Immigration Bill and Potential Killers

Filed in archive Latin News on June 28, 2007

Latina Lista said "Comprehensive immigration reform is dead" - and sadly, she's absolutely right:

Opponents effectively killed President Bush's long-fought and emotion-laden Senate immigration bill Thursday when members voted against advancing the controversial legislation.

The tally was 46 to 53, 14 votes shy of the 60 needed to end debate. (...)

The bill aimed to create a path to citizenship for some of the 12 million illegal immigrants and to toughen border security.

Explaining his reasons for voting against the bill, GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, a leading critic of the measure, said "it would not work."

It would not work. That's a lame excuse! They should had worked something out. I don't care if it's difficult, it's complicated, it's blá-blá-blá. They owe at least that much to the people - to all people: illegal immigrants, legal immigrants and citizens alike.

Well, they didn't get the job done. Now what?

Besides that, this article, published yesterday in the New York Times, really gave me the creeps:

Immigration Bill Prompts Some Menacing Responses

On the eve of a crucial vote on the immigration bill, the Capitol Hill switchboard was deluged again Wednesday as thousands of citizens called their members of Congress - and, perhaps, someone else's - to weigh in.(...) Republicans who support the immigration bill are facing unusually intense opposition from conservative groups fighting it.

(...)While the majority of the telephone calls and faxes, letters and e-mail messages have been civil, aides to several senators said, the correspondence has taken a menacing tone in several cases.

(...)"There's racism in this debate," Lindsey Graham said. "Nobody likes to talk about it, but a very small percentage of people involved in this debate really have racial and bigoted remarks. The tone that we create around these debates, whether it be rhetoric in a union hall or rhetoric on talk radio, it can take people who are on the fence and push them over emotionally."

Off course, Senators said they wouldn't be scared or influenced by this threats - even implied death menaces in some cases. Now, we can't really be sure if some of them voted out of fear, or not. But what caught my attention is that all the threats came against the bill. For some reason I don't understand, some people hate immigrants so much, they would KILL to get rid of them.

At the end of the day, these potential killers got what they wanted. I don't know if they were a decisive factor; I really hope not.

But what's really scary, is that these people walk in the streets as if they were normal persons.