Like many of you I was very disappointed in the Senate’s passage of a 1,200-page, severely-flawed immigration bill last week.  House Speaker John Boehner made clear almost immediately that this monstrosity was “dead on arrival” in the U.S. House.
While I don’t serve in the Senate and did not have a vote on that bill, my offices have been flooded with calls over the last several weeks urging a vote against any immigration bill that includes amnesty.  Sadly, the Senate bill is worse than that. It actually encourages more illegal immigration, making an already bad situation worse.
We only have to look back 27 years to see the results of amnesty without true border enforcement. In 1986, Congress and President Reagan attempted to contain illegal immigration through amnesty and promises of tighter borders, which never materialized.  The result was an explosion in the number of illegal immigrants and a border that still has about as many holes today as the Senate immigration bill itself. A porous border, such as we have today, renders any effort to enforce illegal immigration absolutely impotent.
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who stood nearly alone in the Senate in opposition to this deeply flawed bill, observed, “[T]his amnesty-first bill is a surrender to lawlessness… It will decimate immigration enforcement and erode the constitutional rule of law upon which our national greatness depends…”
It is unclear how and when the House will take up its own immigration legislation, but the first priority should be to finally secure our borders. Effectively open borders not only undermine lawful immigration, but they also place our nation at a greater risk of terrorism.
Snapper Season ends
Almost as soon as it began, the Gulf Coast Red Snapper fishing season has come to an abrupt end.  You cannot catch a snapper for the remainder of the year – not because the popular fish are in short supply; they are in abundance – but due to an arbitrary limit imposed by federal regulators.  Two snapper a day for 28 days, that’s it.
Beginning on the first of June, federal regulators gave the people of Alabama a mere 28 consecutive days to go snapper fishing. For some of us who aren’t lucky enough to live and work on the water, our snapper season lasted less than an hour before limiting out and heading back to the dock.
This is certainly not acceptable for anyone who fishes or who runs a business on the Gulf Coast.  Unnecessarily stringent restrictions on fishing go far beyond our charter boats, commercial vessels and private anglers.