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Amnesty
By Another Name is Still Amnesty: Bush Compounds an Immigration Disaster
By
W. James Antle III
[email protected]
When President Bush unveiled his vision of what a
“more rational, and more humane” immigration policy would look like, he
went out of his way to insist that he opposes amnesty.
The initial Washington Post report on details of the plan
characterized it as something other than a “blanket amnesty.”
But to offer legal “temporary worker” status and eventually U.S.
citizenship to any large number of illegal aliens is simply amnesty dressed
up as something new – and is likely to produce the same results.
Bush’s proposal is supposed to be more of a general
framework than a detailed program and no actual legislation implementing it
has been introduced as of this writing.
But if anything like it does become law, it will stand as the most
disastrous action of his presidency. Despite
all the cosmetic improvements to border security the Bush amnesty-by-another
name plan is said to contain – to make it, as the Washington Post reported,
“more palatable to conservatives”, in reality it takes already porous
borders and pries them further open still at the expense of American
taxpayers and workers.
Amnesties send an unmistakable message to would-be
illegal aliens that a country’s borders are not to be respected and its
immigration laws are not to be taken seriously. The end result is more
illegal immigration: After the last amnesty in 1986 (and after it became
clear that the federal government was not serious about enforcing the
sanctions against employers of illegal workers that were adopted at the same
time to make that legislation “more palatable to conservatives” also),
the population of illegals increased from about 2.7 million then to 8 to 12
million today. “Temporary workers” have a similar result.
As John O’Sullivan, editor of The National Interest and an
editor-at-large of National Review, recently wrote, “Experience
from Germany to California shows that ‘guest-worker’ programs invariably
increase illegal immigration since they create welcoming cultural enclaves
of foreign nationals into which the ‘illegals’ promptly vanish without
trace.”
Then there is the matter of these temporary workers and
illegal aliens having babies on U.S. soil.
A peculiarity of the Fourteenth Amendment automatically confers
citizenship upon these children, keeping their parents in the country.
As these immigrants are legalized, they will bring in still more
relatives under the law’s family reunification provisions.
Chain migration has been constant feature of our post-1965
immigration policy. The end result of the Bush plan will be to compound this and
increase both legal and illegal immigration massively.
Proponents of amnesty by another name, particularly its
conservative defenders, insist surrender is the only realistic approach to
our out-of-control immigration system.
We share a border with a country significantly poorer than us and we
are creating a surplus of critical jobs that Americans just won’t do.
Yet other countries seem able to enforce a tolerable
level of immigration restrictions, including the U.S. up until recent
decades despite the income gap between it and its neighbor to the south.
That neighbor, Mexico, still does to this day – faced with even
poorer and less stable neighbors to its south, it is hardly a beacon of open
borders. Serious border
enforcement could do something to cut the 700,000 to 800,000 annual illegal
entries, while stepped up domestic enforcement can reduce the incentive for
such entries. As for these jobs
Americans supposedly won’t do, the fact is that they won’t do them at
their current wage rates. Encouraging
the mass importation of cheap foreign labor – whether illegal immigrants
or federally approved “temporary workers” – insures that these wages
will continue to remain below what most Americans can accept.
The underlying assumption that our economy would be
imperiled by cutting off the flow of legal and illegal immigrants
significantly less skilled than the U.S. labor force is highly questionable.
The consensus among labor economists, as found in the National
Research Council’s 1997 New Americans study and elsewhere, is that
the economic gain from this is miniscule.
Balanced against the enormous fiscal strain it puts on the areas most
heavily impacted by failed immigration policies as well as the tendency of
reliance upon cheap labor to retard mechanization, it may be a wash or
worse.
Nor will it do to say that we’re stuck with the 8 to
12 million illegal immigrants who are here, so the only thing we can do is
legalize them. Regardless of
the feasibility or even desirability of mass deportations, to say that we
must either tolerate large numbers of illegal aliens or deport upwards of 12
million people is a false choice. We
already deport more than 300,000 people per year.
Is it not feasible to increase this number somewhat? Although the numbers are in dispute, the late INS managed to
deport upwards of a million illegal aliens in 1954. But in any event, we would not have to find and deport every
single illegal immigrant in America. An
increase in deportations would send precisely the opposite message as
amnesty: That the U.S. is serious about protecting its borders and enforcing
its immigration laws. Sending
this message would do as much to discourage illegal immigration as amnesty
would do to increase it.
National Review editor Rich Lowry made this
point in a recent syndicated column on “do-it-yourself deportation.”
In the two years following 9/11, deportations of Pakistanis,
Jordanians, Lebanese and Moroccans doubled and this prompted many to leave
on their own. Lowry observed,
“The Pakistani Embassy now says that more than 15,000 Pakistani illegals
have left the country since Sept. 11.”
But no one should be surprised to discover that failure to enforce
the law yields more immigration violations.
The argument that meaningful immigration control is a
politically popular but practically impossible policy is simply an excuse.
It is not the majority of Americans who lack the political will to
effectively enforce immigration laws. Immigration
is an issue where there is sizeable disconnect between elite and general
public opinion. If empowered to
do so, ordinary Americans would likely be a great deal tougher than a
political elite that long ago stopped trying to uphold the law in this area.
Any immigration policy, no matter how liberal or
selective, needs to be enforced in part through deportations if it is to be
law rather than anarchy. If the
Bush administration is reluctant to enforce the law against the present
illegal population, why are we to believe that it will do any better
enforcing the terms of its temporary work visas?
Indeed, the most radical aspect of Bush’s plan is not
even its offer of amnesty in all but name.
In addition to forcing American workers to compete with illegal
aliens, the temporary workers’ program apparently forces them into
competition with the entire human population of the planet Earth.
In announcing the program, Bush said its purpose is to “match
willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans
can be found to fill the jobs.”
On the surface, this is a conservative-sounding
proposal that appears to be aimed at making sure that immigrants have jobs,
as opposed to being dependent on public welfare payments, and helping
businesses find willing workers. But
on more careful examination, it commits the federal government to
ameliorating poverty everywhere in the world except among the American
people.
Although Bush claimed that employers seeking to avail
themselves of workers under the program “must first make every reasonable
effort to find an American worker for the job at hand,” it offers no
guarantee that it must offer wages that Americans would be willing to take.
The only specific requirement that the administration has thus far
made public is that the jobs must pay the minimum wage.
A full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage makes less than
the official poverty line for a family of three.
Steve Sailer also noted in an analysis for UPI that the “every
reasonable effort to find an American worker” requirement is undermined by
Bush’s further stipulation that employers should be able to “find
workers quickly and simply.”
In fact, the only logical reason for the businesses to
be able to hire lower-skilled workers under this plan would be to reduce
labor costs. As Sailer noted,
“rules that would be effective at keeping up the wages of workers would
undermine the fundamental goal of this plan.”
Already the plan is being supported by telling the
stories of good and decent people, many of them minorities, who overcame
great obstacles to get to the U.S. and who stand to improve their lives by
residing here. Of course, you
can read Michelle Malkin’s Invasion: How America Still Welcomes
Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores to
learn that not everyone who has benefited from our lax immigration system
has been so noble or entered with such good intentions. But there is a great deal of truth in many of these positive
stories.
Yet there are
perhaps billions of good and decent people all over the world who would see
their standard of living increase if they resided in America.
We cannot possibly admit all of them without reducing the quality of
life for all Americans. You can also write moving stories about the good and decent
American workers, many of them minorities, who are struggling and will see
their wages reduced and their jobs vanish as a result of this plan and
others like it. Isn’t the
federal government’s first responsibility to the working-class whites,
blacks and Hispanic Americans who are own citizens and countrymen?
This brings us to
the worst part about Bush’s plan. It
makes the assumption that the universal aspiration to improve one’s own
living standard and that of their family is identical to the desire to
become an American. Many people
love their own countries, cultures and customs as much as we Americans love
ours. Not all of them identify
with our country as their own, even though many of them could make more
money living here. But the
purpose of our immigration policy should not be primarily to serve as a jobs
program for the rest of the world; it should be to create new Americans.
In other words,
this plan takes everything that is wrong with our deeply flawed immigration
system and makes it worse. It
devalues U.S. citizenship and makes the desire to become an American a
purely commercial venture. It
looks at immigration as something to benefit the few rather than the nation
as a whole. It fails to protect
borders and adequately deter illegal immigration.
It throws assimilation, culture and social cohesion out the window
and makes the whole process about money.
It equates our obligation to the whole world with our obligation to
our fellow Americans. It takes
neither Americans nor foreigners seriously.
In other words, it
is a monumental mistake. America’s
immigration disaster is fueled by three forces: Mexico and other
countries’ desire to use the emigration of their poor as a safety valve so
they can escape needed reforms, the welfare state’s need for new clients
and business’ need for cheap labor. Both
major parties are acting in accord with these forces and hoping to reap
political benefits as a result. Bush
in particular labors under the delusion that this will somehow aid his 2004
reelection bid.
It almost certainly
won’t. I’m a supporter of
President Bush. But I must
admit, at times like these he makes it very hard.
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