Some 12 million illegal aliens live in the United States, many of them scared to death of federal officials. They do their best to lay low and pretty much succeed. Now, Congress hopes to entice them out of hiding with a $5,000 penalty.
That’s right. This is the carefully negotiated compromise bill the Senate has come up with, and a chief provision is to lure aliens into meetings with officials, where they will first have to figure out how to come up with money they don’t have.
If they can do that and everything else is fine — if they speak English pretty well, for instance — the head of the household goes back to the home country. Ultimately, that’s done with, and permanent residency is achieved, and the family is on the path to citizenship.
Now maybe some of these illegal aliens will jump at this opportunity, but my suspicion is that the vast majority of them won’t risk a meeting that might send them packing immediately, and here is another suspicion: The congressional geniuses don’t have any very good idea how the government will enforce this scheme or handle the enormous amount of work if cooperation miraculously came to pass.
There are some good parts to this legislation, such as making legal immigration more dependent on skills and education that fit with available jobs than on whether you have relatives already here. The legislation also would try to set up a system better enabling employers to know whether job applicants and employees are legal.
Mostly, however, the legislation sounds like a mishmash intended to give every side a little bit of what it wanted without providing remedy enough to keep millions more illegal aliens from skipping across the border to take jobs away from our poorest citizens, to lower wages, to increase American poverty and to put a huge, additional burdens on local governmental services. One unneeded part of this bill that runs more than 300 pages is a guest worker program inviting 600,000 more aliens into the country.
To pretend as some do that there is nothing much at stake here is to forget about the high unemployment rates among the least educated and most desperate of our citizens. To argue that Americans won’t take the jobs that illegal aliens take is to ignore the fact that, in all the major occupations in which illegal aliens find work, most employees are native-born. Illegal aliens themselves are the exploited victims of the system, and they will hardly be rescued by a plan that likely won’t budge the status quo more than an inch or two from where it now sits.
Some say that if the different sides start amending the plan to make it better, they will destroy it — every move toward greater sense will be a move that costs a vote either among the Democrats or the Republicans, it’s argued.
But amend away: If this plan dissolves, we might be better off for it, and there just could be a chance it would be slimmed down to what’s most crucial. That’s very serious penalties for employers hiring illegal aliens, and a good system of catching them and taking action against them. When the jobs disappear, the illegal aliens will go home, and they will quit coming.
If the Democrats weren’t searching for Hispanic votes and Republicans weren’t looking to help businesses get the cheapest possible labor, you might get to ananswer like this, and maybe, if enough Americans make their anger known, we will.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
