The Saga of the Latest Immigration Plan

The proposed new immigration law was defeated in the U.S. Senate - again - on a procedural issue, and that was a good thing. Somehow the elites in Washington reason that because there was so much opposition to their proposal, Americans want the status quo. Wrong! Clearly, most Americans see illegal immigration as a problem for the country and they want something done about it, but not this.

The message to the government, to both the Executive Branch and Congress, was clear ... secure the border first, then we'll deal with the rest of it. Now, however, rather than listen to what the people said, it looks like there will be no new legislation for immigration at all, and the powers that be in Washington are suggesting that what the American people are going to get is the status quo, like it or not. What the government doesn't understand is that we don't like it, really, we don't.

It's easy to understand why a person from an impoverished part of the world would risk everything to come to the US. It means wages that are ten or more times what they could earn at home, assuming they could even find work of any kind there. A young man from Nicaragua, a house painter, who would earn $30 per week at home when he could find work at all, told a reporter that he earned over $500 per week washing dishes in New York.

However, the risks are very high - physical hardship, the threat of capture and incarceration, injury, robbery, even death in the desert, not to mention the broken families left behind. The Nicaraguan man had not seen his ten year old son in several years and those years have been very hard on the boy.

For the countries and the governments they left behind, there are also mixed blessings. Millions of men and women, poorly educated, unemployed and restive, are gone. They are in the U.S., and what's more, they are sending billions of American dollars home every year to support their impoverished families. But now these very same political leaders are learning that they, too, must pay the price of coping with the societal problems that flourish when there are no men in a community.

So, what's behind this push by both political parties for the legislation? The right answer, like everything in government, is money and votes. Both parties are serving the interests of their constituencies - and those constituencies don't include American citizens, in spite of all the high minded verbiage about how they are simply doing what is best for the country.

From all appearances, there are three constituencies - corporations and businesses large and small, the immigration activists and, third, the governments of Latin America. And these constituencies are served by three separate governmental advocates - Republicans, Democrats, and the president - all working for a common outcome.

The Republicans work hard for the corporations and in this instance that includes small business as well as large corporations. Business owners say illegal immigrants provide the labor they cannot find otherwise. Not true. They could hire all the labor they need tomorrow if they were willing to pay for it. No, what they want is the cheap labor of the illegal immigrants.

And illegal labor is cheap in more than just the hourly rate of pay. Employers need not pay any benefits to these people - no overtime differential, no medical insurance, etc. As a consequence, if one of these workers, or a member of his family, gets sick or is injured, they go to the nearest Emergency Room and the ER bill is sent to the local government for payment, or the hospital absorbs it and passes the cost on to other patients who can pay. In effect, then, the taxpayer and/or the other patients are subsidizing the employers' profits.

If this source of labor is taken away from them, so we are told, employers will have to charge more for the goods and services they provide. No, no, no, no ... don't believe that. What will happen, though, is that the employers' profits will decrease.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are diligently working for their constituents, the immigration activist groups. To the Democrats, illegal immigrants, when converted to legal resident status and then citizenship through the bill's amnesty, add up to votes because polls show that over sixty percent of Hispanic immigrants call themselves Democrats.

Then there is the president - who is he working for? The governments of the countries in Latin America whose citizens have come to the US illegally, of course. He must have made some sort of secret agreement, a grand bargain and a hand shake, that he would not close the border and he would not send these folks home.

There is no doubt that doing so would create terrible problems for these governments. How would they handle the return of millions of hostile, unemployed, unskilled people? Not well, I'm sure. And perhaps it will create a serious problem for us, too, having such unrest in Central America. But that would be a less serious problem than the one we have now.

Now, says the government, those of us who are opposed to the bill are just loudmouthed xenophobes. Well, it turns out that I happened to be in a position to receive several hundred telephone calls about the issue and not in a single call did anyone have anything bad to say about Hispanics as a general group. Those with whom I spoke all said immigrants are welcome here, in fact we need them, and for the most part they are good people. But they must come here the legal way, through the front door.

The way to do what needs to be done is not mysterious, although it might be difficult. Start by securing the borders, north and south. Then increase the number of legal guest workers allowed in under current immigration law so that there are enough to fill the needs of employers. Investigate and prosecute those employers who hire illegal immigrants. If there is no work for them, those who are here illegally will find their way home.

Those who come in the front door are welcome and if they sincerely wish to become citizens, there already is a way for them to do so. If they don't want that they are free to stay as guest workers for as long as the law allows, and then go home.