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Of all the
insults to our intelligence in the current discussions of
immigration legislation, the biggest insult is the claim that
border control legislation and legislation on the illegal
immigrants already in the country must go together.
Why?
What will happen if they are done separately? And who will be
worse off?
The
claim that the two pieces of legislation must be passed at the
same time has been repeated endlessly. But endless repetition
is not a coherent argument.
At
the heart of this issue is the question whether Congress and
the Bush administration are serious about controlling the
borders and about letting the number and kind of immigrants
allowed into this country be decided in the United States, not
in Mexico.
Whatever number and kind of immigrants the United States wants
to admit into this country, that decision means nothing unless
that limit is enforced at the borders. Nor is there any way to
know in advance how effective any particular method of border
control will turn out to be in practice.
The
only way to know whether fences, national guardsmen or
anything else will work is to wait and see before issuing
blanket amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, virtually
guaranteeing that millions more will follow, as has happened
in the past.
A
Congressional package deal is not about border control. It is
about trying to get the Hispanic vote without losing the votes
of other Americans. It is about allowing politicians to vote
on both sides of this issue to cover themselves politically.
Once
such legislation passes, the guarantee to illegals is
immediate and its consequences permanent for them and for
successive generations of their offspring. But what actually
happens at the border is left up in the air.
It
may be significant that, with all the talk about the
preconditions to be set for illegal immigrants to get American
citizenship, nothing has been said about one of the easiest
ways of getting American citizenship, without having to learn
English or do anything else.
Pregnant women from Mexico simply walk across the border and
have their babies in American hospitals. This creates an
instant American citizen who cannot be deported and whose
family members would be hard to deport.
Those who claim to want to "control the borders" with this
package-deal legislation don't even talk about this, much less
try to do anything about it.
Let's return to the question of what would happen if border
control legislation were to be voted on separately from
amnesty legislation, instead of in the current package deal.
First of all, we would find out who is serious about border
control, especially if the question of amnesty (by whatever
name) is postponed for some definite period of time, in order
to first see what happens at the border before taking that
irrevocable step.
Who
would lose anything by this separate consideration of the two
pieces of legislation? The country would not lose anything.
Neither would the illegal aliens already in the country.
The
biggest losers would be politicians. They could no longer be
on both sides of the issue by voting for a package deal but
would have to stand up and be counted on border control.
Some
say that the Democrats would filibuster a bill that offered
border control separately. Fine. Let them!
Let
them show their true colors in an election year and then go
face the voters in the fall.
Of
course, those Republicans who are either weak-kneed or who
share the Democrats' views would also lose the political cover
of being able to vote on both sides of the immigration issue.
But
the country would be better off not to commit itself to
guaranteeing the permanence of millions of illegal aliens and
all their descendants thereafter without getting anything more
than pious hopes about controlling the border.
As
for not being able to pass immigration legislation separately,
that claim has already been refuted by those who made it. The
Senate has just passed a bill allowing illegal aliens to
collect Social Security, even if they were hired with forged
or stolen Social Security cards.
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