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 Editorials | Opinions | February 2006 
Uncle Sam: Fix Immigration
 Rowland Nethaway - wacotrib.com
A new immigration bill is expected to pass the Senate Judiciary Committee this month.
National frustration over the nation's dysfunctional immigration system has led to the passage of sundry immigration laws by the states.
The federal government should take charge of a problem that demands national control.
The states felt forced to act because Congress has refused to pass needed immigration reforms and federal immigration officials have failed to enforce laws now on the books.
State legislatures, according to a Jan. 25 USA Today article, considered 300 immigration laws last year and approved 40 of them.
Some law enforcement officers in New Hampshire started arresting illegal immigrants and charging them with trespassing.
When the flood waters started to recede in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, so many foreign workers flooded into the devastated city that Mayor Ray Nagin said he needed to find a way to “stop New Orleans from being overrun by Mexican workers.”
Nagin, who later urged residents to rebuild a “chocolate New Orleans,” is no stranger to racially insensitive remarks.
Nevertheless, at the same time that Nagin was worrying about being overrun by Latino workers, “Help Wanted” and “Now Hiring” signs were prevalent throughout New Orleans. Labor activists complained that foreign workers were undercutting American workers by working long hours at low wages.
There is a fundamental truth about illegal immigration that many Americans do not want to admit – there are millions of jobs in the United States that American workers do not want that foreign workers accept gladly. They work hard. Their work is good. They are often abused.
The U.S. economy and American businesses need these foreign workers.
The failure to enforce immigration laws, coupled with the refusal of Congress to pass laws that can be enforced, has led to a mockery of the law. This amounts to a breakdown of one of the fundamental principles of U.S. democracy – we are a nation of laws.
No country on Earth has such lax and unenforced immigration laws.
Even as Mexico's government calls for an open border with the United States and criticizes U.S. proposals to crack down on illegal immigration, Mexico's Human Rights Commission reports on the abuse of illegal immigrants in Mexico.
Mexican police and military routinely arrest and detain illegal immigrants coming into their country across their southern border.
By law, only Mexican immigration officers are supposed to detain and arrest illegal immigrants, who are subject to two-year prison terms and hefty fines.
The United States needs foreign workers and it needs an enforceable immigration policy based on the rule of law.
President Bush has called for a guest worker program. That's a start. But it is implausible that the 11 million illegal immigrants now in the United States will rush to apply and then return home when their work visas expire.
It's also implausible that there can be, or should be, a vast roundup of illegal immigrants when there are no national standards to tell a citizen from a non-citizen, which is why employer sanctions now are rarely enforced.
In 1994, the blue-ribbon, bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform concluded an exhaustive study of the nation's illegal immigration problem. The diverse panel unanimously recommended to Congress that a standardized identity system had to be established to permit the enforcement of employer sanctions and other immigration laws.
The 9/11 Commission Report also recommended a national identity system.
Any proposed immigration reform that fails to give law enforcement and employers a nationwide, standardized method to tell citizens from noncitizens cannot be enforced equally and fairly. This undermines the rule of law and fails to fix the problem.
RNethaway@wacotrib.com |
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