RI Senator Lincoln Chafee has been attempting to contrast his stance on immigration with his primary challenger Steve Laffey for several weeks now, and it is a subject that will surely come up during this month’s debates. Chafee’s attacks culminated in a direct mailing his campaign sent out in the middle of July – Kathryn Gregg has a synopsis of that ad and Chafee’s charges against Laffey in this July 18th Providence Journal article. Gregg does a pretty good job documenting the real Laffey position compared to the false charges that Chafee made in the ad. For example, Chafee claimed that Laffey said that “we should recruit illegal labor at the border” when in fact Laffey said on WPRO radio that he would encourage “American companies such as Wal-Mart to recruit workers from among those crossing and allow them two-to-three year visas.” Also, Chafee attacked the city of Cranston’s policy of accepting matricular consular cards as identification. The Senator warps this into claiming that Laffey supports something Chafee calls “illegal immigration cards” when in fact Cranston agreed to accepting that particular form of ID at the insistence of Cranston’s Chief of Police - and that acceptance of that type of ID is widespread, even by the federal government. If Chafee really has a problem with matricular consular cards used as identification, he should introduce legislation in the Senate to ban it – not whine about it in a misleading and false ad.
Mayor Laffey then criticized Chafee for voting for mandatory prevailing wages (Davis-Bacon) and Social Security benefits for admitted illegal aliens – that is people who have admitted breaking the law and being in the country and working illegally. The Chafee campaign responded:
“(Chafee campaign manager) Lang said the expansion of the Davis-Bacon Act "was brought in as a compromise to get the bill through," and Chafee viewed it as "part and parcel" of a bipartisan compromise that would increase fencing along the border, authorize the deployment of the National Guard and provide a pathway to citizenship.
On Social Security benefits, he said, Chafee indeed supports "the principle that people who have worked and paid into the system for years should be able to get the benefits they paid for" after the payment of back taxes and a fine qualifies them for citizenship.”
As to the Social Security benefits, Chafee alludes that these illegal aliens have “paid into the system for years”. If so, then they were using forged documents – a felony that would have you or I serving an extended stay in a federal penitentiary. And then if I later attempted to file for benefits using that fake number I would probably spend some more time in the pen, in addition to being publicly (and rightly) ridiculed. But apparently identity theft or forgery by someone here illegally is a felony that Chafee thinks entitles them to be rewarded, as opposed to being punished like the rest of us.
Chafee’s rational for his support for prevailing wages for illegal aliens, giving them much higher wages than comparable legal workers (which squeaked through the Senate (50-49) with Chafee’s vote) is just precious. The Senator claims that it was a quid pro quo – he votes for prevailing wage and he’d get increased fencing along the border, etc. But there is no evidence that voting against prevailing wage would have threatened the whole bill, especially once the public learned of it. And let’s look in particular at what Chafee said he got in return – the border fence.
It’s true that Chafee voted for the border fence (S.Amdt, 3979), but two months later he voted against funding it (S.Amdt. 4659) even though it was to be paid for by offsets, a funding mechanism championed by Chafee. To add insult to injury, Chafee then voted against an amendment (S.Amdt. 4660) that would have hired an “800 additional full time active duty investigators to investigate immigration laws violations and to offset such increase on a pro rata basis.” So much on being tough on illegal immigration.
However, it does appear that Chafee has seen the error of his ways, at least as far as actually paying for the border fence that was once so important to him. Yesterday the Senate, including Chafee, overwhelmingly voted to fund the fence, although it looks as if his motivation was embarrassment rather than real support.
I guess during the debate Senator Chafee can say to the voters of Rhode Island that he proved his toughness on immigration by voting for the border fence, before voting against the border fence, before voting for the border fence! Then let’s see him tell a voting blue collar worker that he supports paying an admitted illegal alien considerably more to start than that blue collar worker could ever hope to make, no matter how hard that worker works. That’ll win some votes.
