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Sen. Jim DeMint said the immigration bill before Congress will change the political dynamic of this country forever, as the Democrat Party wants these immigrants as a large new block of voters.
DeMint told about 160 people at a packed Tommy’s Ham House, May 30 in Greenville that “if we can’t secure our borders, then we really don’t have a country.”
DeMint, South Carolina’s junior senator, said: “I don’t like to be on the opposite side of our President and fellow Republican senators, but we clearly are on this issue.” Those on the other side include Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The Heritage Foundation estimates that an unskilled, uneducated person coming into the country illegally has a net annual cost to taxpayers of about $19,000.
A bill was passed last year to build a border fence, but only a few miles have been built. People don’t trust Congress, DeMint said, to deal with something that is so important to the future of our country.
He called for a worker verification card, where a potential employer could know within minutes whether a person is legal. Those without such a card would not enter or stay in the country, which would mean that the government would not have to deal with mass deportation.
If this bill passes, DeMint said that every illegal in this country would get probationary legal status, which would essentially mean permanent legal status because no provision in the bill allows that status to be revoked. This, he said, is amnesty, and it does an injustice to our immigration system.
The idea is for illegals to sign up over a period of 18 months for Z visas. Supposedly, they cannot get a Z visa until the nation has secured its border and developed a worker identification program, “but the language in the bill is pretty vague as far as what exactly is control of our borders and what is a worker program and is it operational.”
South Carolina probably needs immigrant labor as much as any other states in the farming, hospitality and tourism industries, DeMint said. Most who come here would like a temporary program that works, where they can work for nine or 10 months a year, go home and come back.
“We trap them here by not granting enough temporary visas, and they become illegal, so they can no longer go back and forth, so we make the illegal problem worse.”
“I want a legal immigration system that works, that we can enforce, and I believe we can do it,” noting that “if we can’t get good amendments added to it, we will do everything we can to stop it.”
Mayor Knox White introduced DeMint saying, “I don’t think we would be in the mess we are in now in Congress with the Republican Party if we had more Jim DeMints,” and complimented the senator for opposing earmark spending.
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