A few years ago, after 12 years of dilly-dallying around, Congress passed what is euphemistically called the Immigration Reform and Control Act. To get sanctions against employers who hire illegal aliens, the sponsors had to trade granting amnesty to illegal aliens.
This shouldn't have been done. Amnesty rewards people for breaking our laws. It also set up even more immigration based on family connections. Nevertheless, it was done and the sanctions have worked in keeping down illegal immigration.
Now Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., have introduced a bill to repeal the employer sanctions. They claim that employers are discriminating against Hispanics, which is bunk.
The only evidence they can cite is a General Accounting Office report claiming discrimination which was challenged at the time by the GAO's own top expert on methodology. She said there was no cause and effect relationship between the sanctions and the discrimination.
As H. Ross Perot has stated bluntly, the nation is at risk and these boneheads in Washington are playing special interest games. Congress ought, in fact, to declare a five-year moratorium on all immigration and provide the manpower to the U.S. Border Patrol to stop the remaining illegal immigration.
Illegal immigrants, one congressman estimates, cost U.S. taxpayers $5.4 billion annually, and that's only 5.4 of the nearly 300 billion we don't have but are spending anyway.
No nation on this earth is as casual about its borders as the U.S., and no nation on this earth takes in or has taken in the numbers of immigrants we have.
That's because most nations have at least semi-sensible governments instead of a gaggle of career politicians who play money politics with the destiny of the country.
We have a big unemployment problem. We have a recession or the early stages of a depression. We have environmental stress. We have homeless people. We have a record number drawing food stamps. We have health care costs caroming out of control. We have 34 states in financial trouble. We have a federal deficit and a federal debt out of control. We have crime and drugs out of control. We have stresses on our educational system and on our court system.
All of these problems are aggravated by immigration, legal or illegal, which is adding the equivalent of one new major metropolitan area of nearly a million people per year.
Yet, rather than addressing the problems, people like Hatch and Kennedy wish to aggravate them. Congress has even passed a law making it easier for corporations to recruit foreign engineers even as American college graduates all over this country go from the graduation ceremony to the unemployment lines or to jobs below their training and education.
It is frustrating to describe the continuing misfeasance and malfeasance of politicians which is causing so much pain and hardship to the American people. My own emotions have gone beyond wanting to vote them all out of office. That's the nicest thing I think they deserve.
Well, get out your pen and write your overpaid representatives and senators and tell them you want to keep the sanctions on employers, you want a fraud-proof alien card, and you want sufficient funds and personnel to police the borders.
It's beyond me how Congress can vote to send American youth to protect Kuwait's borders but refuses to appropriate sufficient funds to protect U.S. borders.
I have often argued it is not an America first policy we need, but an America at last policy. It's time to clean up our own affairs.