My letter to my Senator about Immigration

With the 2nd vote that happened today on the Immigration Bill today I was disappointed in how my Senator John Ensign voted. So I wrote him a letter expressing my dismay. Hopefully he takes the time to read it and will respond. I like him. He normally votes the way I feel but I just had to know why he voted the way he did. Maybe he knows something I don't.
So anyway, here it is...





Dear Sir,
I would like to know why you voted yes on today's Immigration Bill. Do you think that this bill would help us as a country by allowing over 12 million people who are here illegally to instantly have their "Z" status (Amnesty) and be able to use our programs and tap into the same services that I pay taxes for (and have for the past 20+ years of my life)?
Will these "Z" status individuals be able to collect Social Security even if they have not contributed enough to qualify for it? What about Food Stamps. Healthcare, or special low income housing? If so, that is not fair to those people who are legal and have been contributing as they should have. A few months ago Bank of America started their program offering illegals credit cards. I am a 39 year old Marine Corp veteran and I don't have very good credit. I don't have/ can't get a credit card because of this. This program was not offered to people like me. But yet BoA sees an opportunity to offer their services to illegals?!? I don't get it.

As I understand it, if you and the other Senators had voted no then the bill would have had to have been rewritten before coming up to vote again. Is that correct?
What is wrong with having a series of simple bills that address individual issues? Why does the the bill always have amendments that have to be added on. Why can't they just come before the Senate for example as " Bill to secure the border by building a fence" and then the Senate votes yes or no.
The most important thing for me about this Immigration is that I feel we are repeating ourselves as we did the 80's. We gave amensty to several million "illegals" and now we are doing the same thing only this time it is 12-15 million. What will it be in 20 years from now 20-30 million? I want to see our border secured. Can we do that first please!?! Stop the flood and then let us concentrate on what to do with the illegals that want to become legal and contribute to the Nation. Instead of trying to win the war in one fatal swoop can we concentrate on the small things first to get the job done correctly?
1. Get the border fence built and working correctly.
2. Get rid of illegals that are convicts in jail. We don't need to be spending our tax dollars on housing and feeding them. Send them back to where they came from.
3. Make it a felony to hire Illegals. That will stop that immediately. If they are here illegally and can't find work then they will leave on their own. We won't need to worry about them. They will take care of themselves.
4. Do not allow any illegals access to our gov't programs. They are not paying taxes to support them, they should not have access to them.
5. Do not allow them to vote until they have become full US Citizens.

The reasons why people have come here normally in the past has been to become a citizen and assimilate into our culture and take advantage of what we have to offer as a country. That is a good thing.

But over the last few decades those reasons have changed. People are coming here to take advantage of an unsecure border and to make money and send it home to where their families live. We are seeing a trend that does not include becoming a citizen but of just working here and wanting people/Gov't to bend to their will. This can only lead to bad things when the citizens who are here legally get fed up with the one that are not here legally.

I hope that you take the time to read this and answer me back on my points directly because I would like to know what is it that you feel is important for us as a Nation.

Sincerely,


Jeff Lawrence
Husband, Father of 3
Former Marine/Desert Storm Vet 88-92
Hard working normal American.



If I do get a response I will post it here.

Stay Tuned...........

Carbon Offset?

What does it take to be carbon neutral? I guess it depends on what kind of lifestyle you lead. If you are an Al Gore type or Paris Hilton type then I guess it would take quite a bit of either changing your lifestyle which I doubt would happen or it will cost alot of money to even become carbon neutral.

Personally, I believe that the planet goes through cycles. There are warm periods and cold periods. If you take a look through the history of the planet you will see that the ice caps were much larger than they are now. Canada and most of the Northern United States was completely covered with ice and snow year round. Why do you think there are skeletons of Wholly Mammoths in western United States? Because it used to be cold.

Now I know that it would be arrogant of us to think that we have not influenced the environment at all since we have been around on this planet. But to portray us as having been the downfall of the earths environment.... that is a huge stretch.

To me, there is not enough evidence over a long enough period of time to accurately know what is the real cause or even if there is a cause per se. It very well may be the natural order of things.

But where does that leave us. What if it takes us a thousand years for us to have enough information to really know what the story is? That really does not help us now. If you listen to some they say that is not good enough and that we need to do something now to help the environment. Ok. I'll go with you on that. If you want to help, buy some long life light bulbs, stop drinking water out of a bottle and use a filter and filter your tap water and use the same container over and over again. Plant trees and bushes in your yards.

So if we do these things as a human race we will be doing our part in helping to reduce the bad evil air that we are putting into the atmosphere.
I think if the world goes through cycles there isn't a damn bit of anything that we can do to change what is going on. That is like trying to stop an earthquake, tornado, or hurricane from happening.

We have done some amazing things as a human race. Look at all of the things we have accomplished. But even to acknowledge all of those things, to say that we can change how the earth goes through its cycles is a little pompous of us.... Don't you think?



Stay Tuned...........

We Blinked

Well I have heard recently now the United States is going to sit down with Sunni Leaders and work out agreements about about how Iraq should be run?!? What? So we are going to negotiate with the very same people that are killing innocent people because they are either helping us or just believe in something different than they do.

WOW.....

Stay Tuned.........