Thread: My Turn: The immigration mess

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Friday, April 28, 2006

My Turn: The immigration mess

Published: Friday, April 28, 2006
By Jeff Young

Our country is going through yet again another great debate on immigration. For over 28 years I worked in immigration within the federal government in such places as Texas, Miami and Washington, DC. I also worked for many years as a national union vice president for legislative affairs. My first legislative work was with the original Simpson-Mazzoli Bill in the mid-80’s which granted nearly 3 million illegals amnesty. I would like to bring a few points forward so that people can understand the issue and the debate. Nothing being said in Washington today will give anyone a clue to the real issues. And it isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue, as both parties, either alone or in concert, have managed to make a mess of immigration and completely obscure its realities.

Our first priority must be to gain control. Currently, we have little control and what we have is arbitrary and sometimes even cruel. If we do not secure our borders then we must accept the fact that millions will come to this country each year whether we like it or not. But like all issues, illegal immigration is tied to other hot issues such as illegal drugs. A very large percentage of the illegal drugs that come into this country also come across the same porous border that the migrants come across; in addition, there are weapons, money, sex slaves, and kidnapped children to mention just a few. For the time it takes to read this article, hundreds of poor Mexican camposinos will have crossed the border into the United States. They eventually will come to the interior of the US, and find work. How hard do you think it is to smuggle terrorists, drugs, women, children, weapons or anything else you can think of across the border if poor illiterate farmers can cross with impunity? The southern border has 11,000 Border Patrolmen, less than 2,000 are on duty at any one time (the border is over 3,000 miles long). In comparison the New York City police department has 33,000 personnel. Whatever the method, we must take control of the border or all else will fail and fail miserably.

The information you hear daily is very misleading. You hear that requiring employers to screen applicants for jobs is impossible, that employers are not immigration officers and cannot tell a good document from a bad one. True enough. But every employee must present a Social Security number; every illegal alien has either a phony number or someone else’s number. Yet currently it is illegal for Social Security to give that information to the immigration authorities. Just like our borders, how committed are we to law enforcement and security? Many politicians have stated that employer sanctions is a failed policy, but they didn’t tell you that in a state like Florida only one investigator was working on employer sanctions in the entire state.

Further misleading information is about “amnesty”, that an amnesty will allow jobs to be filled that Americans don’t want. There is a reason why Americans don’t want these jobs. In the late 80’s we had an amnesty for nearly 3 million illegals. We made certain conditions that each migrant had to reach to become legal. I can tell you (and so can anyone else who worked in immigration then) that that program fostered the worst fraud. The migrants were desperate to become legal and did whatever had to be done to get legal. And guess what, once they were legal they left those jobs they had as illegals and pursued the American dream just like everyone else. The jobs they left were taken by the next illegal migrant and it never stops. That is because most of the large employers of illegals don’t want to pay competitive wages and health benefits and they don’t want employees that complain. A guest worker program will not work, because the jobs that are filled today by illegals will not be applied for by any employers who will be giving their employees the same rights as all the other legal workers in the US. We have engendered a permanent slave class of millions of people who have no rights and cannot claim the protection of the law. We have in effect created an apartheid that grows its ugly racism every minute.

In this go-round, if we require that an illegal alien have been here five years before applying for legal status, what proof will they present? Very, very few will be able to document when they entered the country, so the document mills will fire up and produce “evidence”; just because of the sheer numbers, the government will not be able to investigate the fraudulent documents (some of which are very convincing). So if we limit what kinds of documents that will be allow to be presented we will leave millions who were here five years ago out in the cold; or, we will accept phony documents and let in millions that weren’t here five years ago, an exact duplicate of what happened during the last amnesty.

How many immigrants do we want? Uncontrolled immigration has placed an enormous burden on the nation’s schools and health care system, not to mention law enforcement (in some states as many as 30 percent of their prisoners are aliens). If we are going to have migrants they must be legal or they become a distinct sub-class subject to the worst discrimination and abuse; that is certainly not worthy of the great free society that the US wants to be. Many studies have been done by very reputable groups on the impact of various types of immigration; this information can be used to determine who we want and where we want them. Our laws have at different times favored families, specific jobs or professions, lotteries, geographic origination and many other categories. The problem is that once we focus on a new category of immigrant all the others adjust accordingly and we are soon out of balance again. This country has never had a coherent, focused and reasoned immigration policy. An immigration judge once told me that the only fair immigration law is to keep them all out or let them all in, everything else is politics. We must make the tough decision: set a reasonable limit and stick to it.

Currently, almost all of our population growth is due to immigration and children of immigrants. This country feeds on growth, but there has to be limits. We should be saying, “How fast do we want to grow and by how much?” Many countries in Europe and Scandinavia have stopped growing and are adjusting their economies and their thinking accordingly. We recently saw illegal immigrants demonstrate in the streets of US cities, evidence of the growing unrest of this underclass as we recently saw in France and Germany.

We do the illegal immigrant no favors by “allowing” them in, for every one that comes there are 10 more waiting to come. We have always looked at other countries in this hemisphere as, “What is in the best interest of the US?” The answer has always been to increase our control over that country. This has lead to some of the worst human rights abuses in the world. Saddam Hussein couldn’t hold a candle to some of the genocide that has happened in Central and South America in the last 50 years. Our own best interests should be served by seeing our neighbors prosper. By cutting off Mexico from illegal immigration and the drug trade, Mexico would have a revolution, one that would benefit the vast majority of their people and not just a few. Hugh Chavez is a case in point. The US tried to control every aspect of Venezuela down to payoffs to generals and politicians. Now the people want their country back and they rightfully despise the US for what was done to their country. To say nothing good or bad about Hugo Chavez, the rest of Central and South America is following suit and soon it will not be safe for Americans to venture there either as tourist or businessman.

Finally, the federal government has to take complete control of the immigration issue. This is not an issue that each state should be tackling individually. Whoever heard of a vigilante group advocating to enforce the law?

The government should be responsible for the cost and care of every new immigrant that enters the US. The burden on schools and hospitals is causing many institutions to break down and fail, creating yet more disenfranchisement. If the cost is calculated, then we know exactly the impact; how much are we willing to pay? How much are we willing to “share” with our fellow human beings? It is easy to stand on the sidelines, especially here in Vermont, and take sides, but when it comes time to pay the bill, it is a day of reckoning. If we want security and fair immigration laws, we must make laws that will be respected.


JEFF YOUNG LIVES IN ST. ALBANS.

I think Jeff is right, but I think its much deeper than that.

The lack of control on the border is only a by-product of the slimy deals made for the good of the global economy, and the urging by the U.N. to merge and form The United States of North America.

Its also a by-product of needing to consolidate against China. They (China) are making a move on the world's oil supply. China was poor and third world before they took all the jobs from the developed countries and shipped them to both China and India supposedly to distribute the wealth evenly. Now those countries are so rich that they don't care what anybody says.

This cancer has spread throughout the globe. While we were minding our own collective business, our country was imploding. I have been literally crying about this. How is this happening? Who do you trust? I just keep calling and writing my Senators and Congressmen.

What I want to know for the short term is how are the Mexicans going to claim they shut down the economy when they have now renamed it from A Day Without Immigrants to the National Boycott Day. Monday will not prove how vital Immigrants are to the economy, it will prove how vital everyone is to the economy. Let's not let them take credit for anything.