If you only hear one voice on immigration...it should be DEMOCRAT Congresswoman BARBARA JORDAN

FINALLY! Someone besides TheTownCrier wrote an article about the wonderful Barbara Jordan!
"“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”

 The Ghost of Barbara Jordan

Texas's first black congresswoman provided a voice missing from today's immigration debate.

By W. James Antle III • May 8, 2013  The American Conservative

 

How different would the immigration debate look today had Barbara Jordan lived? It’s a question frequently pondered by those of us who believe the answer to every problem concerning immigration isn’t necessarily more immigration.
Jordan was the first woman elected to Congress from Texas and the first Southern black female ever elected to the House. She compiled a similar record of firsts in Texas state politics and was active in the civil rights movement. But Jordan capped her career chairing the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
The commission’s vision of immigration reform was very different than the “comprehensive” variety pushed by a bipartisan gaggle of senators. To understand how different, consider Jordan’s contention in early 1995 congressional testimony that “deportation is crucial.”
“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave,” Jordan said. “The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”
Today’s comprehensive immigration reformers think it is an abomination to deport anyone but criminal aliens. The Obama administration has celebrated such deportations while announcing that most of the remaining illegal immigrant population isn’t an enforcement priority.
In all, the Jordan Commission favored reducing legal immigration by one-third, moving towards more skill-based immigration and away from chain migration, and enhanced enforcement. One need not support all its recommendations—I oppose national ID cards, for instance—to see that serious alternatives to the Gang of Eight approach were once seriously contemplated by such mainstream Democrats as former President Bill Clinton.
Not long after Jordan’s untimely death in January 1996, the effects of her absence were felt. Liberals could not say no to immigration, whatever its impact on the working poor. Economic conservatives decided her commission’s worksite enforcement mechanisms were insufficiently pro-business; Beltway social conservatives regarded its changes to family reunification as insufficiently pro-family.
Since then, the country has been plagued by the notion that racism is the only possible motivation for reducing immigration or enforcing immigration laws. There were once courageous liberals like Jordan and to a lesser extent Theodore Hesburgh to whom it was impossible to ascribe such motives who were willing to argue otherwise.
Jordan observed that “it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest,” which includes the interests of citizens of every race, and naturalized citizens as well as natives and the “nativists” supposedly advocating on their behalf. [snip]

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