Mark Steyn writes this interesting piece regarding ‘fast-track’ legalization for illegal aliens. The ‘Kathryn’ Mark is speaking to is KJ Lopez who also blogs on NRO‘s The Corner.
Great news! The terrorist Z-visas will take 48 hours! [Mark Steyn]
Kathryn, that [Senator John] Cornyn amendment is a good example of the kind of final “bipartisan compromise” Congress may settle for: The 12-20 million illegal immigrants will get legal residency in the United States by the end of the next business day (and, incidentally, I’d love to see a list of other US agencies which guarantee full service within 24 hours – or is the express line only available to lawbreaking foreigners?), but terrorists will have to be subjected to what Sheila Jackson-Lee described to me as an “ongoing background check”.
The more you look at this bill the more it seems just the usual Beltway kabuki. Secretary Chertoff says in a time of war we need to know who’s in the country. Okay. But is dumping a gazillion new applications on a sclerotic immigration system the way to do that? Mohammed Atta was the second most famous terrorist in the world and on the front page of every American newspaper but the then INS still sent him a valid US visa six months to the day after he died, and without even updating his address from that Florida flight school to Big Hole In The Ground, Lower Manhattan. And the excuse the agency made was, oh well, we’re only issuing visas to dead terrorists not living ones – which Americans pretty much had to take on trust and which seems a distinction far less likely to be maintained once there’s another 15 million in the system entitled to next-day service. If I were Mullah Omar, I’d apply for a Z-visa. The odds have got to be better than even.
So it will be a fraud on “conservative” enforcement grounds. As for “liberal” fast-track-to-citizenship grounds, I would be surprised if most of those “undocumented” choose to go beyond limited legalization. If you’re remitting vast percentages of your income back to your village in Mexico every month, US citizenship is only going to complicate your life, given that the IRS is one of the few revenue agencies on the planet to claim global jurisdiction. Some things are best left “living in the shadows”.
“Comprehensive” reforms usually backfire in spectacular ways: the “war on poverty” gave us ongoing cross-generational poverty, etc. “Comprehensive” immigration reform will metastasize illegal immigration, embed the “undocumented” support networks as a permanent feature of American life, expand identity fraud, and make it even more impossible for Washington to know which aliens are in the country at any one time.
During the 1980s my Catholic Church became very political. Unlike some dominations traditionally Catholic churches were not very political (except on the issue of abortion) but during the 1980s left wing politics inserted itself unfortunately into the local Catholic church through the very liberal Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen . Things would turn up regularly in the church bulletin such as notices about anti-nuclear protests at Bangor Navy Base or protests against Reagan’s Central American policy, or other left wing causes. It got pretty bad at times and it was one of the reasons I personally left the church.
Well, while I left the church, many in my family didn’t and I would have the opportunity to frequently look at the church bulletin, and during the 1990s and the early part of this decade, the inappropriate notices in the bulletin slowed down and then for the most part stopped. The bulletin became the non-political forum for church information that it was always supposed to be. But still what went on in the 1980s left a bad taste in my mouth (and of course the Priests scandals which our church was in the center of long, long before it became a big issue nationally). But, again, after the turmoil of the Hunthausen days, things had really improved and the weekly bulletin hasn’t in recent years been used as the tool of the Left Wing radicals as it once was.
But it seems that this is not the case again. This Sunday in the weekly bulletin in my church was a yellow piece of paper promoting the radical leftist agenda on immigration. It was by a group that has the following webpage: http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org.
The yellow insert states that Catholics must pray the following:
The Justice Prayer
Come, O Holy Spirit!
Come, open us to the wonder, beauty and dignity of the diversity found in each culture,
in each face, and in each experience we have of the other among us.
Come, fill us with generosity
as we are challenged to let go and allow others to share with us
the goods and beauty of earth.
Come, heal the divisions
That keep us from seeing the face of Christ in all men, women, and children.
Come, free us to stand with and for those
who must leave their own lands in order to find work, security, and welcome in a new land,
one that has enough to share.
Come, bring us understanding, inspiration, wisdom, and
the courage needed to embrace change and stay on the journey.
Come, O Holy Spirit,
show us the way.
Well, what you need to understand about Catholics is that most of them don’t go to church for political reasons. The Parish they choose, most often they choose merely because it’s the parish closest to them. For them religion is a matter of tradition; it’s not a matter of politics. They go to church to form a spiritual community, not to promote a political agenda.
I know Catholics and I know that like the general community most of them are totally against the radical agenda of the political left. But given the social and spiritual importance Catholicism is to them, they are intimidated (most of them) from speaking out for fear of the social repercussions. It is easier for them to remain silent and just look the other way to what is going on in their name, in their midst. Most people (liberals excluded) strive to live a life as much as possible without conflict and in most cases tend to remain silent and not make waves and rock the boat.
Liberals on the other hand live for conflict and due to that they seem to have an advantage when it comes to promoting their agenda. They are obviously using the Church in an inappropriate way, but they are not being called on it.
But those of Catholic persuasion need to speak out against the renewed radicalization of the local Church. Modern day catholic teaching doesn’t say that the Church is infallible on such issues, and when the church is being used by a radical few (yeah many of them in high places) to do something that will harm America, they practically have a duty to speak out despite the friction and division that would cause. After all they weren’t the ones who started the friction, they weren’t the ones who inappropriately hijacked the church to be used as a tool to promote a political agenda.
On this issue the Catholic Church has become a destructive force. Let’s hope that average Catholics get beyond being timid and take the church back from the radicals. They finally wrestled it away from the Leftists who had such a hold of it in the 1980s. It is critical that they do so now.