Why You Should Support Bush's Immigration Proposal

Critics of President Bush's immigration reform proposal have been so quick to label it an amnesty plan in sheep's clothing that they have missed the subtle brilliance of his approach to a very complex problem. Let's look at some of the complex issues of illegal immigration and evaluate the President's proposal in relation to them.

Contrary to what many pundits seem concerned with, the main problem with illegal immigration in the United States is not its influence on the job market but its relationship to organized crime. In an article for the City-Journal's Winter 2004 edition entitled "The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave," Heather Mac Donald provides an in-depth and disturbing look at this relationship:

"95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide in L.A., which total 1,200 to 1,500, target illegal aliens and up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens."

"A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico."

"The leadership of the Columbia Lil' Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.'s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation."

As if that weren't bad enough, in an article carried by the Salt Lake Tribune on December 18th, David Kelly gives us a chilling view of a new development in Arizona crime:

"Moving with the cunning and cruelty of modern-day pirates, gangs of kidnappers are swooping down on Arizona highways, attacking smugglers transporting undocumented immigrants and stealing their human cargo. The kidnappers stash the immigrants in hundreds of drop houses scattered around the city, using violence and threats to extort money from their relatives."

"Now smugglers are fighting back, shooting it out with kidnappers on sidewalks and freeways in broad daylight. A gunbattle last month between kidnappers and smugglers on Interstate 10 at the height of rush hour left four dead. Four others were killed this month in the desert near Phoenix; authorities blamed the deaths on violence between the two groups."

"Kidnappers let smugglers take all the risks of getting immigrants into the country, then rob them once they get here. When they can't intercept smugglers on the road, they snatch migrants from houses where they are known to be hiding. The new wave of violence has made this the deadliest year in Phoenix history with 247 homicides, edging out the previous high of 245 in 2001. Police say 60 percent of the city's crime is related to smuggling and kidnapping."

As these articles demonstrate, a significant portion of crime in our big cities is perpetuated by illegal immigrants. But, as you can also see from David Kelly's article, the victims of these crimes are often also illegal immigrants. This creates a disastrous situation because victims of these and other crimes will not report them for fear of being deported. Vast numbers of illegal immigrants suffer severe abuse, extortion, and virtual slavery at the hands of organized crime and cannot report it for fear of deportation. So the crimes go unreported and the criminals unstopped.

To counteract this problem, many local city governments have adopted "sanctuary policies." These city policies prohibit employees of local government, including law enforcement officers, from inquiring after the immigration status of anyone. Often, even if a police officer knows that a particular individual has entered the country illegally (a misdemeanor) or has previously been deported and has returned illegally (a felony) he or she is forbidden by city statute from arresting that person. Police officers are even forbidden from reporting known illegal immigrants to the federal authorities.

While these policies are supposedly adopted to protect the illegal immigrants who are victims of crime and encourage them to report crimes without the fear of deportation, they have the secondary effect of protecting criminals who are illegal immigrants as well. Even if the police know of an individual with connections to organized crime and a past criminal record, and they know that he is in the country illegally, they are forbidden from using his illegal status to arrest him and deport him. In fact, a police officer can face disciplinary action for arresting someone based upon their immigration status or for reporting them to the INS. Many crimes that might have been prevented by deporting known illegal immigrants are left undeterred because the police cannot use their illegal status to deport them until they have already been booked for a different felony.

Such policies blatantly undermine federal immigration law. Heather Mac Donald explains in her City-Journal article:

"Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city's sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to "terrorize people." Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history."

After September 11th there was outrage over the failure of Federal agencies to prevent the tragedy. And yet the possible contribution of mayor Giuliani's New York City sanctuary policy to September 11th has not been discussed by the mainstream media. While it may be appropriate to inquire into the failures of the federal government in the September 11th attacks, shouldn't there be an equal amount of outrage and demand for investigation into the role of city sanctuary policies? And yet over two years later the majority of the population of the United States isn't even aware that such policies exist.

Despite federal law and September 11th, this outrageous situation is still very common. Sanctuary policies are in effect in at least eighteen cities, including New York, Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Seattle and in two states, Alaska and Oregon.

Since 1998, the city of St. Paul Minnesota has had a police policy that prohibits officers from "independently undertaking to approach, interview, interrogate or arrest any suspected illegal alien" when the main issue is immigration status violation. And, amazingly, this very month, the St. Paul city council is considering adopting an additional measure known as the "INS/City Separation Ordinance."

Why have the sanctuary laws of our nation's largest cities been so ignored by the mainstream media? You would think that even if they were completely neglected in the aftermath of September 11th, they would at least be addressed in relation to President Bush's proposed changes to immigration. The relationship between illegal immigration, sanctuary policies, and organized crime should be a major issue. Yet the mainstream media is still largely silent on the matter. Instead, they spend hours of airtime, newsprint, and bandwidth discussing how Bush's proposal will affect jobs, and whether it will encourage more illegal immigration. I suspect the media's silence is largely due to political correctness. To discuss any relationship between illegal immigration and crime would be labeled "racist" by the media language police faster than you can say "Francisco Martinez."

There is another group that also deserves a portion of the blame pie. The readiness of U.S. businesses to break the law by employing undocumented workers for the sake of avoiding taxes and paying lower wages is deplorable. If U.S. businesses would uniformly refuse to hire illegal immigrants it would help discourage illegal immigration by taking away some of their motivation. The situation is exacerbated by current immigration policies. Because foreign workers can only work in the United States for a very limited duration, companies that hire foreigners and obey the law must hire new workers on a very frequent basis. That makes it more difficult for them to compete with companies that are willing to break the law and hire illegal immigrants and thereby avoid the extra expense of frequently hiring and training new employees, not to mention taxation, worker's compensation, insurance and minimum wages.

The greatest danger to our nation is, in part, the result of widespread lawbreaking by businesses and law nullification by city governments. Conservatives seem ready to condemn the illegal immigrants who come seeking work and often advocate the harshest punishments for them (i.e. shooting them at the border) while at the same time barely hand-slapping the lawbreaking businesses and ignoring city sanctuary policies designed to undermine federal immigration law. This hypocrisy contributes to the unfortunate impression that conservatives are racists.

Under these circumstances, it is simply impossible for the Federal Government to enforce immigration laws. Even if the cities and businesses were cooperating, there is no way the federal government could muster the manpower and the funds necessary to identify, capture, and deport the vast numbers of illegal immigrants and then keep them out.

The immigration system is clearly broken and casting the blame on the Federal government alone is a huge oversimplification and misdirection of energy. Critics of the failure of the U.S. to enforce its immigration laws should direct their ire toward local governments that are endangering our nation with their ill-conceived and illegal sanctuary law.

How does President Bush's proposal relate to this immigration headache?

Rather than develop a detailed, specific plan for immigration reform, Bush wisely proposed principles upon which reform must be based if it is to be successful:

1. "America must control its borders...America is acting on a basic belief: Our borders should be open to legal travel and honest trade; our borders should be shut and barred tight to criminals, to drug traders, drug traffickers and to criminals and to terrorists."

2. "New immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job."

3. "We should not give unfair rewards to illegal immigrants in the citizenship process or disadvantage those who came here lawfully or hope to do so."

4. "New laws should provide incentives for temporary foreign workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired."

By focusing on principles rather than specific plans, Bush provides a much more realistic and flexible approach to reform. The principles remain constant while the specific implementation may change according to how well it adheres to those principles.

The first principle and primary concern is about controlling the borders. Currently, city and state sanctuary policies completely thwart any attempt to apply this principle. The cities justify their sanctuary laws as a necessary measure to allow illegal immigrants who are victims of crimes to report them without fear of deportation. By allowing undocumented workers to receive a legal, temporary worker status, Bush's proposal takes away that necessity and leaves city sanctuary policies without justification. Under Bush's plan anybody who has an honest employment would have temporary worker status. All remaining illegal immigrants, lacking honest employment, could be assumed to be criminals and police officers could demand immigration documentation from anyone and arrest and deport anyone based solely on their immigration status.

In his proposal, President Bush explained:

"Our homeland will be more secure when we can better account for those who enter our country."

"Instead of the current situation, in which millions of people are unknown, unknown to the law, law enforcement will face fewer problems with undocumented workers, and will be better able to focus on the true threats to our nation from criminals and terrorists."

"And when temporary workers can travel legally and freely, there will be more efficient management of our borders and more effective enforcement against those who pose a true threat to our country."

By eliminating the excuse for sanctuary policies, Bush's principle-based plan would then allow local law enforcement to freely cooperate with federal authorities to control our national borders. The Bush proposal makes it possible for federal immigration authorities to focus their limited resources on those who pose the greatest threat to our domestic security: organized criminals. Contrary to the characterization it has received, Bush's proposal allows for more strict enforcement of immigration law and greater control over our national borders by facilitating the repeal of city sanctuary laws.

A related benefit of Bush's proposal is that without city sanctuary policies, law enforcement officers who apprehend illegal immigrants would be able to more easily identify businesses that break the law. Any organization or company that continued to employ undocumented immigrants rather than temporary workers would be suspected of involvement in organized crime or of supporting terrorism and could be investigated and dismantled.

The implementation of Bush's immigration proposal could eliminate a significant amount of crime in our large cities. It could be a significant blow to crime organizations, drug and weapons trafficking, and organizations that covertly support terror. It could help us control our borders to keep criminals and terrorists out.

Bush's proposal is not a scheme to appeal to Hispanic voters. It is a well informed, strategic move calculated to undermine the forces that are currently preventing our immigration laws from being enforced and endangering our nation. Bush's proposal is a brilliant move in a complex chess game. We should support him and encourage our representatives to support his proposal.

Then let's give him one that he can enforce. That is, unless you want Kerry or Dean in the WH for the next couple of years.

A false dilemma.

Was this one of those onion.com parodies?

"Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city's sanctuary policy

Did someone say Rudolph Giuliani? The one with the big contracts in Mexico advising them on "security?"

Under the Bush "outline" All remaining illegal immigrants, lacking honest employment, could be assumed to be criminals and police officers could demand immigration documentation from anyone and arrest and deport anyone based solely on their immigration status.

Nice try. But that'd be profilng. That'd be racist. Hyphenated groups would be all over the Administration. Tons of lawsuits and easy pickings for activist courts. Mass demonstratons. ABCNNBCBS 24/7 condmenations of the "racist" President. . . .

If the law and it's enforcement is an affront to Freedom and disrespects individual rights, then I have no respect for it.

I think that pretty well summarizes your little game. You can play it by yourself as far as I'm concerned since you get to decide what is "an affront to Freedom" and how "individual rights" are defined. I'm sure you also believe in a "Living Constitution." Bye.

Nah, you're evading the fundamentals involved.>>>>>>>>

I wasn't aware that the IRS was *spinning* tax evasion.

This proposal does nothing to render their actions passed, present, or future immune from prosecution.>>>>>>>

Hmmm....We don't have the manpower to catch them *in the act*, however sometime *in the future* the feds will show up to nab you for your *past crimes* ??

THere's no reward for them. There is a reward for the country though to respect their work ethic. >>>>>>>>

Many will be *rewarded* by line-jumping MILLIONS waiting to come legally, the FIRST time.

The proposal says, "MUST have demonstratable employment".>>>>>>>>>

Yeah right, we can't account now for 10 illegals (LOW number), however, we WILL be able to account for 10 million illegals, 10 million employers, & verify all are still working.

SO in your world the congress can pass laws without the support of their constituents.

I'd rather live in your definition of a 'police state', where at least the laws have the support of the people.

No, not really. If you think the Bush bashing in the press is bad now just guess what would happen if he started deporting illegals. The liberals would go wild, the businessmen would turn against him, the average man would be told that we are throwing out helpless people who are only trying to earn enought money to buy bread for their families at home, etc. etc. etc.

Sheesh, look at what the poor man is going through just from rounding up actual terrorists, he's being raked over the coals by people here and in europe. If it's going to be done, it has to be done the right way.

I heard there isn't much chance of getting this passed. People are cheering that, but all it means is that we continue to live with the problem and the problem will continue to grow.

The sentiments of the American people aren't reflected in the press, either here or in Europe. If the president thinks this he's in trouble & there's nothing that you or I can do about it.

Rounding up illegals & fining their employers would be hugely popular with the American people. Period.

There have been plenty of proposals offered on the many threads on this subject. In fact, one solution was offered and passed by 60 percent of voters in California ten years ago.

Politics by the Dems killed it as Gov. Davis refused to support the appeal of the lowest federal court's decision.

It's on track to be on this November's ballot. Son of Prop 187 will deny public services in California that are not allowed for ILLEGAL aliens by federal law. It will also require local and state employees to report ILLEGALS.

Once taxpayer subsidized housing, food, and non-emergency health care are denied what can the affected ILLEGALS do but go home?

"So in your world the congress can pass laws without the support of their constituents...where at least the laws have the support of the people."

Here's a clue. There's no where near 50% of folks in the combined Congressional constituencies that would support the police state action called for on this thread. Those folks are a minority in the world.

"anyone *sneaking in* is going to stop & take *the quiz* ??? LOL"(txdoda)

THe idea is that they had better, or they're busted. That's a simple concept. (spunkets)>>>>>>>

LOL.........Keep up with the news.......right now BP admits to only *busting* 1 out of 3 illegals (border 'watchers' say BP *busts* 1 of every 5), looks like our present *concept* needs a lot more funding.

The American taxpayer should not be buying anyone anything! Taxes are to be used to support legitimate govm't functions, not subsidizing and transfers of earnings.>>>>>>>>>>

My sentiments exactly........HOWEVER, even tho our BP & I.C.E. (??) continue to be UNDER FUNDED to do their jobs.......you'll be happy to know that GWB announced that he has TAXDOLLARS to GIVE many minority families 5,000 each, so they can *more easily* buy a house.

"...called employer sanctions."

Part of the PLAN which recognizes the wider scope of the problem:

Under my (Bush's) proposal...Employers must not hire undocumented aliens or temporary workers whose legal status has expired. They must report to the government the temporary workers they hire, and who leave their employ, so that we can keep track of people in the program, and better enforce immigration laws. There must be strong workplace enforcement with tough penalties for anyone, for any employer violating these laws.

You are absolutly right, no two ways about it. Illegal aliens have more rights than American citizens. If you don't believe me, just check out your nearest emergency room and see who is paying for their treatment and who is being treated at taxpayers expense... Check out the percentege of illegal aliens receiving public assistance verses American citizens.

If the presidents proposal goes through, then these numbers will take a quantum leap.

"your little game"

It's not my little game.

"you get to decide what is "an affront to Freedom" and how "individual rights" are defined.

They have well recognized definitions.

"I'm sure you also believe in a "Living Constitution."

You should be more careful in coming to conclusions.

You mean actually enforcing the existing laws is a "NON-PROPOSAL"?

If not in context with the wider problems of how to deal with the millions of illegals already in the country, yes.

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