Press ’1′ for English

By Michelle Malkin  •  June 9, 2004 12:15 AM

Here’s the transcript of a local PBS town meeting on immigration I attended last week. It was the usual Can’t We All Get Along-Celebrate Diversity-Embrace Change emote-a-thon. Frank Senso was as fair as a PBS host can be on this issue. But the panel was about as kookily unbalanced as Courtney Love teetering in stiletto heels on David Letterman’s desk.

Perhaps the most snort-worthy lines from the open-borders crowd, and there were so many to choose from, came from immigration lawyer Denyse Sabagh. First, she disputed my contention that anybody ever had to learn English before arriving in the U.S.

IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY DENYSE SABAGH: Well, I would disagree that people had to learn English before they came to the United States. That never was the case.

Tell that to the legions of foreign students and workers in the U.S. who are still required to demonstrate English proficiency today (at least the ones who haven’t hired lawyers like Sabagh to weasel their way out of taking the language test). I didn’t get to point this out, however, because the audience was too busy booing me.

Sabagh’s other laugh line (well, nobody was laughing but me) was her complaint that “there’s a tremendous amount of law enforcement going on right now. As a matter of fact, there’s-there’s… The law enforcement today is much more stringent and punitive than it used to be.”

Reality check: Just outside the WETA studio where this show was taped is a tax-subsidized day labor shelter for illegal aliens that was opposed by WETA’s own CEO, Sharon Rockefeller. On the evening of the taping, a few dozen men hung around the shelter. Everyone in Arlington knows they are immigration law-breakers. No one, including the local acting police chief who attended the town meeting, enforced the law against the illegal aliens.

I tried to point this out, but Sabagh was too busy blabbing out the urgent need for another illegal alien amnesty.

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