Friday, May 18, 2007

More on Amnesty

Captain Ed Morrissey posted a thoughtful critique of the arguments against the new amnesty agreement reached by the Senate. While I will not recap it in its entirety, I would like to comment on the agreement.

Captain Ed wrote:
There are 12 million illegals in the US. Let me explain how difficult that would be. In the first place, the ICE has to find them, usually where they work. They then have to build a probable cause for a raid and search warrants (unless we want to toss out the 4th Amendment). That takes quite a bit of time; it might take months to build that kind of a case against an employer, but at least it will take a few weeks. Then they raid the shop, arrest everyone without proper identification, and start the deportation process -- which requires a hearing for each person in court to determine their status. During that period, we have to house and feed them.

...

If we really want to solve the porous border and the immigration issue, then we need to start somewhere to stop the problem from getting worse first. This bill is not perfection by any means -- but it is a reasonable starting point.


Captain Ed has a point about the difficulty of deporting 12 million illegal aliens. However, if we simply enforced the laws already on the books- especially as regards employers, we can put the pinch on the companies who employ illegal aliens to the point where it is extremely difficult for them to find work. If we coupled that with a crackdown on illegals' access to Social Security, public education, the courts and healthcare, we could make things very uncomfortable for them. Would they leave? Possibly not, but if we force them to face life without all the perks they seem to feel entitled to (and which their home country certainly would not give to any illegal there), some of them might rethink the benefits of being in the United States.

That being said, I doubt we will do better than this bill in the current political culture. Republicans have no stomach for actually listenting to their legal constituents- they are too worried about the Azatlan-promoting activists with whom the foolish media are so in love. And Democrats see the illegals as a vast new Democratic constituency, so they will certainly not put any obstacles in front of this rush to amnesty.

The only thing we can do is to put pressure on our elected representatives to enforce the border security provisions in this bill, and make enforcement more than just a word thrown around by clueless politicians. We need a strong fence, a robust deportation effort, a campaign by the federal government to take cities like San Francisco who think federal law is made to be broken to court with severe financial penalties, a crackdown in illegal alien employers, a Congressional law depriving illegals of standing in US courts and above all, we need the southern border locked down.

Hat tip to Captain Ed Morrissey.

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