Could the people of California please stop electing the “ugly face of tyranny,” Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), to the United States senate? Not only has she been a treasonous senator in going after guns, and even including Canada and Mexico as part of the homeland, but on Tuesday she wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department, under DHS, stop enforcing immigration law. No, seriously, she did.
In June 2012, she raised the issue that ICE was using I-9 worksite audits against agricultural employers in a letter to former ICE Director John Morton.
At that time Feinstein wrote, “Many farmers and growers in California informed me that their business and livelihood are at risk due to a shortage of legal harvesters, pickers, pruners, packers, and farm workers. As you can imagine, with approximately 81,000 farms in California, I am very concerned that these audits will result in significant harm to the agricultural industry and the state’s overall economy.”
In attempting to address her concerns about farmers not having willing and available domestic agricultural workers, (how many people are on food stamps and are unemployed in California?) she along with Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), co-authored the Agricultural Worker Program, an agreement that was incorporated into the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, which passed the Senate in June 2013.
In her latest letter to Napolitano, Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote:
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement has wisely used its prosecutorial discretion to defer removal of young people who arrived in the United States without documentation as children.… I respectfully suggest that you adopt a similar policy of exercising prosecutorial discretion to defer enforcement against agricultural employers and workers, and concentrate instead on removing those who would and have harmed our society, rather than those who contribute to our vital agricultural economy and heritage, and the safe and high-quality food supply that benefits all Americans.”
So, what Senator Feinstein is proposing is rewarding “good, productive” illegals who have broken the law versus prosecuting “bad, harmful” illegals. Is anyone else see hypocrisy here? Illegals are harming the society. They harm it by breaking the law upon their entrance. Second, many of those same illegals take from the system, and have been specifically targeted and encouraged by the federal government to do so. Many illegals even take advantage of the tax system, filing fraudulent returns and collecting thousands of dollars illegally. Sure, they give back in terms of taxes and such when they purchase items, but that is secondary.
Trending:
Picking and choosing who to apply the law to, violates the Constitution and it makes a mockery of the rule of law, but this is how Senator Feinstein and others operate.
Jessica Zuckerman writes at Heritage:
California is the nation’s top producing agricultural state. With approximately 81,000 farms, from Napa to Fresno, the state produces everything from grapes and oranges to figs and avocados. During peak harvest time, the $44 billion industry employs more than 400,000 workers.
For the second year in a row, however, farmers report experiencing shortages in workers. Many factors are likely at play here, including increased economic opportunity in Mexico and the resurgence of the construction industry in the U.S. Senator Feinstein, however, seems to place the blame almost solely on the Obama Administration’s attempts to enforce the law against agricultural workers who are illegal immigrants.
Her solution: stop enforcement. In fact, not only is the Senator calling for the abuse of prosecutorial discretion to benefit agricultural workers in her state, but she was one of the chief authors of portions of the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill that would grant permanent amnesty to agricultural workers across the U.S.
While Ms. Zuckerman says that building an “effective temporary worker program to allow those who seek to come here to work to do so legally and fill important niches in the national workforce” would be a key component in dealing with immigration, I disagree. I disagree because we already have those things in place. We already provide work visas and various other means of dealing with this, we simply are choosing not to enforce the current laws. While I can agree that laws could be improved, it seems to me we have an illegal immigration problem because we have not enforced the law, but ignored the problem. We continue to do that, and Dianne Feinstein’s letter demonstrates just that sort of mentality.
Tim Brown is the Editor of Freedom Outpost and a regular contributor to The D.C. Clothesline.
