We now have a small (and bi-partisan) job creation plan that would employee 20,000 new government workers at what likely will be decent wages. Yes, some Senate Republicans want to expand the deficit to employee 20,000 new workers. It really should be a stimulus much bigger (perhaps a million workers), but one has to start somewhere. Now I grant you that these are "make-work" jobs, and we really need infrastructure spending rather than these jobs, but we should take what we can get. Jobs.
Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) later Thursday are expected to announce details of the agreement that they worked on in recent days with members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who wrote the immigration bill.
“We’ve made significant advances,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday morning as he opened the Senate, saying he is “willing to look at any reasonable amendment” and expected to hear more from Republicans later in the day.
Corker was short on specifics Thursday morning, but said in an interview with MSNBC that the deal is so tough that it’s “almost overkill.”
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The agreement calls for a “border surge” that would double the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents along the southern border to more than 40,000, according to aides. The federal government also would need to complete construction of about 700 miles of fencing along the border, essentially forcing compliance with immigration laws passed in 1996 and 2006 that authorized its construction.
WaPo
Illegal immigration is way down, but no matter. It's jobs. And there is infrastructure spending, but it is on an unnecessary fence. But it's jobs. So it's more than 20,000 new jobs. Fence workers will have work.
Maybe we can build a big fence in the North to keep French Canadians from coming down here to flee from national health care. They don't speak English, and we know how Republicans hate the French.
Be thankful for the jobs, even if it is all bullshit to assuage haters. The demographic time bomb scares the shit out of parts of the R Party.