It was 20 years ago when Congress passed the last major immigration law reform — popularly known as Simpson-Mazzoli — which gave amnesty to three million illegal immigrants while promising tougher immigration law enforcement. The tougher enforcement never came, but many more illegal immigrants did, reaching an estimated 11 million today.
Washington is again wrestling with immigration reform. Yesterday, we considered ways to secure America’s borders and avoid swelling the ranks of the 11 million. Today’s focus: What to do about those already here.
President Bush and the Senate want the two things we think inadvisable: granting another amnesty or something very like it and establishing a guest worker program to assure cheap labor in the U.S. economy. Both moves promise trouble.
Why repeat the Simpson-Mazzoli mistake? The politicians are loath to call it amnesty now, but not requiring illegal immigrants to return home, re-enter and apply for U.S. citizenship is the same thing and says it’s OK to flout U.S. law. If we do it again, we might as well throw our borders wide open.
Although dressed up in “earned citizenship” platitudes, President Bush and leading Senate immigration reformers are ignoring the fact that illegal immigrants are here — illegally. Looking the other way won’t make this problem go away. The House version of immigration reform wisely seeks to make it a felony to enter this country illegally and requires such entrants to go home before anything else.
But can we really just tell the 11 million to leave? A realistic compromise includes a required prompt and documented return to the country of origin, admission of guilt for the prior illegal entry, and payment of a suitable fine, followed by temporary residence conditioned on maintenance of acceptable progress toward achieving U.S. citizenship. Failure to follow these requirements would be punishable by permanent loss of the opportunity to petition for U.S. citizenship.
Which brings us to the guest worker question. Having a guest worker initiative will effectively create a vast menial underclass of foreign-born gardeners, construction laborers, vegetable-pickers and other toilers without the language skills and educational attainment needed to integrate successfully into the great American middle class. Resentment and anger would spread as these unfortunates daily see our prosperity all around them but are never able to share it as equals.
Scoffers who say what happened in France can’t happen here be advised — America already has, with its 11 million illegal immigrants, the largest such population in the Western world. In the California penal system alone now reside an estimated 15,000 illegal immigrant felons from Mexico. Thousands more roam our streets undisturbed because no Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was present — as required by law — to escort them out of the country when released from American jails. A mere 10,000 Muslim youths instigated the Paris riots.
A guest worker program eventually will ignite ethnic fires in Los Angeles, Houston and hundreds of other American cities that will make Peugeots burning in Paris pale by comparison.
