By Jack Martin

I read with interest the commentary by Thomas Roach in The Sunday Oregonian on July 18, "Myths muddle the immigration morass." I wonder if most readers caught Roach's statement that he regularly represents Mexican farmworkers. That implies that many of his clients are illegal immigrants. That may color his view of the issues he writes about.


Share Are Americans unwilling to do menial jobs? The majority of workers in the jobs Roach refers to – janitors, chambermaids, dishwashers, etc., are Americans. Farmworkers are probably the exception, but wages have become so depressed in farm work because of the presence of so many illegal workers that not even illegal immigrants want those jobs any more. That needs to be changed. A good start would be to enforce the law and require farm employers who cannot find American workers to use the legal agricultural guest-worker visa program, which has no limit.

Do illegal immigrants pay taxes like you and me? Not the estimated half of illegal workers being paid in cash in the underground economy. As for the other half, the average earnings of those workers is so low they have no income tax liability. So the taxes they pay are ones they can't avoid like sales and rental and gas taxes. Those using fake or stolen identities do have Social Security and workman's comp taxes withheld. And it's true they will not be eligible for Social Security retirement unless Congress adopts an amnesty program and makes them legal workers.

It's true that illegal immigrants do not receive welfare, unless you count the welfare they receive for their U.S.-born children, or the unpaid medical outlays for their emergency care or the free meals their children receive in the schools. That of course would change if an amnesty were adopted.

Is the fix to the illegal immigrant problem adoption of an amnesty? While that would give low-skilled foreign workers a better chance to compete against low-skilled American workers, it would not stop the illegal immigration problem, any more than the last general amnesty did in 1986. That only made the situation worse. Unless we are prepared to throw the door open to the hundreds of millions around the world who would like to work here, we will have to combat illegal immigration.

Roach is correct that one of the reforms we need is to make employers responsible for not hiring illegal workers, and that means requiring them to verify the work documents they are required to ask for. There is general bipartisan support in Congress for that reform, but unfortunately the administration and congressional leadership won't allow a vote on the issue unless it's part of a "comprehensive reform," by which they mean including an amnesty, which Roach refers to as "earned legalization."

Is crime an issue? While it's true that immigrants in general commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, part of the reason is that legal immigrants are screened to deny entry to those who have committed crimes. Another factor is that those who commit crimes are deported and are less likely to be around to commit another crime. Unfortunately, that is not always the case with illegal immigrants who too often manage to sneak back into the country.

Are illegal immigrants a health care burden? It's true that the generally younger and healthier illegal immigration population needs less routine medical attention than native-born Americans. It's also true that they are much less likely to have health insurance. As a result they are much more likely to be indigent cases when they have an injury or in the case of pregnancy. Those expenses are substantial and in the case of pregnancy they are picked up under the Medicaid program.

Removing illegal immigrants cannot be done overnight. Homeland Security authorities say about 400,000 people is currently the most they can handle in a year. But that doesn't mean that illegal immigrants will not leave on their own if they can't find work. That's happening to some extent today in Arizona and elsewhere because of the economy and because of increased enforcement. The U.S.-born child issue is a red herring. These children are dual nationals and generally will accompany their parents whether they leave voluntarily or involuntarily.

Fencing on the border is important, but it's not a solution by itself. But fencing is needed to stop smuggling as well as illegal immigration. Fencing has two purposes: It demonstrates that we really don't want illegal immigration, and it acts as a true deterrent to those who are not totally committed to illegal entry. It will be a still greater deterrent when we effectively deny jobs to illegal immigrants because Border Patrol resources will become more effective against a reduced flow.

Would "earned legalization" be different from the 1986 amnesty? The idea that it would be different because a penalty would have to be paid is a ruse. In 1986 the amnesty recipients had to pay a fee, but then it was recognized as the cost of administering the program rather than calling it a penalty. Would back taxes have to be paid? Roach earlier said these workers already paid taxes. Which is it? Perhaps this is recognition of the fact that these workers do not have a tax liability because of their low incomes. But if they could legally file a tax return, would that mean they could then claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a payout from the U.S. Treasury to low-income families?

A majority of Americans say they prefer enforcement of our immigration law rather than adoption of an amnesty. That's why the advocates of an amnesty insist on calling it something different. And the public opinion polls they commission get some majority support when they ask whether the public thinks that "undocumented workers" should pay back taxes and get right with the law and go to the end of the line. The poll questions do not say that the line they would go to the back of is in the United States and they would get the jobs they took illegally while legal immigration applicants are waiting outside the United States.

Is denying driver's licenses to illegal immigrants smart? The driver's license is our de facto national ID – other than the U.S. passport. Giving it to illegal immigrants facilitates their effort to take a job and lead a trouble-free life in our country. The possibility exists in federal law (the REAL-ID Act) for states to issue a non-identification license. But even that is a bad idea because it accommodates the presence of illegal immigrants when our objective should be to discourage their presence so they return home. The employers of legal guest-workers, by the way, are by law required to provide transportation to the job site and to food supplies. That's one of the reasons agricultural employers cut costs by hiring illegal immigrants.

Verification of work documents is the key. The issue debated in Congress is how to phase it in. Some have proposed to stay with the current verification system that requires only the documents of new employees to be checked, but make it mandatory instead of voluntary. That would mean that established workers would only be denied new jobs when they lost one or their employer went out of business. That would be a very gradual attrition of the illegal immigration population. Others have proposed a sliding scale over time starting with verification of all employees first by the biggest employers and gradually working down to small employers. Still others have proposed a two-step approach with verification of the work documents of older employers deferred for a period. A final idea is to allow each employer to decide when to complete the verification for all employees within a 10-year period. None of these approaches would be an immediate major disruption of the illegal immigration workforce.

Likening Arizona's immigration law to the Japanese internment camps is only slightly less absurd than likening it to the Nazi pogrom. Congress has explicitly invited states and local jurisdictions to cooperate with the federal immigration authorities and that is what Arizona has done. In the interest of full disclosure, the organization I work for participated in the drafting of the Arizona law.

"Racist" is a term being thrown around by illegal immigrant defenders against anyone opposing their efforts to push through an amnesty. It's designed to scare people from openly opposing those efforts and to try to discredit those who nevertheless persist in working to deter illegal immigration rather than accommodate it.

Jack Martin is special projects director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index ... at_th.html Published: Friday, July 23, 2010, 8:00 AM