The great immigration debate rages on. Are illegal immigrants ruining the country or are they helping the economy by taking jobs no American wants? The Congress is split. The House wants to take harsh measures: Close our borders and, one way or another, give the rest a one-way ticket back to Mexico. The Senate and President Bush are seeking a way to keep employers from losing their illegal help through a guest worker program.
Two contrasting visions of illegal immigrants. Two starkly different solutions. Both are lousy and bad for America.
The get-tough approach ignores reality. By most estimates, there are 11 million illegal immigrants in this country. Whether you like it or not, there’s no way to round them up and send them back. You and I wouldn’t want to live in an America that even tried such a massive deportation.
The tough guys say if we cut off all benefits to their kids, the illegals will get the idea they’re not wanted and head back across the border on their own. In essence, we punish the kids for their father’s sins. I don’t think America would stand on this principle any longer than it took the photos of deprivation and abuse to reach our homes via television news.
If you think the demonstrations in our streets by angry immigrants and their families are wild now, just wait until you force their kids out of school, stop them from getting medical attention or, in the case of those children of illegals born here, take away their citizenship. It ain’t going to happen. I don’t care how many times Pat Buchanan rails about America turning into a "flophouse." Funny, Pat, but that’s exactly what the Anglos said when the Irish and Italians were allowed to come to these shores. How soon we forget.
Please don’t make it that the illegality of these Mexican immigrants is some kind of moral breakdown. I hear people say their grandfathers came here the right way, went through all the proper paperwork, etc. Uncle Nunzi tells me if Italy had bordered the United States, he would have tunneled here too.
When you get right down to it, the immorality belongs squarely on the shoulders of the business community that welcomes cheap labor – no matter how it gets here. You want to holler at somebody, holler at people like affluent author Erica Jong, who argues there’s just no American who could care for her kids as well as her Mexican help – and at considerably cheaper wages.
The dirty little secret in the immigration debate is once again it’s low-skilled Americans who are getting screwed. The argument Americans won’t do these jobs is bunk. Illegal immigrants work cheap and they don’t complain. That spells love affair with American businesses and a nice chunk of the Republican Party that does their bidding. Keep the flow of cheap labor coming into the country and you depress wages for our working poor. Make the illegals guest workers as the president wants and you create a permanent underclass in America much like the alienated Muslim communities that are raising holy hell across Europe.
We have a right to control our borders. We have a right to limit immigration. That’s not immigrant bashing. That’s good policy for ourselves and the immigrants we welcome.
Is it unrealistic to completely seal our borders? Probably. But that doesn’t mean a much larger border patrol and a virtual wall won’t drastically reduce illegals from getting in. We can’t wait for Mexico to solve the problem for us. That might be unfair, but I don’t want to leave the security of our border and the flow of illegal immigrants in Vicente Fox’s hands.
We have a moral obligation to the illegal immigrants we’ve already allowed here and we can do something about it once we take control of our border. If we don’t seal our border first, any humane treatment of illegals will just continue to encourage more to come.
But forget about making the Mexican immigrants already here guest workers; they should be allowed a path toward full American citizenship. When we failed to enforce our border, that was like flashing a green light to come on over. If we take care of those already here, we stay true to our own ideals and soon those low-skilled workers and their children will become the high-skilled American citizens of tomorrow.
Seal the borders. Allow those who already work their tails off a chance to become citizens. That’s the kind of America that gave you and me a good life today, but it’s not the vision of America being debated right now in the halls of Congress.
