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IMMIGRATION BILLS DON'T ADDRESS ROOT OF PROBLEM
By Georgie Anne Geyer
Tue Aug 9, 6:21 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- Innocent or well-meaning Americans could be led to believe the White House's predictions that the nation will undergo some genuine immigration reform once autumn raises its cooling head.

Three bills, named after their congressional sponsors (McCain-Kennedy, Kyl-Cornyn and Tancredo), are already being widely discussed and argued. The first and most liberal would give illegals in America temporary status and citizenship, if they wanted it, but with weak enforcement. The second would give illegals five years to leave and would create a new guest worker program, albeit with tougher enforcement. The third emphasizes tough enforcement and a guest worker program, but only if strict criteria are met.

Has the time finally come, particularly after the London bombings, for America to see the light and control its borders, and thus preserve its national heritage?

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. If the intent of these bills is to diminish illegal immigration, these proposals will be essentially useless. The illegal immigrants already here are having so many children on American soil, who automatically become citizens, that the numbers will only grow under any form of "guest worker" program.

As Steve Camarota, author of a provocative new study, "Births to Immigrants in America, 1970 to 2002," commented to me recently: "The idea of a 'temporary immigrant' is like being a 'single married man.' There's nothing as permanent as a 'temporary worker.'"

His study, published by the respected Center for Immigration Studies here, found that according to birth certificate records, in 2002 almost one in four births in the United States was to an immigrant mother, legal or illegal, which is "the highest level in American history." This "may overwhelm the assimilation process, making it difficult to integrate these new second-generation Americans." What's more, of those approximately 383,000 births, 42 percent were to illegal alien mothers, so that "births to illegals now account for nearly one out of every 10 births in the U.S."

"The large number of births to illegals shows that the longer illegal immigration is allowed to persist, the harder the problem is so solve," the study goes on. "Because as U.S. citizens these children can stay permanently, their citizenship can prevent a parent's deportation, and once adults they can sponsor their parents for permanent residence." Thus, any "temporary worker program is unrealistic because it would result in hundreds of thousands of permanent additions to the U.S. population each year, exactly what such a program is supposed to avoid."

At the very core of the immigration debate is, of course, the mysterious 14th Amendment, passed during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War to give additional protection to slaves. The amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States ..."

But in 2005, there are 34 million immigrants in America, at least 11 million of them here illegally, and their American-born children fall under that 14th Amendment.

What this means to America is important on so many levels. It is estimated that two-thirds of these births are to mothers without health insurance, thus creating an approximately $1.7 billion cost; the bonus of cheap labor to the growers and companies turns out to be one big bill to the American taxpayers. Illegal mothers are characterized by lack of education, thus creating a next generation of less-educated "Americans" (approximately half of Latino children already drop out of high school).

In the early 20th century, around 1910 in particular, when the first great wave of immigration was overwhelming the country (which led to early immigration control), the children of immigrants were essentially raised in America among natives. Today, they are far more likely to be raised among immigrants with the same cultural norms, values and identities, creating what are essentially foreign ghettoes among the largely Hispanic newcomers.

"It is not inconceivable that if illegal immigration is allowed to continue, there may come a time in the not-too-distant future when births to illegal immigrants will actually add more citizens to the United States each year than naturalizations of legal immigrants," Camarota's report states.

Nor is there any assurance that the second and third generations of these "14th Amendment citizens" will fit in to America. Indeed, political scientist Peter Skerry, who has written widely on this subject, finds that the first generation of immigrants, including illegals, is relatively content with their new situation, but that the higher expectations of the second and third generations often lead them to more radical confrontations with their new country. (The Chicano movement in the California universities, for instance, is almost entirely made up of dissatisfied third-generation Mexican-Americans.)

The answer, then? Analysts believe it should be to gradually downsize illegal immigration, "a strategy of attrition through enforcement." That is not so dramatic as all of these much-touted congressional policies, but it would probably slowly work. When the growers of the Southwest and the big corporations talk so coldly and self-interestedly about "getting workers," they might remember that they are bringing in human beings, with all their needs and longings, with all their hard work and artifices.

As Steve Camarota commented to me: "What the birth data do is to put into stark relief to us that these are not only economic factors." Or as one European writer on immigration noted recently: "We asked for workers and they sent us men."