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Opinion
SENATE BILL WOULD PERPETUATE IMMIGRATION DISASTERS OF THE PAST By Georgie Anne Geyer
Thu May 18, 8:05 PM ET



WASHINGTON -- For those few of us who have championed rational immigration control policies over the last 30 years, there have been constant and insensate challenges to what seemed the most central of nation-state business: controlling the borders and carefully choosing new immigrant populations.

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Thirty years ago, when I started writing in this column about border control, self-righteous professional Third World-sympathizers such as Sen. Teddy Kennedy had already arrogantly pushed through the 1965 immigration reform act, which switched traditional immigrant preferences from the ethnic groups already in America to the impoverished and uneducated Third World, especially Mexico.

Most of us shook with fury when, in 1986, Congress, with total ignorance about human nature and systems, passed what was to be the "last amnesty bill." It legalized nearly 3 million illegal immigrants already here. We were most angry that legislators could not guess that their acts would lead to where we are today, with 12 million thusly encouraged "new" illegals demonstrating in America for their "rights."

But now, you may think, it is finally going to be solved. In President Bush's speech, he seemed to come across as bearer of a moderate solution to this deadly serious problem. But in fact, he didn't.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who has studied Congress for 25 years, has just published a shocking article. As he said this week, if the immigration bill before Congress goes through, "It would end the U.S. as we currently know it."

Should you think that's extreme, listen to his findings (which are exceeded by a separate analysis by the office of Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (news, bio, voting record)):

If the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (S.2611) does go through, it will not only grant amnesty to some 10 million illegals already here, but it would permit entry over 20 years to a maximum of nearly 200 million additional legal immigrants. That's over 180 million more than current law permits.

From his meticulous rundown of people who would be allowed to immigrate -- those under the current visa program and the amnesty, expanded family chain migration, employment-based green cards, a guest worker program, spouses and children of guest workers and illegal immigrants given amnesty, and parents of naturalized citizens -- Rector carefully arrives at a conservative tally of at least 103 million new immigrants who will be added to the nation's current population of 298 million.

"Within 20 years, some 103 million new immigrants would enter the U.S.," Rector writes in his stunning report, "Senate Immigration Bill Would Allow 100 Million New Legal Immigrants Over the Next Twenty Years" (www.heritage.org). "This number is about one-third of the U.S. population ... (The bill) would transform the United States socially, economically and politically. In its overall impact, it would rival other historic milestones such as the creation of Social Security or Medicare. Within two decades, the character of the nation would differ dramatically from what exists today."

Even worse, citizenship would become an "entitlement," Sen. Sessions says. "The decision as to who may come will almost totally be controlled by the desire of the individuals who wish to immigrate ... rather than by the United States government." Both estimate that the eventual cost of this American giveaway would be about $50 billion a year, particularly since it favors poor, uneducated and unskilled workers.

And in the last few weeks, respected economists have come forward, all making the same argument: With these wanton attitudes toward immigration, far from bringing in those ever-so-needed workers, the country is massively importing poverty, the great majority of it from socially static Mexico, where the rich get richer and more of the desperate poor head for "El Norte" every day.

If this is, indeed, what takes place, the America of the future will be unrecognizable to Americans of our largely Central European traditions. Mexicans will form their own blocs, politically run by advocacy groups that pretend to represent them; the far leftist trend in Latin America will insinuate itself here, buoyed by the innate historical anti-Americanism of most Mexicans; the U.S. will become thoroughly bilingual, with all the separatist disasters that bilingualism always brings with it; American education and health care will decline; a Mexican government could easily use this unassimilated population of dual citizens to cause chaos in the U.S.; and today's Americans will find themselves strangers in their own land, as the environment, the national parks, the urban centers, the air and the water will be overcome by this huge and unassimilated population.

Is this what Americans really want? Is this all our hapless American Congress can figure out to do when it's supposedly in charge? (Just wait 20 years until it isn't in charge.) Are they simply not capable of doing the obvious: halting immigration for a grace period until the border is controlled and we can make wiser decisions?

"Obviously, our leaders no longer believe in the nation-state," Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told me. "This would simply change the whole concept of what being an American is."