about America's surging population - growth fueled almost entirely by immigration and births to immigrants - and the effects that growth has on our natural resources, particularly freshwater supplies.

For either candidate to claim now that they support reducing consumption without also voicing support for slowing our population growth shows they are intellectually dishonest.

Some may claim, because there isn't much daylight between the two candidates on the issue, that a detailed discussion of this topic wouldn't amount to much. I doubt it.

McCain was the co-architect of the "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation that would have resulted in the single largest mass amnesty for illegal immigrants in the history of nations - and Obama supported it. The American people, however, clearly and decisively rejected it in 2006 and 2007.

So as economic peril looms large, both candidates should be asked about their intentions to reshape America's immigration policy.

Several months ago, both McCain and Obama addressed the National Council of La Raza's annual conference in California, where both men vowed to make sweeping changes to U.S. immigration policy that would increase the flows. Is that still plan for each?

So the question for every informed voter is: What aren't they telling us?


Mark Cromer is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization.

This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle


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