First GOP Debate ZZZZZ
By Joe Guzzardi
Life is short. Our time on Earth is far too brief to waste two hours listening to eight GOP presidential hopefuls give rote answers to puffball questions. But as a journalist on assignment, I toughed out the debate – the wrong word, by the way, forum is more accurate.
Yes, I stayed awake and listened to queries that candidates had been asked and had responded to multiple times before. If I’m giving Fox News, Martha MacCallum, Bret Baier and eight candidates my ear for 120 minutes, I want insight into their opinions on important, but less understood subjects, and not a rehash of what’s been opined on endlessly.
The debate was doomed to fizzle from the get-go. First, the electorate has no idea if the leading GOP presidential candidate, President Donald Trump, will be campaigning from a jail cell. Second, no one knows if the Democratic machine will put the skids to the incumbent, Joe Biden, who has vowed not to debate, and probably won’t campaign. Any candidate who compares the near-loss of his cat and his Corvette in a kitchen flare-up nearly two decades ago to 115 Lahaina dead, including infants, and more than 388 unaccounted for two weeks after the Maui fires, is not a guy Democrats should consider endorsing again. Third, the Iowa caucuses will be held on January 15, 2024, and the Republican National Committee’s convention is set for July 15-18. Both dates are, in the political world, eternities away.
The second primary debate is September 27, plenty of time for the moderators to formulate questions that will make the candidates squirm – put them on the spot! Viewers learned nothing from the first debate. All eight candidates are for stronger borders – big surprise! Every Republican candidate in recent history, including infamously pro-immigration Sen. John McCain, campaigned on enforcement – I’ll “complete the danged fence.”
The public deserves to know more about immigration’s harmful fine print. The moderators should ask about birthright citizenship, a policy abandoned in most Western countries because of its absurdity. Granting priceless U.S. citizenship to a child whose mother entered the U.S. on a fraudulent tourist visa for the sole purpose of having a newborn delivered at a U.S. hospital while being catered to pre-pregnancy and post-delivery at a hotel designed to pamper wealthy, deceitful foreign nationals is ridiculous.
Absurd too is citizenship for children born to illegal alien mothers. Many pregnant foreign nationals have crossed into the U.S. from the Southern border during Biden’s open border era, and will soon be giving birth to brand new American citizens. Congress could and should pass a bill to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to grant citizenship only to a person born in the U.S. to parents, at least one of whom is: (1) a U.S. citizen; (2) a lawful permanent resident alien who resides in the U.S.; or (3) an alien performing active service in the U.S. Armed Forces.
On a related subject, let’s hear the candidates’ opinions about chain migration, a subject too few Americans understand. Every immigrant who enters as part of the chain is chosen by other immigrants, not by the federal government. Chain immigrants come regardless of their skills, or lack of skills, and how they might affect the labor pool or Americans’ wages who compete in the same job categories, and regardless of how they might drive the booming U.S. population growth that government data show is the primary cause of the destruction of natural habitat and farmland annually. A quarter of a million lifetime work permits are given to foreign citizens each year through chain migration that probably doesn’t serve the national interest.
Birthright citizenship and chain migration affect every American. The two policies drive population growth which in turn expands the labor market; adds to overcrowded cities, schools, hospitals and roads; and reduces citizens’ quality of life. If the debate’s purpose were to inform voters, Fox News gets an F. Moderators should ask tougher questions so that the electorate can make informed choices at the polling booth.
Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org
And therein lies the first rub, the GOP forum was not about informing the voters, it was about distracting them and attacking President Trump. The “right” side of the Uni-party has no more intention of fixing the broken immigration “system,” or anything else for that matter, then the “left” side does. If they did, they would be fighting to impeach the braindead criminal pretendisent for his very real high crimes, misdemeanors and felonies. The other rub is that the electorate is now either self-informed or past being inform-able. The US MSM is nothing but a propaganda machine that would make the Soviets jealous. Our country is in deep trouble and the only way out is to pray very hard and to trust in God.