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Immigration crackdown finally gains momentum

October 4, 2005

BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN


Almost every day brings a new and alarming story about immigration. Last week, the Pew Hispanic Center produced a report showing that for the first time in American history illegal immigrants coming to the United States outnumbered those arriving legally. Some 562,000 illegal immigrants entered America in 2004 compared with 455,000 legal ones.

That statistic comes on top of an official estimate of 11 million illegals already here. Some observers believe the real figures are almost double that. This influx of largely unskilled and low-paid immigrants, both legal and illegal, has aggravated almost every social problem in the nation.

It accounts for the rise in U.S. poverty figures; it explains the stagnation in wages at a time of sustained economic growth; it contributes to growing economic inequality; it causes the closure of hospital emergency rooms; it requires massively increased spending on schools, language teaching and remedial programs; it has the environmental impact of a new medium-size city every year; etc., etc., etc.

This problem has grown to such intimidating proportions because elites in government, corporations, the media, churches and cultural institutions have quietly connived at the erosion of America's borders and the breaking of America's laws. They have resisted the strong and consistent demands of at least two-thirds of the voters for reducing immigration. They have argued with world-weary condescension that only "demagogues" and "nativists" fail to realize that immigration benefits Americans substantially.

In fact it is the sophisticated elites who have got it spectacularly wrong and ordinary Americans who have grasped reality. Academic research demonstrates that the maximum economic benefit of immigration to native-born Americans is $10 billion in an multitrillion dollar economy -- for the understandable reason that most of its benefits go to the immigrants themselves. This trivial gain is massively outweighed by the fiscal costs that low-paid immigrants impose on the government in welfare and other costs.

If the elites' argument is false, what explains their position? Well, the GOP and Big Business get cheap labor, the Democrats get cheap votes, the unions and the ethnic lobbies get cheap recruits, and the churches, the media and cultural bodies get cheap displays of compassion -- cries of "no room at the inn" that ignore the lower wages and decreased job opportunities for poor and minority Americans. The political parties pay more attention to their donors than to their voters -- and jointly seek to avoid discussing immigration in front of the latter.

This conspiracy of silence, however, is breaking down. President Bush inadvertently radicalized voters last year when he proposed both a new immigration regime that would give amnesty to existing illegals and a new guest worker program that would legalize future ones. Arizona residents fed up with their land being used as a thru-way camped out on the border to warn the feds of illegal crossings. And leading Democrats such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, sensing Republican vulnerability on the issue, began to make noises about border security and protecting the rights of American workers. The heat was on.

Today no fewer than five major immigration bills are before Congress. But those forces promoting an "open borders" immigration policy, from the White House to Wall Street via the AFL-CIO, have not abandoned their aims. They have re-packaged them as "bringing immigration under better control" or something similar.

At least one of the bills -- the McCain-Kennedy bill in the Senate --is something new in politics: a transparent Trojan horse. It opens the border even wider than the Bush plan. It would ask illegal immigrants already here to pay $2,000 in order to become eligible for a "green card" and U.S. citizenship down the road. And it has a generous "guest-worker" plan that also leads to residency and citizenship in short order.

If you allow almost everyone in, you don't need serious enforcement provisions to keep them out. Quite consistently, the McCain-Kennedy bill has no such serious provisions.

The Kyl-Cornyn bill, also in the Senate, is a well-intentioned attempt to restore law, order and honesty to immigration policy. It requires illegals to return home in order to be legalized and it grants those in its new guest worker program no automatic right to residency and citizenship. Unfortunately, as Mark Krikorian has pointed out in National Review magazine, it would pile enormous new burdens on an already overburdened immigration control bureaucracy -- and for that reason it would quickly become unenforceable.

That leaves three realistic and worthwhile bills -- that proposed by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and two from Republican members in the House, Rep. Tom Tancredo and Rep. J.D. Hayworth. All three bills stress improving border security, streamlining deportation and cracking down on illegal employment rather than new measures to increase immigration levels. All three avoid amnesties. And though Tancredo's bill does include a temporary guest worker program, it comes into effect only when the feds demonstrate they have met clear benchmarks in enforcing the law on border security and other measures.

Already the effort is on to brand these bills as unrealistic and their sponsors as "nativists" and "demagogues." The people who told you that illegal immigration would be no problem now tell you it is a massive problem without a solution. We simply have to live with it since the U.S. economy would allegedly collapse without illegal immigrant labor.

That warning is as false as their previous reassurances. If illegal immigrants could not get jobs because employers did not want to risk prison by hiring them, they would stop crossing a dangerous border. Those here would were gradually return home as illegal employment opportunities dried up. Some U.S. companies would then raise wages to attract American workers now undercut by illegals. Others would install labor-saving machinery. Any gaps that remained could be filled by legal immigrants in numbers determined by our economic needs rather than at rates determined by their availability. This is the "attrition strategy" and it needs no "Gestapo tactics" to enforce it.