Freedom Folks: Case Against a Guest Worker Program

Please read this most excellent piece that addresses what is happening in the "debate" on immigration reform in America.

The U.S. Senate has begun what is likely to be a long debate on immigration reform. The House of Representatives, responding to the anxieties of most Americans, recently passed a bill that would reduce illegal immigration by placing sanctions on employers who hire them and by improving border security. Of course, it is already against the law to hire illegal aliens and to enter the country illegally. So this simple but necessary measure essentially tells the U.S. government to enforce existing laws.

That is too much for the Senate. Responding to the pressure of corporate America and the White House for cheap labor and to demands from ethnic lobbies and labor unions for cheap recruits, senators are likely to insist that any enforcement legislation include amnesty for the 11 million illegal immigrants already here and admit more legal immigrants by a "guest-worker" program and other methods.

Mr. O'Sullivan goes on to point out...

So the federal government simply stopped enforcing the 1986 law some time around, say, 1987. By 2004, though, everyone knows that most of the 11 million illegals hold undercover jobs, exactly four employers nationwide were fined for employing them. Four.

Then he notes...

In recent years, however, the evidence has been mounting -- and the voters have been noticing -- that many Americans, mainly unskilled workers on lower incomes and their families, were harmed by the competition of immigrants willing to work for much less. A study by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies shows that between March 2000 and March 2005 only 9 percent of net new adult jobs went to native-born Americans.

...and closes with wisdom that is music to my ears...

This time, we're told, the federal government really means to crack down on illegal border crossings and scofflaw employers. Terrific! But why wait until a guest-worker/amnesty bill goes through? After all, the additional tasks these bills impose on the Homeland Security bureaucracy (processing millions of new legal and existing illegal immigrants) will actually get in the way of enforcing a crackdown. Passing the House bill ASAP would enable us to calm and control the situation while working out a sensible long-term immigration policy.

Such a policy must address not only the economic well-being of Americans but also their social and national solidarity. When half the flags waved at rallies to defeat the House bill over the weekend are Mexican, then immigration may be helping to create a divided bicultural society at best -- or a second nation at worst -- within the United States. And having arrived here by breaking our laws, that second nation evidently feels empowered to intimidate us into changing them to suit its power and interests.