Common Sense Immigration Reform

There is no question that America has a range of difficult problems facing her; the economy, unemployment, Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare are pushing our great country to the brink. However, there is an underlying problem which is a contributing factor to all of these problems – illegal immigration.

The U.S. Government estimates that there are between 8 to 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing within our borders but independent studies have shown that number is significantly higher. The Californians for Population Study (CAPS) released a report by four leading immigration experts who believe that there is somewhere between 20 to 38 million illegal aliens in America[i]. Given the federal government’s penchant for under grossly underestimating numbers, there is a significant likelihood that the CAPS figure is closer to being accurate than the government’s estimate.

Regardless of which number is correct illegal immigration is one of the most critical issues facing America today, not, as the Obama administration recently asserted, akin to jaywalking[ii]. In fact, Fox News recently reported that illegal immigration currently costs American taxpayers an astonishing $113 billion per year[iii].

Further exacerbating the problem is that recent Census data shows that white children are now outnumbered by minority children in the United States. This is a decades old trend in which the Census Bureau has predicted that whites will become the new minority by 2042[iv] or sooner.

Latinos are leading this demographic shift. In the states that share a border with Mexico; Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California[v] – Hispanic children already outnumber whites and African Americans. Unbridled illegal immigration is partly to blame for the problem as well as all levels of government (federal, state, and local) affording illegal immigrants the same rights and privileges as American citizens.

First, here is my plan on how to reform immigration and enforcement of our laws:

We need a pro-immigrant, low immigration policy with the following elements:

 A merit based immigration system that brings in the skills and talents to keep us competitive in the global economy;

 Reduced immigration levels based on need and more closely approximating 300,000 immigrants a year vice the current 1.2 million annually;

 Elimination of extended chain migration, i.e., family reunification, limiting it to the nuclear family;

 Enforcement of existing immigration laws to reduce the current illegal alien population and limit future illegal immigration, i.e., attrition thru enforcement. Enforcement would include: (1) ending the job magnet; (2) increasing coordination at the federal level by eliminating barriers to information sharing among agencies; (3) leveraging state and local enforcement resources; (4) fully implementing the US-VISIT Program to track and deport visa overstays; and (5) secure the border and make mandatory such programs as E-Verify and 287 [g] authority to assist employers and law enforcement in identifying illegal aliens;

 Elimination of birthright citizenship;

 Ensure that anyone who enters this nation illegally is not rewarded by being permitted to stay and work here; i.e., no amnesty;

 Streamline the processing and adjudication of immigration cases; and

 Promote pro-immigrant measures that help newcomers assimilate and embrace the values and principles of our Founders and the Constitution.

Deportation to their home country where they will be given the opportunity to apply for legal immigration to the United States unless they are a convicted felon.

How do you define a felony? If you include ID theft, tax evasion, working illegally, etc. in addition to breaking into our country illegally, the overwhelming majority are felons, not necessarily convicted. And are these the kind of people we want as citizens, i.e., people who blatantly and deliberately flaunt and violate our laws?

■ii. Receive a Green Card granting temporary citizenship for a period of two years. As long as that person does not commit a felony, they will be granted citizenship as long as all conditions set forth herein are complied with. Persons choosing this option will forfeit the right to vote in all elections as penalty for entering the United States illegally. Persons choosing option one will have all the rights and privileges of a U.S. citizen as long as all the conditions of citizenship are met.

When you reward something, you get more of it. We had a one-time amnesty in 1986. It didn't work. There are over 4 million intending immigrants waiting overseas for their turn to enter the US, some for many years depending upon what category they are in. They have completed all of the paperwork, including background checks and physical examinations. Is it fair to these people who have observed the rules to allow those who violated our laws to stay and work in the US even though they entered illegally?

What you are proposing in amnesty. Any legislation that legalizes the status of those who broke our laws by entering our country illegally and allows them to stay is amnesty. We must not only prevent the Democrats and some moderate Republicans from hijacking the meaning of the word amnesty, but the public must be made aware about the true impact of an amnesty. The Heritage Foundation concluded that the cost of amnesty alone would be $2.6 trillion. And the number of additional LEGAL immigrants who would join those who were the recipients of amnesty through chain migration, i.e., family reunification, would approach 70 million over a 20-year period, assuming there are only 12 million illegal aliens. We cannot assimilate such numbers. An amnesty would destroy the United States of America with the stroke of a pen.

You are proposing the same thing that McCain pushed along with Kennedy in their 2007 amnesty bill. McCain wanted to deport immediately the estimated 2 million illegal aliens who were felons and put the remainder on an "earned path to citizenship" once they paid a fine and learned English. They would get to the back of the line. And your idea that we could create a class of citizen who could not vote is pure nonsense. No court would ever approve it and it is an anathema to the Constitution and our system of government.

3. Any person found in the United States illegally who has committed a felony will be immediately deported to their country of origin and will not be allowed to return to the United States under any condition.

That is the existing law.

It is evident that our immigration process needs to be updated and streamlined as does most of America’s federal bureaucracy. Current immigration wait times range from three to nine years[vi] which is patently absurd. Perhaps a point system such as the one employed by New Zealand would be an appropriate model.

Yes, we should have a merit based system, rather than a kinship system. However, do you realize that the US takes in 1.2 million legal immigrants a year, more than the rest of the world combined. This is not a process problem. We must have quotas and limits in order to assimilate people. The real absurdity is that we take in the numbers that we do and the fact that most are poor and uneducated. 57% of immigrant headed households are on welfare.

By implementing the Kinsy, Calvert Bill which would prohibit illegal immigrants from obtaining employment or residence in the United States, we would likely see self deportation akin to what has happened in states like Alabama[ix] where strict immigration enforcement has caused a mass exodus of illegal immigrants. For those that remain, federal authorities will arrange deportation immediately.

The proponents of amnesty are wont to create the false choice between a blanket amnesty and mass deportation of 12 to 20 million illegal aliens. In reality, we have other choices and alternatives that don’t reward people who have broken our laws with the right to stay and work here and an eventual path to citizenship. The 12 to 20 million illegal aliens did not enter this country overnight and they will not leave overnight. Attrition through enforcement works. We have empirical data from Georgia, Oklahoma, and Arizona proving that it does.

Strict enforcement of these two policies along with those spelled out above should prevent illegal immigration and alleviate any need to build cumbersome, costly border fences which will require costly maintenance and upkeep in perpetuity.

Mexico is a third world country. Unless we secure our borders, we will continue to have national security and public safety issues in addition to illegal immigration.

The two main threats to our national security posed by immigration relate to terrorism and drugs. First, tens of thousands of persons from countries that support international terrorism have come across our southern border undetected since 9/11.

Testifying before Congress in March 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that his agency busted a smuggling ring organized by the terrorist group Hezbollah that had operatives cross the Mexican border to carry out possible terrorist attacks inside the U.S. “This was an occasion in which Hezbollah operatives were assisting others with some association with Hezbollah in coming to the United States,” Mueller told a House Appropriations subcommittee during a hearing on the FBI's budget. Hezbollah was responsible for the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 243 U.S. troops. A total of 20 foreign-born terrorists were involved in 9/11, 19 of whom took part in the attack that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths. The terrorists had entered the country on tourist or student visas. Four of them, however, had overstayed their visas and become illegal aliens and the others should not have been granted visas for various immigration control reasons.

Second, Michael Hayden, the outgoing head of the CIA stated in January 2009 that the threat of a narco state in Mexico is one of the gravest dangers to American security, on a par with a nuclear-armed Iran.

An assessment by the United States Joint Forces Command, published in February 2009, concluded that the two countries most at risk of becoming failed states were Pakistan and Mexico. The descent of Mexico into a failed narco state, marked by increased violence and brutality, which has already spilled over into the U.S., has enormous implications for immigration, legal and illegal. With over 11 million Mexican-born residents in the U.S. plus their U.S.-born relatives, there are strong familial ties to Mexico, which would attract Mexicans fleeing a disintegrating state seeking asylum and safety in the U.S. And the pressure on our porous, unsecured southern border would increase dramatically.

Currently, the Border Patrol apprehends more than half a million people annually trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico and hundreds of thousands more illegal aliens are successful in gaining entry. There is no way the U.S. could stop a tidal wave of Mexicans seeking asylum in this country and it would be even more difficult to remove them.

There has been a confluence of interests between drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism. The systems for moving terrorists illegally across the border have become increasingly sophisticated, with Mexican drug kingpins now playing a major facilitating role using the same routes and methods to bring in illegal aliens and drugs. In view of the carnage that the 19 terrorists created on 9/11, the virtual certainty that our government has allowed substantial numbers of terrorists and their supporters to enter our country illegally is an outrage.

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