Thread: Start with this basic: Don't reward lawbreakers

The 14 th. Amendment was passed for African Americans concerning the Civil War not illegal criminal invaders from across the border. Anchor babies need to be deported with their illegal criminal parents! Illegal is Illegal is Illegal.


http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs. ... 35/opinion

Start with this basic: Don't reward lawbreakers
By PAUL DONNELLY
SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER

January 6, 2007
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The muddle-headed opponents of immigration laws that make sense have decided to miss the point once again. As the Bush administration has begun to enforce the law, causing thousands of foreigners who have been working illegally to choose to leave the country rather than sit in jail, activists have begun to complain about the children of these foreigners, many of them born here and thus are U.S. citizens. Estimates range as high as 2 million.

Don't get me wrong: When I worked for the late Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, she once told me that she would "shed blood" before allowing the 14th Amendment to be altered to deny U.S. citizenship to any child born here. So would I.

But the only reason there are millions of U.S.-citizen children born to foreigners living in the United States illegally is that there are perhaps 8 million such illegal workers.

The American "debate" about immigration has an aversion to clarity. But the issues aren't that complex: Illegal foreigners are people we do NOT want in America. That's why they are illegal.

Legal immigrants are people we DO want - that's why they're legal.

How do you tell the difference?

It's not whether some guy from Jalisco is willing to work for the wages offered in a Sioux City slaughterhouse. That is simply a subsidy provided to a particular industry. Even worse, it is a subsidy against citizenship - because the price to America for the drop in wages in meatpacking from nearly $20 an hour in 1980 to less than $10 an hour today is millions of workers who are cut off from American citizenship. The price is also the 2 million U.S. citizen kids, whose parents can - and this is the point, should - be thrown out of the country. They're breaking the law.

They're also making a mockery out of the millions of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who have requested legal entry for their brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives and found that Congress requires them to wait five, 10 or 15 years or more. The 1986 amnesty created a backlog for the spouses and kids of legal permanent residents that last year reached a minimum of seven years.

So perhaps this would be a good rule for comprehensive immigration reform in the new Congress: No one illegally in the United States should get "earned legalization" while anyone who has obeyed the law is still waiting to be united with his or her husband or wife.

Instead of a ridiculously complicated immigration-reform scheme like last year's Senate bill, with special rules for those illegally present for less than two years or more than five, let's base our immigration laws on our values.

We could create a point system that combines family and employment and all the other characteristics that make up what we want in new Americans: so many points for a U.S. citizen who invites you, a few less for a sponsor with a green card. So many points for each year you work on one of the Bush-supported guest-worker visas. Work here long enough "temporarily," accumulating those characteristics - and you get a green card.

But there must be this essential element: Break the law, and you lose all your points. Rewarding those who break the law while penalizing those who obey it is not the way to defend American citizenship.

In the end, what is good in immigration policy is good for citizenship, and what is bad for immigration policy is bad for citizenship. It is bad for citizenship that large parts of our economy are dependent on workers who are - by their own act - alienated from the way immigration has always renewed and revived America. It is bad for citizenship that as many as 2 million citizen kids have parents who are illegal foreigners.

Let's not make the problem worse.

PAUL DONNELLY of Hyattsville, Md., was communications director of the bipartisan, congressionally mandated U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform from 1994 to 1998.

great article and so very true.