A Comprehensive Approach
I fail to see how anyone can support the continuation of illegal immigrants flooding into the country and taking up a subrosa life here for years. I fail to see how employers of Illegals can flaunt the laws against hiring them, but most of all, I fail to see why the Government is not cleaning up this mess right now! If it is because George W. Bush is holding the Feds back then woe on him.
We have two main problems here, and both need to be addressed immediately: 1) our borders should be far better protected from the illegal entry of foreigners; and 2) The Illegal immigrants within the country must be accounted for and forced to either become legal or to leave.
Borders
I am in favor of the Wall approach, supplemented by the usual, but beefed up, border patrols and sensor surveillance. A high and solid wall is not impenetrable or unscalable, but it does represent a significant challenge to all but the most robust people. To the extent that it keeps out most of the transgressors it will do a good job. Portals through the wall can be carefully controlled to admit people with a legal pass, yet prevent illegal entry. Our need for workers is great; therefore, setting up and managing an effective guestworker system is imperative, together with foolproof registration and identification procedures.
Further, I am in favor of bringing law enforcement into the effort directly, as opposed to making Illegal entry only an INS problem. Let unidentified entrants be shipped back over the border by the law enforcement personnel that captured them the very same day. There should be only one essential way for legal entry, and that is through the normal processes of the DOS, INS and the guestworker program. But there should be many ways for them to be forced to exit!
Illegals Within
It is criminal that we have 11 million illegal immigrants in the country! That is a huge number, which makes it a serious problem in many dimensions. The most obvious point is that they are here for jobs, and they are being hired by employers who know that they are illegal, but who pretend not to know. That is for crass monetary reasons.
Law enforcement must be made to go after employers of illegals, and the fines for hiring them should be raised to a hurtful amount, say, $25,000 per first incident per illegal. This should be raised further for second and third offenses to $100,000 for the second offense and $200,000 plus 3 years in jail for the third offense, again per incident per illegal. So, if I hire ten illegals I could be forced to pay $250,000 for a first offense and a million dollars for a second similar offense.
This draconian penalty system alone would, if enforced, cause many illegals to flee the country for lack of employment as it is phased into being. Or, they would surface and request to be entered into the guestworker program properly. Judging by the reasons they came here in the first instance, most would elect to sign up for the guestworker program, and thus we would regain a measure of control.
There is another aspect that I have not found mentioned in any of the tomes I have read on illegal immigration. That is the fact that many of us know and see illegals every day in the normal course of events. We know that they are illegal, but we do not do anything about it, thereby pushing the problem off onto largely indifferent law enforcement officials. So the immigration problem has no observers who report occurrances.
In my opinion, those who see a person breaking the law, which an illegal does so long as he is inside of our borders, and does nothing about it, is himself breaking the law, or at least not performing his moral obligation to report lawbreakers. Since local lawmen have little authority to handle illegals, they tend to keep hands off so long as there is no crime involved. So the further answer is to empower local lawmen to make arrests and to start the process of expelling illegals. As far as I am concerned, this is a problem that has been exascerbated by the State Department and the INS, so they need to be defranchised from the enforcement process.
# posted by Mannning @ 4:22 PM
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