Letters page

Many bleeding-heart progressives are attacking the Republican presidential candidates for their position on illegal immigrants, using an “all or nothing” approach.

Want to put a halt to illegal immigration? You can’t just be a citizen concerned about the future of our nation, you must be a hate-filled, fear-driven, intolerant bigot. Want secure borders like most other nations? You must be mean and greedy.

Well, I have questions for the bleeding hearts, at least those who have children: How does illegal immigration benefit their children? Do they even consider their future? Or does their “compassion” somehow insulate them from having to confront those realities?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why would anyone want to put their own children on that road?

When they come and ask the bleeding hearts what they did to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants that forever changed America for the worse, will they be honest and tell them they supported the immigrants?
 

Patricia Michaelson-Duffy made some inaccurate or misleading statements in her Aug. 8 column favoring the recall of state Sen. Floyd Prozanski (“Prozanski a good example of why Oregon has recall law”).

I’m not aware that Prozanski ever voted to give illegal immigrants “free college tuition.” He and his fellow Democrats supported in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants, while denying that benefit to legal U.S. residents from other states.

They voted to give Oregon Opportunity Grants to illegal immigrants, thus eliminating that opportunity for some deserving U.S. students because there isn’t enough money in that program to serve all who qualify.

And they attached an emergency clause to that bill (Senate Bill 932) to prevent a referendum because they knew what would have happened had it been taken to the streets, as was done with their illegal immigrant driver’s card bill.

Regarding the emergency clause, Prozanski isn’t alone in his guilt. Both parties abuse that process. There are few bills that warrant an emergency clause, but I’m told it’s now default language when legislative counsel drafts bills. An initiative is in the works to rein in that practice.

Finally, Michaelson-Duffy claimed that “Oregon’s values are not defined by liberal politicians.” All you have to do is observe who gets re-elected time after time, regardless of political blunders, to see the error in that statement.

I suspect Prozanski will have his legislative job for as long as he wants it.
 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., dares to venture into a taboo subject for Democrats and most Republicans: He advocates reducing the current extremely high volume of legal immigration. In a recent interview, Sanders said, "Open borders? ... That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ... You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? ... I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer."

Many studies prove that excessive immigration has adversely affected the wages and job opportunities of citizens. Employers exploit the visa system, which is riddled with fraud, to import foreign workers and dismiss citizens....

Sanders might have mentioned the effects of exploding population numbers on our natural environment, the loss of forests and farmland to ever-expanding housing and related infrastructure, or the overcrowding in cities and the complications of governance for so many people....

U.S. voters do not want the population increases caused by these enormous levels of immigration. Many honest polls say so, and yet congressional leaders of both parties ignore citizens' needs and opinions and work ceaselessly for more and more legal immigration...

In the 2016 presidential race, Sanders is one of the many contenders. He's currently rated F- by NumbersUSA, which compiles records of votes and public statements by candidates on immigration and displays them on their website. His voting record doesn't actually match the support for less immigration that he recently expressed, but he's done a great service to the public just to talk about it. Hopefully, he and Donald Trump will break the taboos on critical examination of our recklessly expansive legal immigration policies. They both speak frankly; how refreshing that is.
 

In the 2015 legislative session, majority Democrats denied Oregonians their right to refer many bills to a public vote -- almost certainly, in at least some instances, because they feared voters would reject those bills if given the chance. Here's the story of one such bill -- and of how voters, in 2016, might get an opportunity to stem future such lawmaking abuse.

Senate Bill 932, which was approved by the House and Senate early this month and currently awaits Gov. Kate Brown's signature, credentials illegal-immigrant college students to compete with U.S. citizens for taxpayer-funded Oregon Opportunity Grants. This is objectionable enough: Plenty of Oregonians, as we'll see, went on record last year as opposing state-government benefits for foreigners here illegally.

But there's more: SB 932's sponsors saddled the bill with an "emergency clause" -- and with the evident intent of assuring that voters wouldn't again get the chance to take such firm official stand against illegal immigration.

The Oregon constitution stipulates that "no act shall take effect until ninety days from the end of the session at which the same shall have been passed, except in case of emergency; which emergency shall be declared in . . . the law." Such declaration, known as the "emergency clause," speeds a bill's enactment into law. Though, in recent years, few bills containing the clause have addressed true emergencies, its use is common: according to Lewis and Clark senior lecturer emerita Chana Cox, in the 2015 session 46 percent of bills (as of early June) contained an emergency clause. Among those that passed: House Bill 2177, which automatically registers as voters all citizens holding Oregon driver licenses, and SB 941, which expands background checks on people transferring guns. SB 932's emergency clause declares the bill effective "on its passage" -- which means it will become law the moment Brown signs it.

What's the official reason for SB 932's emergency clause? So its intended beneficiaries, bill sponsor Sen. Michael Dembrow (D-Portland) told Eugene's Register-Guard last spring, can (in the newspaper's words) "access opportunity grants in the coming school year."

But here's the rub: Absent a successful referral -- for which, we'll see, there is a high bar -- those beneficiaries would have been able to seek and win grants even if SB 932 hadn't had an emergency clause. For the next Oregon Opportunity Grants that will be available -- for the school year of 2016-17 -- the state government's Office of Student Access and Completion urges interested parties to submit their applications as soon after January 1, 2016 as possible. Had, then, Dembrow forsworn the emergency clause, and in SB 932's text merely stipulated that the bill take effect no fewer than 90 days from the end of the session (which will be early October), its beneficiaries still would have had ample time -- some two-and-a-half months -- to have prepared and submitted their applications within OSAC's suggested time frame. (For those who would argue that SB 932 needed the emergency clause because sessions' adjournment dates are never certain, consider: In the past 130 years no session has extended beyond late August, and most recent sessions have concluded by early July.)

Might, then, there have been an unspoken reason for SB 932's emergency clause?

Perhaps. When a bill contains an emergency clause, once signed it is not merely sped into law: the clause also forecloses Oregonians' ability to try to give their fellow citizens the chance to approve or disapprove it via referendum.

The reason? To refer a bill to voters, its opponents must engage in a constitutionally-stipulated and time-consuming process: collect the signatures of registered voters numbering at least 4 percent of the votes cast for governor in the last election. This must be done within 90 days of a legislative session's end -- not coincidentally, the same length of time it takes bills that don't have emergency clauses to become law. If a bill's opponents collect the requisite signatures, the bill, rather than become law after 90 days, remains unenacted until after the referendum vote, which affirms or rejects it as law. But when an emergency clause stipulates that a bill, once signed, becomes law immediately, it forecloses the referendum possibility.

Could this have been the real reason for SB 932's emergency clause?

Consider: In spring 2013, the legislature approved and Gov. John Kitzhaber signed SB 833, which would have authorized driver cards for illegal immigrants. But the bill's opponents collected sufficient signatures to refer it to the November 2014 ballot, at which voters rejected it. The magnitude of that rejection -- the margin was almost two-to-one -- made clear: the vote transcended the issue of driver cards to constitute a general mandate against state-government policies that offer benefits to illegal immigrants.

Even after voters' annihilation of driver cards, however, Oregon's legislative Democrats remain virtually unanimous in their support of illegal-immigrant "rights." Case in point: A recent letter to Salem's Statesman Journal newspaper, signed by all 35 House Democrats, contended that "keeping our state a great place to live" will require that all Oregon residents are "treated equally" regardless "of their . . . citizenship status."

So it is reasonable to ask: Was an emergency clause written into SB 932 with the specific intent of keeping it from being referred to voters and, potentially, meeting the same fate as illegal-immigrant driver cards?

Only Sen. Dembrow and SB 932's co-sponsors can answer that question. Whatever their answer would be, however, the bill's story illustrates the need to rein in the emergency clause's future use.

For the November 2016 ballot, a measure has been filed to do just that. If passed by voters, the "No More Fake Emergencies Act" -- Initiative No. 49 -- would enact a constitutional amendment that would require most bills containing emergency clauses to receive the votes of two-thirds of the members of each the House and the Senate to pass. This would restrict legislators' ability to use the emergency clause to thwart potential referenda of bills they believe would be defeated if put to popular vote -- a cynical, antidemocratic practice that poisons public confidence in the lawmaking process and, indeed, perverts the relationship between legislators and the Oregonians who elect them.

To reach the ballot, by July 2016 Initiative No. 49 will need the signatures of more than 117,000 registered voters. In days to come, the Catalyst will inform readers of how to print and sign an online petition to help qualify the initiative -- and in doing so to help restore the voice of the citizen, as manifested in the referendum, to its preeminent place in Oregon's representative democracy.
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Richard F. LaMountain, a former vice president of Oregonians for Immigration Reform, served as a chief petitioner of the 2014 referendum via which Oregon voters rejected the 2013 bill that sought to grant driver cards to illegal immigrants.