I'm mass-mailing this letter to Senators tomorrow:
Dear Senator:
I am writing to urge you to block any legislation that is put through the Senate that includes any kind of amnesty (defined as permitting illegal aliens to work toward legal status without first leaving the country and “righting the wrong” they did) for illegal aliens. There are a number of misnomers about the current illegal immigration crisis. Here are my thoughts on just a few, for your consideration.
1) “They’re only doing jobs Americans won’t do” This is patently ridiculous and yet I continue to hear Republican senators and our own President repeating this lie. What they are doing are jobs Americans won’t do at a less-than-competitive wage. If those employers increased their wages on those jobs, American would fill them, guaranteed.
2) “We should legalize them so employers won’t exploit them” Putting aside for a moment the fact that if we’re ready to admit that employers are exploiting these workers, then we’ve also admitted that the wages they’re paying are below competitive levels; if we legalize these workers today, they will demand higher wages, and tomorrow there will be a whole new batch of illegals taking those jobs away from the newly-legalized ones.
3) “We are a nation of immigrants” This is another convenient lie. 85% of the citizens in our country were born here. We were a nation of immigrants 150 years ago, but we are definitely not today.
4) “The economy will collapse if we deport all the illegal aliens” First of all, less than 5% of all workers are illegal aliens. While this is a huge number and a travesty when you consider the number of times our laws were broken; it is a part of the workforce that could be replaced if necessary by the remaining 95%, and by others, such as teenagers, who currently are not in the workforce at all. Secondly, no one is suggesting we deport all 11 million illegal aliens. What we should start doing, simply, is enforce the laws we have on the books, fining employers who hire illegal aliens. This will dry up the market for illegals in an instant and, faced with no job prospects, these illegals will likely return to Mexico, where they can get a job legally.
5) “We need a sensible guest worker program in any bill” This is ridiculous. Before illegal immigration, we were somehow able to get the job done, as a country. Furthermore, we do not have a labor shortage in this country. Mexican immigrants come here to make more money than they can make in Mexico (a lot more); not because we are desperate for more workers. Besides, even if we did have a labor shortage, we could alleviate it by increasing the number of immigrants allowed through the legal process. This is how we have always done it; why the sudden need for a new "guest worker" program?
6) “The guest worker provision in this bill is not amnesty” It certainly is if you concede that amnesty can be defined as putting illegal aliens on a path to citizenship in this country without returning home first, as basic fairness would require. They broke the law; even if you are willing to not prosecute them for breaking that law, you cannot do so in good conscience without requiring them to “right the wrong” by returning to their home country first. And even if you disagree with that statement, but believe that requiring some years of consistent work, plus admission of guilt, plus payment of a fine, is fair recompense for the crime, I defy you to find 100,000 illegal aliens who would be willing to pay such a fine or admit such guilt on paper. And what do you do with those who won’t play by that rule? The government has already shown it is unwilling or unable to enforce the law in this area. Without the “stick” of deportation threatening them, no illegal alien will agree to these stipulations, which makes the provision totally impractical.
7) “Under the guest worker program, aliens will have to leave the country periodically” Again, given the government’s total inability to enforce existing immigration laws, where are the teeth for this provision? What will we do when illegals refuse to leave the country? Or when they start having children (who will be citizens), or bringing their families across the border with them? We have zero chance of enforcing any such rule, so to even include it in a bill is ridiculous.
8) “Any new bill will include ‘get tough’ policies, including fines, on employers” This is also a ridiculous statement. We were told this exact same thing back in 1987 when amnesty was put in place for illegals then. There are laws on the books right now that fine an employer $10,000 for every instance of an illegal alien being employed. Yet how many enforcements occurred in the entire year of 2005? Zero. Bottom line: It makes no difference at all how big you make these fines, since they won’t be enforced anyway.
Illegal aliens are well aware of this. Far from being “in the shadows,” as President Bush claims, these people are taking to the streets – literally – disrupting traffic on freeways and streets, draining valuable police coverage and costing the hard-working legal residents of this country time and money in the process. They wave Mexican flags; desecrate American flags, and make all kinds of demands for respect. They get support from Democrat politicians and are emboldened at every step.
Decades of inaction at the border have put us into this position, and Congress must take some drastic steps, now, to attempt to fix the problem. Our government services are bleeding to death already; they cannot take much more of this absorption of poverty from Mexico. We need control over our borders first and foremost. Then and only then, it is reasonable to start talking about all these other issues. All the other issues pale in importance to the issue of control at the border. Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, and have for years. Accordingly, Republican congress people need to control this debate, focus on the real issues, here, and start putting America first for a change, instead of employers. Failure to do this will definitely cost Republicans at the polls later this year. If you all can’t get this kind of thing done, why shouldn’t we vote in the Democrats?
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