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Politics and Immigration Create an Unholy Alliance!



By Michael Cutler



The politicians who have no knowledge about law enforcement or bureaucratic processes make judgment calls without having the knowledge that they need to make proper decisions. There are assertions being made about immigration that may sound good, but the reality does not match the rhetoric.



The Washington Times reported on Friday, Feb. 2:



Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, the Republican National Committee's new general chairman, wants Congress to pass an immigration bill this year that will include a guest-worker program with "earned citizenship" requirements for illegal aliens.



"earned" defined by WordNet - gained or acquired; especially through merit or as a result of effort or action; "a well-earned reputation for honesty"; "earned income"; "an earned run in baseball"




It is interesting that the dictionary definition of the word "earned" notes something acquired by merit. We are talking about illegal aliens. This means that they have entered our country in violation of law or entered our country legally and then went on to violate the terms of their admission into the United States. Somehow the term "merit" does not seem to be properly equated with an illegal act.



There are many politicians who have taken to playing a game of semantics that would appear to have come from the pages of George Orwell's novel, 1984, wherein Orwell devised a form of propaganda that was constructed around "Newspeak." The idea of Newspeak was that if you could eliminate words from the vernacular you could change perceptions, hence reality.



In the 1970's, then President Jimmy Carter ordered that all INS employees drop the term "Illegal Alien" from our lexicon. We were, at first, ordered to refer to illegal aliens as undocumented aliens. Several months later Carter issued another edict. We were to immediately refer to aliens who were illegally in the United States as "Undocumented Workers" and we were threatened with disciplinary action if we did not comply. I got so angry I took to referring to illegal aliens as "Pre-Citizens.”



It is important to make a point I have made many times before. The word "alien" is not a pejorative. The term alien is defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act as, "Any person who is not a citizen or national of the United States." In point of fact, when citizens of the United States travel to other countries, those other countries refer to us as aliens. In Mexico, the preferred term is "Foreigner." No other country has a problem with the term "Alien," so why do our leaders? Why has Senator Ted Kennedy taken this game of Newspeak to a new level by referring to illegal aliens as "The Undocumented?" Why does President Bush talk about the need to legalize immigrants when he really means to say he wants to legalize illegal aliens?



The point to this exercise is to muddy the waters as much as possible. Many people do not understand legal issues and the laws concerning immigration tend to be a murky area for those who are not familiar with it. Many Americans can not go back more than a generation or two in their own families without pointing to a relative who immigrated to the United States. It is my guess the President is hoping that enough Americans will think that legalizing immigrants is sort of like naturalizing immigrants, a normal process.



By referring to illegal aliens as "The Undocumented," Senator Kennedy neatly sidesteps the fact that we are talking about aliens who are present in our country illegally. The difference between an illegal alien and an immigrant is the difference between a burglar and a houseguest. If I called the police in the middle of the night and said I was holding a houseguest at gun point, they would send a SWAT team and a hostage negotiator. If, on the other hand, I called the police in the middle of the night and reported I was holding a burglar at gun point, they would send a squad car to simply take the intruder off my hands.



Words certainly have impact and the spin doctors on Capitol Hill are spinning at warp speed. Clearly the agenda is to keep our nation's borders open to facilitate trade and provide a limitless source of cheap and compliant labor forum scrupulous employers.



Now that we have examined the use of propaganda (Newspeak), it is time to consider that Mr. Martinez is making assertions that are also baseless. He says that we cannot deport the millions of illegal aliens who are present in the United States. He is right, we cannot and should not attempt to round up millions of illegal aliens. What we need to do is to take away the incentives that bring them here in the first place -- the prospect of getting a job and sending money home. Last year more than $20 billion was wired to Mexico by aliens working in the United States. That does not include the money that was smuggled back to Mexico that goes unreported. Mexico's most valuable export is its own citizens.



It is not that these illegal aliens do the work American's won't do, it is simply a matter of illegal aliens being willing to work for substandard wages under substandard conditions. If Americans will toil in coal mines, steel foundries or construction sites, drive garbage trucks, don firefighter gear and race into burning buildings to try to rescue total strangers, or put a badge in their pocket and a firearm on their hip and chase armed and dangerous criminals down dark alleyways, then I would submit that there is no job an American won't do, provided that they can support themselves and their families when they get paid.



Mr. Martinez asserts that we should exclude relative newcomers among the illegal alien population from his amnesty program. I want to know how he proposes our bureaucrats would be able to definitively determine when an illegal alien actually entered the United States? The only way to begin to determine the authenticity of such claims would be to physically send agents out to interview landlords, neighbors, employers and others.



Similarly, he says that we need to do background investigations on these millions of illegal aliens. Running fingerprints and names through a computer database does not constitute a background investigation. Background investigations are labor-intensive. They require agents knocking on doors armed with a photo of the person they are investigating, and it would take a couple of days at least to conduct a reasonable investigation of each alien applicant. There are only a few thousand special agents at ICE who could physically conduct these investigations of millions of alien applicants.



USCIS is the division of DHS that is responsible for adjudicating applications for all immigration benefits. No doubt this agency would be pressed into service to administer this ill-conceived program. Right now there is virtually no integrity at that agency because they have focused on clearing the backlog of applications for benefits. Last year USCIS lost over 111,000 files relating to aliens seeking various immigration benefits. Among those thousands of aliens were 30,000 aliens who had applied for naturalization. Incredibly those 30,000 applications were adjudicated without the relating files. United States citizenship represents the "Keys to the kingdom" and USCIS in its usual mad dash to clear the backlog simply rubber-stamped the applications. This would be a god-send to terrorists seeking to embed themselves in our country.



Mr. Martinez's statements are not supported by reality.



President Truman used to keep a plaque on his desk in the Oval Office. It read simply, "The buck stops here!"



Politicians who continue to ignore the findings of the 9/11 Commission and the testimony of ever so many expert witnesses at Congressional hearings about the inherent pitfalls of a guest worker amnesty program starting with national security concerns should probably have a different placard on their desks. Theirs should read, "Don't confuse me with the facts!"



Lead, follow or get out of the way!



FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a well-respected authority on immigration and border security issues.

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