It may be more of a kneejerk resistance to Obama’s latest immigration debacle than anything seriously principled, but mainstream conservatives have finally found the courage to begin openly calling for mass deportations and an end to auto-citizenship:
INGRAHAM: OK. First thing you do is start deporting people not by the hundreds, not by the dozens — by the thousands. And that means entire families. Not just a father, a mother. But we keep families unified by deporting all people who are here illegally number one.
O’REILLY: Wait, logistically who gets deported? Do you go door to door? Do you search them out?
INGRAHAM: Wherever we find people who are not supposed to be in this country legally, those people have to go back to their home country. But families should be sent together.
O’REILLY: Do you have an active federal police force seeking them out?
INGRAHAM: The way if used to work, Bill, and the way Eisenhower did it is federal, state and local, they worked all together. They didn’t demonize each other. They didn’t oppose one another. They all work together for the common good much the country. I think it can happen again. It will be really positive. We are not picking and choosing. Where we find illegal aliens they have to go home. Keep families together that’s number one.
O’REILLY: Mass deportations, that’s number one. What’s number two?
INGRAHAM: Thousands not hundreds. Number two, we have to stop visas and stop foreign aid to country who is will not repatriate the citizens of those countries that left and came to our country illegally.
We’re saying this of Guatemala, Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, some of these South American countries. If they don’t agree to repatriate their citizens back home and stop sending signals implicitly, explicitly that people should come here, then they get no more foreign aid. We stop all visas from those countries from coming in. This is a crisis, and we have to deal with it in a serious way.
Number three, there has to be an end to this thing called birthright citizenship. Some people call it anchor babies. It’s not required by our Constitution. It does not require a constitutional amendment. Harry Reid was for this about 15, 16 years ago. He went on the Senate floor proclaimed that we should end birthright citizenship. So that should go. We also should have severe penalties in place that are enforced, Bill, against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants who undercut the American worker and the legal immigrants who want to earn a decent wage. Severe civil penalties. If they have to be criminal penalties for successive violations, we have to do that.
However, conservatives aren’t entirely serious about defending the nation yet. They’re still hung up on the irrelevant difference between legal and illegal immigration. What is relevant is not the legal status of the immigrant, but the identification of the immigrant. Illegal Canadians and Brits are not part of the problem here. Legal Mexicans and Nigerians and Saudis are.