It’s a tragic fact of man’s nature that people prescribe an ounce of prevention when a pound of cure is needed -- and a pound of cure when times call for a ton of desperate measures.

Immigration, rightly and largely thanks to Donald Trump, has become a big issue this election cycle.

But not big enough.

And Tuesday’s GOP debate was illustrative of the problem. When John “Can’t do” Kasich and Jeb “Invasion is an act of love” Bush both scoffed at the idea of following the law, saying we “can’t” deport illegals, the response was lacking. Only Senator Ted Cruz rode in to save the issue from their demagoguery. He said it was “offensive” to suggest that enforcing the law is anti-immigrant and warned that the Republicans will lose if they “join Democrats as the party of amnesty.” He also quite eloquently pointed out that the media wouldn’t be suppressing the dark reality of illegal migration if “a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press,” and that there’s nothing compassionate about diminishing millions of Americans’ earnings.

Yet even the intelligent, staunchly traditionalist Cruz misses the boat on immigration. Even the intrepid, titillatingly anti-establishment Trump does. In 2013, Cruz proposed (at 3:28 in this video) increasing H1B visas 500 percent and doubling legal immigration. And Trump repeats the theme that immigration must be done “legally.” The problem?

Americans are “legally” being done out of their jobs. They’re “legally” being pushed into socialism. And they’re “legally” having their culture stolen away. Yet much more than this went unmentioned during Tuesday’s debate.

“Think about the families!” cried Kasich, alluding to family unification. “C’mon, folks!” Okay, c’mon, let’s think about families.

The “families” argument is pure propaganda. Families can also be united by sending people the other way -- back to their native countries, where most family members often are in the first place. Second, the families argument could be used as a pretext for not enforcing any law. Why imprison people for bank robbery or embezzlement? If they have children, the kids will be left without a parent, or even parentless and have to languish in foster care. And as with illegals, many other law-breakers engage in their crimes “because they want a better life.” How many mafia figures didn’t use their ill-gotten gains to support their families?

Moreover, failure to enforce immigration law is discriminatory. If such law can be flouted with impunity, why should any of us have to follow the law? The amnesty crowd are essentially creating a privileged group -- illegal migrants -- who alone will get a pass on their criminality. Is unfair discrimination compassionate?

Kasich also trumpeted Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty and said the idea of deporting “11 million people who are law-abiding… is not an adult argument.” But is this a mature statement? The illegals by definition aren’t “law-abiding” because they broke the law in coming to the U.S. in the first place. Here’s something else unmentioned: Reagan reportedly called the 1986 amnesty “My biggest mistake.”

And Kasich, Bush, “Gang of Eight” Marco Rubio, and others think we should repeat it.

Note that since the ’86 mistake there have been six more amnesties, each one attended by promises to secure the border. It’s said, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Should we play the fool an eighth time? Are we Charlie Brown with the football?

Transitioning to political footballs, there’s the Kasich-Bush-Insane notion that we “can’t deport 11 million people.” Here’s the ideal debate response:

Well, we certainly can’t if we look to make not good policy but excuses. But despite what “Can’t do” Kasich might say this isn’t a matter of capability but will. But first realize that we don’t have to deport illegals -- we can get them to deport themselves.

You use a carrot-and-stick approach; the removal of the carrot and application of the stick. First, make sure illegals can’t get any government benefits; of course, this includes no driver’s licenses, which can enable illegals to vote in our elections. Then ensure they can’t get jobs by punishing employers hiring them. Once these incentives to remain are gone, most will leave voluntarily, as Arizona’s crackdown on illegals some years back proved. And once most depart, deporting the few remaining will be an easy task. So the issue isn’t complicated; it’s only made so by pandering politicians who put votes ahead of country.

Speaking of a treasonous spirit, the topic of H1B visas -- which allow employers to recruit high-skilled foreign workers -- came up during the second-to-last GOP debate on Oct. 28. Once again, no candidate fielded it sufficiently. Ideal debate statement:

In the news there has been story after story recently about corporations replacing high-skilled American workers with lower-wage foreigners; this is a violation of the law, which stipulates that an H1B-visa recruit can only be retained if there’s no American to take the job, but this law is routinely flouted and unenforced. Outrageously and rubbing salt in the wound, in some cases these Americans have even been forced to train their foreign replacements under threat of losing their severance packages! This is treasonous! And think about the families, the families that these Americans can no longer support. Is this compassionate? Is this an “act of love”?

The H1B-visa program is being abused, and is used to abuse Americans, by crony capitalists in and out of government who grease each other’s palms. This will stop, cold, under my presidency. More than 94 million Americans are not in the labor force. We need to ensure that corporations hire available American talent. Let high-skilled foreigners build up their foreign countries, and let high-skilled Americans have the jobs that are their birthright.

Returning to Tuesday’s debate, many candidates mentioned Islamic terrorism when asked to cite America’s biggest current threat. Yet not a single debater pointed out the following. Debate statement:

With many millions of unknown-quantity illegals violating our border during the last couple of decades, probability dictates that some terrorists have come across. There’s no doubt that some weapons of mass destruction have come across. Yet we can’t get it across to our feckless leaders that it’s silly, in the extreme, to talk about a “war on terror” and pursue “nation building” in faraway lands while leaving our back door to Mexico vulnerable. It’s a bit like going to the nearest crime-ridden naked-city street looking to be Charles Bronson in Death Wish and leaving your home’s door wide open on your way out. And think about the families on 9/11 and those on the next 9/11, whose loved ones will have been sacrificed on the altar of political pandering. Leaving your national family’s door open isn’t an act of love. It’s criminal negligence and an act of treason.

Having said all this, none of the above addresses our main “legal” problem: legal immigration. Since the Immigration Reform and Nationality Act of 1965, 85 percent of our immigrants have hailed from the Third World and Asia; 70 to 90 percent of those vote for socialistic candidates upon being naturalized. This is a universal Western phenomenon, mind you, and was actually referenced by Labour Party operative Andrew Neather. A former aide to ex-British prime minister Tony Blair, he admitted in 2009 that the massive immigration into the United Kingdom over the last 15 years was designed to “rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

Yet such schemes wouldn’t be possible had Westerners, including conservative ones, not fallen victim to “immigrationism”: the idea that immigration is always good, always necessary and must be unquestioned. The reality?

Immigration always presents problems of assimilation. It’s just a matter of whether the likelihood of it is great or virtually nil.

As to the latter, a recent poll showed that a majority of Muslims in America prefer Sharia law to American civil law. Note also the studies showing that young Muslims in the West are actually more Islamic and anti-Western than their elders.

In addition, note that amnesty duly passed into law would be as “legal” as our widely accepted legal immigration. Legal is not synonymous with smart.

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