One good reason to be glad Congress gets nothing done

I read Friday that Congress has just begun a luxurious five-week summer vacation as if all its important work were done!

Done? Not hardly. In fact, according to the Washington Post, Congress has sent a measly 22 bills to President Obama for his signature. Can you believe that? Do you think Congress actually solved any of our nation’s pressing problems with one of those 22 bills? Highly unlikely, but what’s worse is that they will strut and swagger for the next five weeks as they lecture us — we the people — about the hard work they are doing in D.C. and how it’s somebody else’s fault that nothing ever gets done.

Maybe the biggest “nothing” that just won’t get done is “comprehensive immigration reform,” but for that we should all be grateful. As I have noted before — while the bill IS comprehensive; it is NOT reform. Rather it is capitulation.

The bill, as approved by the Senate, does not set policy based on the needs of the country, but rather based on the needs of politicians. What the country desperately needs is to make an honest and accurate assessment about what kind of legal immigration is appropriate and useful for the country’s advancement. But what the country is getting, however, is blanket slow-motion amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants who have taken advantage of our hospitality and now are on the verge of reaping a handsome reward for their impertinence.

Technically, the problems of border security and criminal residence within our borders should not even be part of an immigration bill; they should be dealt with as law-enforcement issues. If we had a Congress that was serious about protecting and defending our Constitution and our common welfare, this would not even be up for discussion. When people are invading your country... your fort... your home —whatever it is — you do one of two things, surrender or fight back. Congress has chosen to surrender, and the American public has let them get away with it.

The sum total of the Great Debate on border security and illegal immigration in Congress can be encapsulated in 10 pernicious words:

“Protect the border? Too big! Deport the illegals? Too many!”

But until we solve the problems of that porous border and those millions of illegal immigrants, there is no legitimate reason to waste time on real immigration reform.

Why try to restrict or encourage legal immigration when everyone in the legal line already knows they can sneak into the country if they have to? And when everyone who has a brain can tell that the United States is being reshaped (transformed?) under our noses into a Third World country because of our unwillingness to defend our sublime culture, traditions and exceptionalism from the leveling process of relativism that aims to condemn us to the lowest common denominator of base humanity.

Instead of rescuing the tired and poor from the “huddled masses” of other countries, we have made “huddled masses” of our own American cities and invited everyone to join us in our own squalor. Detroit, thy name is vanity! Do we really think we are in any position to absorb the tired and the poor of other countries when Detroit is going bankrupt and Chicago is a virtual charnel house?

Yet progressives turn their malfunctioning municipalities into “sanctuary cities.” And Mexico takes offense that we might ask Mexicans to return to their homeland! If they had any sense, they would be telling our undocumented visitors to get out while the getting is good.

Face it, this is no longer the America of 1883 when Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” and envisioned a country strong enough to absorb the world’s outcasts and be the “Mother of Exiles.” If the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” have to take sanctuary in dismal Detroit or uncivil Chicago, they are not really getting refuge at all, but are toiling at the bottom of the barrel as more “wretched refuse,” just with a new address.

It’s not a pretty picture, but the point is that this America, the real America of 2013, can’t absorb and assimilate millions of immigrants — legal or otherwise — just because there was once a poem that said we could.

The sooner Congress figures that out, the better off we will all be, and then maybe we can take a stab at real immigration reform.