The plan states that they have 120 days to go home, not stay. If they do, and apply for legal entrance to this country, they are put to the back of the line of others trying to get here legally. Those found after the 120 day grace period are deported and not allowed to apply to come here again for 10 years.
The confusing part of the plan is this - Gov. Huckabee has stated his intention to speed up the immigration application process. He wants to make it quicker for immigrants to find out the status of their application than it takes today. This would allow for them to come back, if they meet muster, legally in a more expeditious manner than the current process would allow.
His quote is “if we can get approved by American Express for a credit card over the phone, why does it take years for the government to process an application” to come into the country legally?
Anyway, that is how I understand it.
>>His quote is “if we can get approved by American Express for a credit card over the phone, why does it take years for the government to process an application” to come into the country legally?<<
That sounds a little naive. Making bureaucrats more efficient is a good idea, but we don’t want to be in such a hurry that we grant visas to the next 9/11 conspirators. I believe that our visa system is really too loose as it is. It does not even track when, or if, a visa holder leaves the country.
The "problem" with immigration has less to do with the speed with which applications are processed and more to do with the numbers and conditions that must be met to come here legally. We already take in over a million people a year legally, more than the rest of the world combined. Due to various number caps on certain immigration categories, intending immigrants with all of the paperwork processed can wait three to ten years or more before their number comes up. Is Huckabee suggesting that we increase the number of legal immigrants that we take in?
This is not a process problem, it is a numbers problem. There are more than three million intending immigrants waiting overseas for their number to come up. If Huckabee thinks that adding 12 to 20 million people to the "back of the line" can be addressed by improved processing, he doesn't understand the issue.
And then there is the question of how many of the 12 to 20 million can meet the standards of entry back into the United States. Many of them couldn't even qualify for a tourist visa. And the vast majority of them are not only guilty of breaking our laws by entering our country, they have also committed ID theft, tax evasion, missuse of SS numbers, and petty crimes. There are over 600,000 illegals who have gone through all of the deportation hearings and ordered deported, but they failed to show up to be deported and are on the loose in the country. What happens to them. Finally, there are an estimated 2 million illegally alien felons who need to be rounded up.
We don't need more legal immigrants, we need less. Huckabee is just changing his position once again the same way he was for eliminating birthright citizenship and then recanting a few days later.