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Saturday, May 26, 2007
Trust lacking on border security
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The underlying problem, the insurmountable obstacle to embracing the immigration bill now before the U.S. Senate, is that people don’t trust Congress. Or the bureaucracy that will administer it. Or future administrations to honor the promises the bill makes.
Frankly, I’m ambivalent about the compromise. If the borders aren’t secured, it’s another in what will become a long line of amnesty grants. Our failure to secure them will continue to be interpreted, as it is now by the left, as an invitation to illegals. They won’t insist — they never have — that the borders be secured.
Instead, the blame will be assigned to a moving target: greedy corporatists unwilling to pay wages that would attract native-borns, a culture of conspicuous consumption dependent on cheap labor to build the houses and maintain the lifestyles we demand, or some other presumed sin that blames America for being a nation that invites and exploits desperately poor neighbors.
From that “it’s-our-fault” premise, it’s difficult to find good-faith agreement that, indeed, the provisions promising border security will, despite the triggering language that no temporary worker program can begin until border-security provisions are “funded, in place and operational,” which is not necessarily to say secure.
The ideal would be evidence that the problem of illegal entry is substantially fixed, thus making it possible to deal with a problem that’s not worsening. Once critical mass is reached, illegals become emboldened, as demonstrations for amnesty confirm, and politicians lose the will to enforce the law. It then becomes, as it is now, a debate about how best to avoid alienating a sizeable segment of current and future voters and whether they’ll vote Democrat or Republican.
The fact of border security and the fact of a biometrically secure identification card that employers are required to have on record would go a long way, for me at least, in accepting the amnesty provisions. Employers will be required to ask every job applicant for identification. For the citizen, it’s a Social Security card, a birth certificate or a passport — though the process of making Social Security cards useful for verification purposes is at least 18 months away. For the hireable immigrant, it’s the biometric identification card.
Clearly, employers should face stiff penalties for hiring illegals, as they do under the proposed bill, at $75,000 per illegal. “The employer enforcement in this bill is very strict,” says U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). Under the existing system, employers can accept documents they strongly suspect to be forgeries without penalty by pretending not to have known.
Another concern is that while they are specifically not entitled to social service benefits beyond their Social Security contributions when they leave the country, this portion of the law won’t hold through a Democratic administration and Congress.
An analysis by Robert E. Rector and Christine Kim for the conservative Heritage Foundation notes that “current immigrants [both legal and illegal] have very low education levels … at least 50 percent, and perhaps 60 percent of illegal immigrant adults lack a high school degree.” They continue:
“The current immigration population … contains a disproportionate share of poorly educated individuals. These individuals will tend to have low wages, pay little in taxes, and receive above average levels of government benefits and services.”
Low skills equal high poverty. Such immigrant households received an average of $30,160 in benefits, including education, in 2004, researchers found. Total taxes paid was $10,573 per household. Over a 60-year life, the cost to taxpayers will exceed taxes collected by $1.2 million, researchers project.
When amnesty was granted in 1986, about 37 percent of the illegals went on to apply for citizenship.
Granted, this proposed legislation sets up a long process to citizenship and specifically does not make Z visa holders eligible for welfare, food stamps, free medical care, except in emergencies, or other social services. But you can be certain that incrementally those benefits will be made available and, morally, it’s hard to argue that those Z visa holders who spend a lifetime working beside citizens should be excluded from benefits granted to those in need. It’s not in the American nature to create a permanent caste system.
If the left and the right could sign a good-faith agreement that we’d support honest border enforcement now and in the future, a biometric ID card for noncitizens with workplace enforcement, and that we’d accept a social service and education system that treated citizens and noncitizens differently, amnesty could work.
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