Sen. Mel Martinez’s reward for trying to push through immigration reform is a precipitious drop on the polls. He’s fallen to a 37% approval rating. Martinez doesn’t face re-election until 2010, but these numbers must be a concern.
Here’s how one constituent described his dissatisfaction.
The issue has cost Martinez, who lives in Orlando, the support of voters like John Gilbert, a retired aerospace engineer from Orange County.
“What we’ve had is a nonviolent invasion of our country,” said Gilbert, a Republican who voted for Martinez when he was elected in 2004. Gilbert said giving legal standing to illegal workers is not good for the country and will strain schools and hospitals. He said Martinez, who came to the U.S. from Cuba as a legal immigrant as a teenager, would not support it if he weren’t an immigrant.”I can assure you: Those of us who didn’t walk ashore or swim ashore oppose it,” Gilbert said. “We see people coming in and taking over our nation.”
It’s probably a good thing for a lot of Republicans that the immigration bill was filibustered. It looks like it did plenty of damage as it is.
but that quote has the new code words that we don’t like Mexicans or brown people “invasion”. The real hurting on the Republicans will come in 2008, to see how much of the Latino vote it lost..not because “immigration” is the sole latino issue… But the question of race is involved and it appears to me that the Republicans were doing the mean things said and wanting mean spirited resolutions.
How wants to be a member of racist party, the gives shelter to the likes of racist like Kirs Kobach??
maybe these people should work on figuring out why so few Europeans wants to emigrate here these days.
Martinez is already spinning the message that the immigration bill’s defeat was due to bipartisan dissatisfaction with it and the Democratic leadership’s fault in the Senate. I heard him spouting that line this morning on Bloomberg radio and I don’t doubt we’ll be hearing it on Fox Noise tomorrow. This despite the fact that the Senate Republicans split 20/80 for/against the cloture motion, with the Democrats the reverse. Yeah, that’s “biparisan” – in the Republican world. Plus, Reid was supposed to fight this bill through to the bitter end despite the lack of cloture. Too bad Martinez hadn’t argued that on any other bills under consideration.
What an asshole. My ancestors came over not long after the Mayflower. My family has fought in every US war since the Revolution. And yet I do not belong to the “us” to which Mr. Gilbert refers — that being paranoid nativist bigots without the sense God gave a fucking chicken.
Taking over? Right. Any day now, the White House will be stormed by fieldhands, restaraunt workers, landscapers, and construction workers, a great brown horde of low-income recent immigrants bent on — what? Seriously, what the hell are “they” going to do? Force us to eat tamales? Outspend us on church clothes? Put bilingual signs on the doors?
they’re are a lot of assholes in this country.
Actually I am opposed to illegal immigration and actually it has nothing to do with race as one commenter suggested.
I did some work a long time ago trying to help Hatian refugees remain in this country becuase they were true “refugees”..and I will say in that case a lot of objections from the “other side” were tinged with racism it seemed to me.
But it’s the (future) economics of this wave, plus the factc this is the second time the US has done this….and how many more times are we going to do it.
It’s all fine and dandy to take in 12 to 20 milion until you hit that bump in the road…which I assure you a the Us is gonna hit…then it will become a big problem.
No, it’s time to clean house in the Mexico-US scheme to make life fine for their elites and multinationals while US taxpayers make room for their unemployed economic refugees.
But as for Martinez, the sooner he is gone the better.
This bill is all about cheap labor. If we wanted to stop illegal immigration, we would do something about Mexico’s economy, such as cancel NAFTA. We could also do something about the employers that hire illegals, and that break labor laws because they can’t complain.
What you don’t hear much about is the increase in H-1Bs. There is no shortage of tech workers. We already have a surplus. H-1Bs are used to drive down wages with an infinite supply of indentured servants.
Yes it is about cheap labor, you’re right.
Immigration is no longer about the ..”give us your oppressed, huddles masses”….”yearning to be free”.
Immigration is soley based on…
what the politicans think they can get for themselves out of it….and…what the corps want.
I saw a quote by Bill Moyers over on another site…about how…”Goverment as been priviatized”…with all the benefits flowing upward to the elites and the politicans.
That about sums it up.