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How important is enforcement in immigration debate?


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Chris Graham

chris@augustafreepress.com

They're called vigilantes; they're called racists; they're called xenophobes.

They see themselves as otherwise average citizens who simply want to see Congress and the White House get serious about enforcing the laws on the books regarding immigration.

"The word illegal is the crux of the whole thing," said Jim Patrick, a member of the Shenandoah County Board of Supervisors who has written extensively on the immigration issue on his Web site, www.jimpatrick.us.

"If it wasn't illegal, I think I and thousands of other people across the country - whether they're policymakers or policemen or average citizens - would feel more comfortable about what's going on and that we could possibly get a good handle on it. But it all goes back to the word illegal - that people from Mexico and Central and South America can just stream across the border, and there's a general feeling that, well, that's just the way it goes, nothing can be done," Patrick told The Augusta Free Press.

Others who are pushing for the feds to get tough on immigration enforcement interviewed for this story expressed similar sentiments.

"The biggest issue right now is securing the borders. And that's a multistage process. You secure the borders at the physical border, and then you also need to secure the borders from the perspective of people coming in on visas that are overstaying their visa on purpose so they don't have to go home. With the people that are already here illegally, you need to enforce the current laws so that it forces them to leave," said George Taplin, the state leader of the Virginia Minutemen, which is affiliated with the national Minuteman Civil Defense Corps group that was founded to organize and carry out civilian patrols of the Southwest border with Mexico.

"In essence, what we're saying is, no kind of immigration reform or immigration policy can be set up until you can actually enforce what you set up. You can talk about anything in the world - you can talk about what they call amnesty, you can talk about increasing numbers, you can talk about decreasing numbers, you can talk about it all you want, but you cannot enforce any of it until you have secure borders. And we do not have secure borders," Taplin told the AFP.

"The first thing that we need to do is enforce our laws," said John Vinson of the Monterey-based Americans for Immigration Control.

"Before we can talk about guest-worker programs and the rest of it, we have to make sure that we can enforce our laws. We have to make sure that the system works - and then we can look into guest-worker programs and some of the other things that are being talked about," Vinson said.

"The most important thing that we need to consider is that we are a nation of laws. That is the backbone of our nation. It's hard to maintain that, though, when we permit people who have no respect for the rule of law to act according to their individual whims," Vinson told the AFP.

"Somehow deportation has a very negative connotation in the United States. We associate that with police states. It seems so un-American to do that. Of course, I'm also one of these people who thinks it's un-American to allow people to break the law with impunity. That's what disturbs me," said Ed Rubenstein, who conducted an analysis of the costs and benefits of a mass-deportation program for the McLean-based National Policy Institute.

"We have lost sight of the fact that both the workers and their employers have flaunted the law for years. That, to me, is un-American. And the fact that we've turned a blind eye to that kind of activity is very dangerous. That upsets me much more than the thought of deportation - which in my mind would simply be a means of reasserting our sovereignty as a country. Every country has a right to enforce its laws - but we have apparently relinquished that right for what we perceive to be economic gains," Rubenstein told the AFP.

"The most important thing is, number one, enforcing the laws. We can't have any kind of meaningful reform unless we get our borders under control, unless we get control of our policy," said Ira Mehlman of the Washington, D.C.,-based Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"What the Senate has voted for, and what President Bush is pushing, is exactly what happened 20 years ago - where on the one hand they promised all sorts of benefits to the people who broke the law and promised on the other hand stricter enforcement to the rest of us," Mehlman said.

"What happened was the amnesty came through, millions of people got legalized, but the enforcement never happened. If they were to do what the president and Senate want to do, it's going to be a repeat of 1986 - only on a much larger scale," Mehlman told the AFP.

But is it as basic as they make it sound - is it just respect for the rule of law that is driving this debate? Doug Rivlin of the Washington, D.C.,-based National Immigration Forum isn't so sure that is the case.

"You often hear people bring up the question - what part of illegal don't you understand? Well, the simple response is - what part of solution don't you understand?" Rivlin told the AFP.

"The larger issue is - is this is an issue with good laws with bad people trying to flaunt them? Or is it a situation of good people being caught up in bad laws? I fundamentally think it's the second - that you've got a mismatch between the supply of legal immigration and the demand for legal immigration by our economy, by immigrant families that want to be reunited, and by individual immigrants who would like to seek their American dream. And so we've been trying to suppress immigration ineffectively - rather than regulating it intelligently," Rivlin said.

"It's the law of supply and demand and an economy that is growing, a workforce that is aging and increasingly educated and increasingly interested in working indoors and having their kids go to college. These kinds of pressures over time have led to a country that is attracting immigrants and putting immigrants to work - but we just haven't figured out a way to work aboveboard within the law and on our terms. That's what this debate is about," Rivlin said.

Tim Freilich, managing attorney of the Charlottesville-based Virginia Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers, sees the debate as being framed in much the same way.

"The question is - how do you deal with the estimated 11 million undocumented folks who are here?" Freilich told the AFP.

"I think everybody agrees that the immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed. Certainly, reforming the immigration laws won't accomplish much unless you also secure the border," Freilich said.

"I think the difference between the House and Senate approaches right now is the House is strictly focused on border enforcement and interior enforcement without really presenting a workable plan for making sure that the millions of workers that are essential to the U.S. economy are able to continue working here. The Senate seems to recognize that it's a lot more complicated than rounding everybody up and shipping them back. That's not going to happen, and neither is people deciding to leave on their own," Freilich said.

That there are those in the reform movement who make that case - that immigrants will decide to leave on their own in the face of beefed-up enforcement - is an indication to Katy Pitcock, the founder of the Harrisonburg Area Hispanic Services Council, that the movement lacks a fundamental grounding in "who the immigrants that they're talking about are, what they're doing here, why they're here, the contributions they're making."

"Their argument is a simplistic attitude about how there's a kind of person who would choose to break any law - regardless of what the law is or how important it is or how reasonable it is," Pitcock told the AFP.

"It's like choosing to break a law puts you into the same character category, as far as they're concerned, as murderers and child molesters. Working at McDonald's without permission puts you in the same category as those other people," Pitcock said.

In a word, yes, that is what reformers see with respect to the issue of the respect for the rule of law.

"The concern that I'm hearing from most people in the Valley who are passionate about this is that the law is not being adhered to," said Steven Sisson, a columnist and regular contributor to the AFP who has written on the immigration issue from the lens of the Shenandoah Valley immigration situation.

"Groups are more than willing to help anyone that needs help - but the law needs to be adhered to. A lot of times, the left will come out and say, Well, you profess to be so religious, but you're not helping the poor and the destitute. That's not what I'm getting out of it. What I'm getting out of it is that there's a helping hand there for anyone who needs it - but the law must be adhered to because we're a nation of laws," Sisson said.

"I feel frustrated," Patrick said on the issue. "If there's a group of illegal immigrants somewhere not necessarily causing harm, but are taking jobs from people in my community or something like that, I don't know what to do. The federal government will not send those people away or take any sanctions against them. It's incredibly frustrating.

"The main problem is just this flaunting of the law," Patrick said.



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Read more on the immigration debate in The Digest.



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Mass deportation of those found to be here illegally
Adoption of immigration policies that reflect the new economic reality in the U.S.
A mix of amnesty and expanded guest-worker programs with stricter enforcement

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