Thread: Attrition through enforcement will work

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib ... rikor.html

Attrition through enforcement will work

By Mark Krikorian
April 2, 2006

The Senate is debating a bill to legalize the 12 million illegal aliens in the United States. The measure, originally crafted by Sens. John McCain and Edward Kennedy and modified along the way, would first re-label the illegals as guest workers, and then allow them to stay permanently if they met certain conditions. In addition, it would double legal immigration (by adding as many as 1 million new green cards each year), establish a new “temporary” worker program to import at least 400,000 more people yearly, and provide for some limited improvements in enforcement.

If, as is likely, the Senate eventually approves some version of this bill, it would be the counterpart to the bill passed by the House of Representatives in December, which focused on enforcement. That bill establishes a short timetable for all businesses to verify their new hires' Social Security numbers, enhances cooperation between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement, and calls for expansion of fencing to cover about a third of the border with Mexico.

As with any legislation, the two house of Congress would then try to reconcile their respective bills, in order to come up with a compromise measure to send to the president's desk.

This will be difficult, though, because the differences between the bills are not minor details but rather reflect fundamentally different answers to the question of what to do about the 12 million illegal immigrants who are here.

The Senate approach is based on the false choice between mass roundups of illegals and amnesty. In other words, since we can't deport 12 million people all at once, there's only one alternative – legalization.

In contrast, the House approach rejects both amnesty and legalization and posits a third way, one that might be called “attrition through enforcement” – consistent, comprehensive enforcement of the immigration law (something we have never attempted) designed to reduce the number of new illegal arrivals and persuade a large share of illegals already here to give up and deport themselves. The goal would be a steady decline in the total illegal population, rather than the constant annual increases. Only then would there be a debate on whether some portion of the remaining illegals should be legalized.

This attrition approach is the only workable alternative in any case. Mass deportation is obviously unrealistic: If the 7 million illegal immigrants in the work force (the rest do not work) disappeared overnight, there would be significant disruptions. It's not that the economy ever “needed” these workers, but rather that the economy has accommodated itself to their presence and going cold turkey would be painful. In addition, as the mass illegal alien marches over the past few weeks have shown, mass roundups would likely require the use of military force.

Of course, the effects of the mass-roundup option are irrelevant since the federal government simply doesn't have the capacity to deport so many millions of people over a short period of time. Last year, we deported only about 41,000 aliens from inside the United States (as opposed to those caught at the Mexican border and dumped back across), and that's down from the previous year. Even a tripling or quadrupling of deportations, necessary as that is, can't be the whole solution.

But the Senate's legalization approach is just as impractical. Whether it's done honestly, as in the amnesty passed in 1986, or disguised as a guest-worker program, as in the Senate proposal, a large legalization program is guaranteed to fail. Let us put aside other questions, such as the immorality of rewarding lawbreakers while the law-abiding remain tangled in red tape, and look only at the practical questions: Who would run the program and enforce its requirements? The Department of Homeland Security is choking on immigration, with a backlog of some 4 million applications – it is absurd to suggest that millions of additional applicants could be successfully screened and vetted and tracked by a broken agency that is incapable of meeting even its current responsibilities.

We've tried unrealistic mandates like this before and the results were disastrous. The closest parallel is the 1986 legalization program; about 3 million illegal aliens applied for amnesty, and 90 percent were approved. Hundreds of thousands of successful applications were fraudulent, many presenting fake proof of employment – sometimes as flimsy as a handwritten note on a scrap of paper – and offering ludicrous stories such as, “I've picked watermelons from trees.” One beneficiary of such fraud was Egyptian cab driver Mahmud Abouhalima, who was able to travel to Afghanistan for terrorist training only because of the legal status conferred on him by the amnesty; he then used that training to help lead the first World Trade Center bombing.

Support for either mass expulsion or a guest-worker amnesty is based on a kind of magical thinking, a utopianism that imagines we will be able to resolve this long-brewing policy problem with a single masterstroke.

In contrast, attrition through enforcement requires no magic wand – just consistent, comprehensive application of the immigration law with the tools available, enabling us to back out of a problem that took many years to develop. Such a strategy would have two parts: conventional enforcement at the border and the interior to apprehend and remove illegals (such as the House bill's expanded fencing and federal cooperation with local law enforcement), and what might be called a “firewall” policy, which seeks to prevent illegals from being able to embed themselves in our society. That would involve denying them access to jobs (which is what the House bill's employer verification requirement is about), identification, housing, and in general making it as difficult as possible for an illegal immigrant to live a normal life here, so as to persuade a large number of them to give up and self-deport.

The reason this can work is that there's a lot of churn in the illegal population. According to a 2003 report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, about 400,000 people are subtracted from the illegal population each year, through deportation, voluntary return, etc. The problem is that the inflow of new illegal aliens swamps this outflow, resulting in an annual increase of the pool of illegals of some half a million each year.

The goal of an attrition strategy would be to decrease the number of new arrivals and increase the number of people here who leave. And there are plenty of relatively recent arrivals among the illegal population who can be induced to leave; a Pew Hispanic Center report recently found that 40 percent of the illegal population has been here less than five years, and fully two-thirds less than 10 years.

And it actually works. To pick just one example, after 9/11, immigration authorities began to enforce some immigration laws against Middle Eastern illegal aliens (and only Middle Eastern illegals). As a consequence, the largest such group, Pakistanis, deported themselves in droves, with a majority of their number leaving the country of their own accord.

Our country faces a choice – the Senate's magical promise of legalization or the House's real-world goal of attrition. Our decision will echo for years into the future.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit research organization in Washington. It is online at www.cis.org

added to the homepage

http://www.alipac.us/article-1142-thread-1-0.html

These are the kinds of messages and concepts that every ALIPAC Activist should know like the back of their hand.

W

The argument that the problem is "too big" to solve has always been a load of crap peddled by political prostitute filth who want as much cheap illegal labor they can get to satifsy their cheapskate lawbreaking scumbag employer contributors, for as we know very well if 11 million or 111 million people defaulted on their federal income taxes, this governnent wouldn't have any problem whatsoever in gathering enough resources, law enforcement personnel, or tear gas, batons, and bullets to compel tax resisters to surrender their lives and their property or be imprisoned or shot to death.

The nonsensical garbage that the federal government cannot move against a massive lawbreaking population is a pathetic, stupid lie. They sure had no problem exterminating innocent native Americans in order to acquire land and territory. Now the US allows an illegal population of foreign third world parasite trash to dictate the terms of our own immigration policy? Madness and suicidal weakness made lethal through greed, stupidity, and cowardice. However, many if not most of the political leaders themselves would be caught up in the net as they are prominent enablers of lawbreaking including the President himself.

We are somehow expected to believe that we as a nation can wage a global war to fight terrorism and transform violent, backward foreign cultures and reform world civilizations with our political and military resources but cannot manage to secure our own damned borders from illegal and unlawful encroachment. Utterly presposterous. Of course we can do this. We defeated Hitler's Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, and put a man on the Moon more than once. This isn't even a legitimate question. The only thing lacking is the will to do it, NOT by the hard working law abiding taxpaying American people who want it badly in poll after poll after poll across the political spectrum, but by the degenerate and greedy cowards in Washington entrusted with the authority and positions of power to do so!

The President's disgusting and treasonous enabling of this madness and anarchy should and would be rewarded with impeachment, imprisonment, prosecution and removal if our government worked as it was designed to and the damned laws we all have to abide by were enforced. I pray the President and every one of the filthy, stinking traitors that infest and infect our government burn in Hell. The biggest threats to America aren't from without, they are from within.

I really like the, "attrition through enforcement," term! It sums it up really well. I also like the reference to the, "firewall," concept of making it difficult for illegalS to live here.

I heard a gentleman on a talk radio show a few days ago who said he had lived in Holland and Germany and he said it is virtually impossible to live in either of those countries as an illegal alien. You can't get a job, rent a place to live, get utilities installed, or a whole slew of other things without being able to prove you are there legally.

In addition, I've heard and read that Mexico's immigration laws are MUCH stricter than our own. I also heard that France is strengthening its immigration policies so that potential immigrants have to learn the French language, learn French culture, history and laws before they can even be considered to become a citizen. I also heard the French are severely limiting who a current resident can sponsor - so it's not so easy for an individual to bring in his or her whole extended family.

If Holland, Germany, France and Mexico can have stricter laws than we have (and enforce them!) that restrict who comes into their country, and require those that are allowed in to do it legally, WHY CAN'T WE!?!

This has been my philosophy all along. The supporters of illegal immigration are always using the false statement, "you can't deport 12 million people". Securing the borders, then consistent, tough enforcement of our laws will gradually reduce the number of illegals to a manageable level. I think this needs to be our message to Congress, secure our borders and enforce our laws.

I saw Congressman JD Hayworth expressing these ideas on Meet the Press on NBC over the weekend!