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 Editorials | At Issue | May 2005 
MAD About Immigration
 Avery Oldach - Frontiers of Freedom
| | President Bush should be careful about pointing fingers at alleged 'flip-floppers'; his administration is now going after two seemingly contradictory plans concerning immigration policies. |
It looks like it belongs on the pages of MAD Magazine, but in all actuality it is a brochure distributed by the Mexican government that instructs, through illustrations, how to safely and successfully sneak across an international border. And you guessed it - the American border is the one being overwhelmingly penetrated by illegal aliens.
There is no consensus concerning the number of illegal immigrants that currently inhabit the United States. The one thing that is agreed upon, however, is that there are many non-Americans living and working on our soil, and the numbers are only rising.
President Bush should be careful about pointing fingers at alleged 'flip-floppers'; his administration is now going after two seemingly contradictory plans concerning immigration policies. The first, of which many people may already have heard, concerns a guest-worker program that "will offer legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment here."
The second plan is called the Real I.D. Act and seeks, among other things, to prevent the granting of driver's licenses to individuals who cannot provide proof of their legal U.S. residency. This plan would potentially deny driver's licenses to millions of undocumented workers currently living in the United States.
It seems to me that in order to combat the growing problem of aliens crossing our border, we should crack down on people unlawfully entering the United States and seek out the ones currently living here, not offer illegal aliens the reward of legal status because thay have come here and gotten themselves jobs. According to Bush, the jobs that immigrants, particularly Mexicans at this point, fill are ones that Americans would be unwilling to take. Other than the mention of some Californian agricultural positions, though, these allegedly undesirable jobs have not been specified (I wonder if it is a coincedence that around the same time of the proposal of this guest-worker program, Bush was eager to gain Hispanic support for re-election).
The truth is that many American employers are enticed by the availability of people willing to work for next to nothing, and a very large available number at that. By paying much lower wages, often under the table, to illegal immigrants living in the U.S., employers are making out like bandits while the rest of Americans suffer. For instance, in the past several years, millions of American jobs have been lost to immigrant workers. It's not that Americans are not willing to perform certain jobs; it's that immigrants are willing to perform them for a lot less pay. Furthermore, the social services provided to low-wage immigrants are being taken out of Americans' paychecks.
The introduction of the Real I.D. Act further complicates where America stands on this immigration epidemic. Bush is now reinforcing his image as the big bad American protector and is backing policies that would tighten the straps on official documentation of citizenship. I can understand how the fight against terrorism should involve strengthening gateways onto aircraft and into government buildings, but I don't understand what the good would be in restricting issuance of driver's licenses to illegal residents, especially to those whom Bush is trying to give temporary American legal status. Citizens worry that the passing of such an act would encourage aliens to simply drive without licenses, in which case they would not have formally learned about traffic safety and would be a potential threat on the road.
Don't get me wrong, I feel much sympathy toward citizens of other countries who try to enter America in order to escape persecution and to make better lives for themselves. However, our government should not in any way support the illegal practice of smuggling aliens across the borders. It is not fair to encourage foreigners to take the jobs of Americans and to make us pay for their survival. Before we can help the citizens of any other country, we must help the citizens of our own, and that means fighting unemployment and poverty among other things. |
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