And its a damn site better than anything being done by leaders on the state and national level -- especially since Congress has abandoned the issue for this year.

Texas should deploy 10,000 state National Guard troops to the border and issue special worker cards for immigrants, gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman said Wednesday as part of his "Keep It Simple, Stupid Politician" plan.

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Friedman said Texas should immediately deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to the border to reinforce several hundred who are there now.

"We've been waiting for 153 years for Washington to help us with the border. They're not going to do it," he said.

Friedman said he would require immigrants to buy "taxpayer I.D. cards" that would allow them to work legally in Texas, and proposed fines of up to $50,000 against employers who hire illegal immigrants without the card.

Now I don't know that Texas can issue its own immigration documents, but we at least have someone proposing a common sense plan.

For that matter, I suspect Kinky has scored points with some Houstonians with frank words about our other immigration problem -- Katrina evacuees whose presence has lowered our quality of life.

In a Houston campaign appearance, the maverick independent also expressed a dim view of Hurricane Katrina evacuees still in town.

"The musicians and artists have mostly moved back to New Orleans now," he said, according to KHOU (Channel 11). "The crackheads and the thugs have decided to stay here. They want to stay here. I think they got their hustle on, and we need to get ours."

He wants the state to give Houston $100 million for more police officers to deal with a spike in street crime related to the evacuees.

And yes, he does generalize a bit too broadly. But given the spike in crime associated with the low-lifes shipped here from New Orleans, the failure of many of the evacuees to take any part in supporting themselves, and the constant whining for hand-outs from those peole (we've got kids still using their evacuee status as an excuse for not bringing pens and paper to school -- a year after the storm), many Houstonians are ready to load them back onto the buses and send them back across the Louisiana state line.

Posted by: Greg at 10:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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