>>So you are for amnesty—and any kind of legalization is amnesty, BTW—because it’s going to happen anyway?<<
No, I’m for amnesty because it’s the right thing to do to straighten out the mess we’ve created by ignoring our immigration laws for so long.
We need to first secure the border and then we need to decide who should be allowed to remain here legally. Yes, that would mean “legalization” but “legalization” doesn’t mean “citizenship.” All it means is that we decide who should be allowed to remain here with a legal green card, either working or attending school, or as child of such a parent.
Once we’ve described who we want to grant legal status to, then we grant amnesty to anyone who comes out of the shadows to either: a) be given a green card, or b) be sent home without jail time or other penalty.
For example, if an illegal has worked here for years, but doesn’t qualify for a green card due to an exception written into the legalization process (maybe he’s a felon, or no longer has a job, or just arrived in recent months) do you first make him pay all the taxes he’s avoided by working off the books? Do you jail him if he doesn’t pay them? Or do you send him home?
I’m guessing you’d send him straight home, but in doing so you’d be granting him an amnesty by foregoing the taxes he owes.
Everyone who doesn’t “come out” during the amnesty (to then be deported or given a legal green card) would then remain an illegal, but if the border were secure, and there were far fewer illegals after the amnesty, those remaining could practically be dealt with much more severely, i.e., with jail time before deportation, no hope of ever returning, and obviously no route to ever obtaining citizenship.
It’s a mess. Someone’s got to fix it. I wouldn’t trust the Democrats to do it, but someone has to. Frankly, I like Paul Ryan’s approach of going at it one step at a time. The last step of such a process should be to have everything in place and then implement the amnesty and sort out who goes and who stays with legal work or student status.
Any route to citizenship should be one of those separate issues and all routes should be clarified before the amnesty is implemented. And it shouldn’t be easy to achieve, if at all, since you’re dealing with people who came here illegally in the first place.
The obvious fix is simply to enforce the law. Granting the 30 million illegals here any kind of legal status will inevitably lead to citizenship—and for governments as bad and as leftist as are the norm in Latin America.
That is national suicide and we have no moral obligation to inflict that upon ourselves.