Amnesty, Again - This country should have learned -- apparently, it has not
Articles
President Bush has kicked off his reelection year by proposing an amnesty for illegal aliens dressed up as a guestworker program, plus the importation of millions of new guestworkers and a significant increase in immigration. What is the White House thinking?
The administration first floated the idea of a guest-worker amnesty in 2001, during President Bush’s honeymoon meeting with Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, but discussions came to a halt because of 9/11 (as well as ferocious opposition from House Republicans)...
...the president has frequently said he wants an “immigration policy that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee.” Taking him at his word would suggest a return to 19th-century unlimited immigration, with the American labor market open to the world’s other 6 billion people. And, in fact, this seems to be the objective, because under the proposal, employers would decide which workers come into the United States, though it would maintain the fiction that Americans would have to be offered the jobs first.
Providing U.S. employers of low-skilled labor access to the entire workforce of the Third World would inevitably drive down wages and benefits for Americans, creating ever more “jobs Americans won’t do.” The White House seems to view immigration as similar to trade, seeking a market-driven system that allows free movement of people. But immigration and trade are fundamentally different issues...
Not that amnesty supporters ever use the “A” word. A couple of years ago, the National Council of La Raza commissioned focus groups to prepare for the fight over amnesty and concluded that they should never utter the word. As a result, amnesty proponents have concocted a series of ridiculous euphemisms, which have been embraced by the White House and others: “normalization,” “legalization,” “registration,” “permanence,” “earned adjustment, “adjusted work status,” and—my favorite—“phased-in access to earned regularization.”...
It is true that the Bush Amnesty would work differently from the 1986 version. First, illegal aliens would be relabeled “guestworkers” under a renewable three-year status, thus allowing them to remain here legally, get driver’s licenses, travel freely, etc. Then, they could apply for green cards under the normal legal-immigration system, free from the fear of deportation. However, rather than allow the backlogs to grow astronomically, as would happen otherwise, the president’s plan would significantly increase legal immigration quotas so as to accommodate the new applicants. In other words, this is a kind of two-step amnesty,...
So what? What’s wrong with legalizing millions of hardworking illegal aliens? Let me count the ways.
What part of “illegal” don’t you understand? Amnesty undermines the rule of law...
“Sucker!” The most immediate victims of amnesty are the millions of people overseas on waiting lists seeking to immigrate legally. Even if the illegals have to go to the back of the line, the fact remains that we have rewarded their lawbreaking, and we thus mock those who did not sneak into our country and sought to obey our law.
Overload. Immigration authorities simply do not have the administrative capacity to manage an amnesty—however it is organized—properly. There is now a backlog of more than 5.5 million applications for immigration benefits,...
Enemies, foreign and domestic. Of course, the corollary of administrative overload is massive fraud, as overworked bureaucrats start hurrying people through the system, usually with political encouragement. We saw this in the 1986 amnesty, when applicants who claimed to have picked watermelons from trees were legalized as farm workers, because the INS was prohibited from devoting too much attention to suspicious applications, lest the process bog down. This can become a national-security problem...
Priming the pump. Amnesties don’t solve the problem of illegal immigration—they exacerbate it. An INS report released about three years ago showed that after the 1986 amnesty, illegal immigration increased markedly as family and friends of the newly legalized aliens sneaked into the country...
We the People? Amnesty will create millions of new U.S.-Mexican dual citizens, who, as early as 2006, may be able to vote in both countries’ elections. This would represent the fulfillment of Mexico’s efforts to extend its authority over a large part of the American population—the most serious threat to our sovereignty since the Civil War...
To go back to the original question: What are they thinking?... The proximate reason is politics, with the quest for a larger share of the Hispanic vote clouding the judgment of otherwise sensible people. Though its importance is wildly exaggerated, the effort to win more Hispanic votes isn’t a bad idea; it’s just that this isn’t the way to do it... A Zogby poll conducted shortly before 9/11 found Hispanics evenly split on amnesty. In fact, twice as many Hispanics in the survey said support for amnesty would make them less likely to vote for the president as said it would make them more likely to support him. And when it came to congressional elections, support for amnesty would lose four Hispanic votes for each one gained...
So, again, how can smart people think there’s something to be gained from amnesty? The answer is that Beltway and Wall Street Republicans live in an elite echo chamber, where the received wisdom about immigration goes unchallenged by respectable people... The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page exemplifies this disconnect....
Republicans need to save the president from his advisers, lest amnesty become for him what illegal-alien driver’s licenses were for Gray Davis: the disaster he embraced because everyone he knew thought it was a good idea. Amnesty shouldn’t even be discussed until our immigration system has been fixed.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
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