Amnesty on the Installment Plan

By Nicholas Stix

January 26, 2009
VDARE

After the sham of an election—the MSM’s chosen loser vs. their chosen winner—open borders lawyer-columnist-tenured activist Allan Wernick offered some words of advice to the new potentate on how best to fool the people, seeing as they are overwhelmingly opposed to an amnesty for illegal aliens. In one of his twice-weekly Daily News columns, Wernick, who has a sinecure at the City University of New York’s Baruch College campus (which although specializing in business and accounting, has its share of left-of-Stalin Marxists), where he is Director of CUNY’s Citizenship and Immigration Project, advised “Obama,” given a climate unconducive to formal amnesty, to immediately go for three forms of stealth amnesty: the DREAM Act, AgJobs, and a Visa Recapture bill. Not content to amnesty all of the invaders currently illegally in the country, Wernick wants the government to go abroad shifting for one-time illegals who had since returned home, calling them back to exploit the American people. (Wernick’s professorship appears to be an activist position for running the amnesty program, as opposed to a real professorship, which would entail teaching and research. Then again, most of CUNY’s “professors” these days seem to be activists in academic blue jeans.)

Many of us in the immigration field have long called for a broad amnesty - yes, let’s call it what it is - for undocumented immigrant workers. We need more of these hardy individuals working on the books, paying taxes and demanding fairer wages from their employers.

But let’s be honest. With unemployment rising and the economy in deep recession, this is a politically dangerous, if not impossible, time to overhaul decades of failed policy. Still, three targeted measures can and should be passed in the first year of an Obama administration: the DREAM Act, granting legal status to undocumented students; the AgJobs bill, benefiting farmworkers, and the Immigrant Visa Recapture bill, which would require the government to issue immigrant visas allocated, but unused because of bureaucratic delays, during the past 15 years.

It’s becoming clear that it will take a second-term Obama presidency to tackle comprehensively the thorny issue of immigration reform.

[Barack Obama should take three strong steps toward true immigration reform, by Allan Wernick, New York Daily News, December 3, 2008]

Wernick sees the three stealth amnesties as granting instant green card status, and eventual citizenship, to three million illegals (he refuses to use the word “illegal” in any way, shape, or form, to describe the invaders whom he seeks to legalize and grant citizenship; to him, they are all “undocumented workers”).

Note, however, that he sees the stealth amnesties affecting 25 percent of all illegals, and arrives at the three million figure based on an ancient lowball figure of 12 million illegals, thus making his stealth plan a con within a snow job. Conversely, I accept the January, 2005 estimate of Bear Stearns analysts Robert Justich and Betty Ng who, based on increases in remittances to Mexico, and in residential and school building starts, calculated that there were at least 20 million illegals in the country. (Justich and Ng support open borders.) At a minimum annual increase of 500,000 illegals since, the present total would be over 22 million. The numbers to benefit from Wernicks’s stealth amnesty would thus run more like 5.5 million, or 83.3 percent higher than he claims.

While not among the most prominent of open borders lobbyists, Wernick is nonetheless a one-man amnesty factory, his agitations subsidized by the very taxpayers whom he seeks to disenfranchise and dispossess. He has penned the book, U.S. Immigration and Citizenship: Your Complete Guide, he also writes a nationally syndicated column for King Features Syndicate, and “has served on the National Board of Directors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), as Chair of the Immigration Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and as President of the New York Chapter of AILA.”

In Allan Wernick’s world, to say of American citizens, let alone white Americans, “We need more of these hardy individuals working on the books, paying taxes and demanding fairer wages from their employers,” would go under the category of “obscene.” On the contrary, he sees his proposals as “three sensible steps toward change that millions of people desperately need.”

How flooding the market with an endless supply of unskilled, illiterate, foreign workers would give labor the power to “demand fairer wages,” as opposed to paying them less and less, and continuously replacing them with new waves of illegals, he does not explain. Perhaps he thinks that the race politics of mass mestizo power and a ban on employing whites, would suffice to suspend the laws of economics.

At VDARE.com, a post-election consensus has emerged that agrees with Wernick that “Obama” shall not seek to ram through a general amnesty in his first term. I only wish that I could be so optimistic. Stay vigilant, friends.