Matt Hayes
Foxnews.com
On March 24, the House Judiciary Committee held an oversight hearing called “How Would Millions of Guest Workers Impact Working Americans and Americans Seeking Employment?”
The hearing took place in connection with various “guest worker” bills pending before Congress. Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, a committee member, has spent extraordinary resources trying to convince voters that the bill he co-sponsors is not an amnesty, though it would not prosecute the millions of illegal aliens who have committed a crime by entering or remaining in the U.S. without a current visa. Instead, it would give them a work permit.
Cannon, a lawmaker, has openly expressed his contempt for the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. “We love immigrants in Utah. We don’t make the distinction very often between legal and illegal,” he said on June 6, 2002, as he received an Excellence in Leadership award from MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Cannon’s remarks are entirely consistent with the beliefs of MALDEF’s co-founder, Mario Obledo, who said in June 1998 “California is going to be a Hispanic state and anyone who doesn't like it should leave. They should go back to Europe.”
"Reconquista" is a term employed by groups like MALDEF who want to see California and its neighboring states annexed, at least culturally, with people free to move there from Mexico. If there had ever been doubts that Cannon was doing the bidding of the "reconquistadors," they were erased at that hearing. Cannon’s bill, the Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act of 2003 (AgJOBS,” H.R. 3142, would make all foreign nationals who were illegally in the United States between February 2002 and January 2003 (which Cannon estimates is 11 million people), and who had also worked for 100 days in agriculture, immune from prosecution for the crime of entering the U.S. without a current visa, and then give them work permits.
Posted by Suzanne at April 1, 2004