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DEL.ICIO.USSays Chambliss: No round-up of illegals
"I think we’re kidding ourselves to think that we can do that"
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You could almost see U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss squinting at the needle as he threaded his way through the immigration issue on Tuesday.
He was on the phone with a half-dozen reporters. First bit of news: Chambliss doesn’t think the legislation now before the U.S. Senate has much of a chance of passing this week.
“This bill has tied immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. That’s proven to be a difficult hurdle to get beyond,” he said.
“I’m not one of those folks who thinks that you can round up everybody who’s here illegally and send them back. I think we’re kidding ourselves to think that we can do that,” Chambliss said. “So we have got to make some accommodation for folks. But we can deal with that issue short of giving them citizenship.”
The fine line that Chambliss walks can be found in the furrowed rows of Georgia farms. He doesn’t want his farmers to have the federal government peering over their shoulders, looking at their payroll lists.
Yet at the same time, he said farmers are a first line of defense against illegal immigration, and must bear some of the responsibility.
A final word from the Mexican Consul General in Atlanta.
Nearly two weeks after the event, the Mexican consulate in Atlanta has issued a formal response to recent events in the state Legislature.
In late March, you’ll recall, the House was debating the illegal immigration bill now on Gov. Sonny Perdue’s desk. State Rep. Matt Dollar (R-Cobb County) rose to speak, and produced what he said were two matriculas consulares — photo IDs issued by the Mexican government to Mexican nationals legally residing in the United States.
Except the IDs had Dollar’s photo on them, and his name. Dollar, a genuine U.S. citizen, said he obtained them through the Mexican government — though he later backed away from this statement.
Dollars’ words were transmitted to Remedios Gomez-Arnau, the Mexican government’s top diplomat in Atlanta. She went straight to the Capitol and House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s office, where she demanded Dollar’s curly head — or at least the Mexican government’s documents, which he claimed to possess.
She was shown the door. It wasn’t pretty.
We made inquiries to the consulate, but until Tuesday morning had heard nothing. Here’s what we received, in part:
“The matricula consular is a document that has been issued for 130 years and, since May 2002, it contains a series of security features that avoid its possible forgery and make it a highly reliable document,” wrote the consulate’s spokesman, Armando Bello Padilla.
“In such sense, the Consulate General of Mexico rejects categorically any demonstration of doubt on the seriousness and consistency of the processes followed in the issuance of such consular document,” the spokesman said.
The translation, we think, is something like this: “The documents are reliable, and frat-house fakes don’t count. Anyone who says otherwise is fibbing.”
Comments
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By Debbie
April 5, 2006 06:04 AM | Link to this
Sen. Chambliss will have excessive baggage when he faces re-election. His stance on the Guest Worker program will come back to haunt him. He needs to remember that he is elected by all the voters in Georgia, not just the farmers.