Chertoff on FNS
Fox News has been one of the staunchest supporters of amnesty. Their silencing of dissenting voices was taken to such ludicrous extremes that last Sunday Fox News Sunday had on two amnesty supporters - Senators Trent Lott (R-MS) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) - “debating” the Bush-Kennedy bill.
This week was no different, with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff - a Bush minion and supporter of amnesty - “discussing” immigration with host Chris Wallace.
Here’s an interesting part of their exchange about the fence:
Wallace: Congress passed the Secure Fence Act in October of last year, mandating construction of 700 miles of new fence along the southwest border. Now Congressman Duncan Hunter, who comes from that part of the world - comes from San Diego - says that in fact, in the eight months since then, that the government has built only 13 miles of new fencing. Is that true sir?Chertoff: Well what we’ve done is we’re working on - and we’ll complete by September - up to 140-150 miles of fencing. As anybody who’s ever built a fence or a wall knows, Chris, you don’t build it one mile at a time. You take a chunk - like for example the 35 miles at the Barry Goldwater range in Arizona - you have to level the ground, you have to put a foundation in, you have to drive in the pillars, and then you put the fencing in. So in that case, for example, we’re going to go from a handful of miles to 35 miles within a couple of months. We’re on track to get about 370 miles done by the end of 2008.
It’s very encouraging that Chertoff has committed to build 370 miles of fence by 2008.
But what are the other tools he needs?
But I do have to say that, for people who believe that the answer is just fence, yesterday we discovered a tunnel; so fencing is not the cure-all for the problem at the border. We’ve got 40 percent of our illegals coming through the ports of entry, using legal visas, and overstaying.…
We haven’t been able to require every employer to enter a system in which they check the work status of their employees, to determine whether they’re illegal. And without that, we don’t really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that’s truly effective. And that would be the single greatest additional weapon we could use if we’re serious about tackling this problem.
Indeed, mandatory employment verification is a laudable goal, and one that I’ve been pushing for three years, starting when the president first announced his support for amnesty in January 2004.
The Social Security Administration put a verification system in place in 2005, which over 15,000 employers are now using. The easiest way for the Bush administration to give Chertoff most of what he wants is to require all federal contractors to use the system. This can be done by the Executive branch, without having to push new legislation through Congress. And, if the president wants to ask Congress to pass laws requiring all employers to use the system, we’ll be glad to help out there as well.
— PoliPundit