If there is to be a guest-worker program, I would hope that it will be clearly spelled out. The President has clearly stated that he is against "amnesty" for illegals.
As for your concerns about how we will get all these people to leave when their visas expire, I assume there is the technology to deal with it. Afterall, what do we do with people who HAVE visas NOW and their visas expire?
You posed a good question, "If we can't get 300,000 to leave then how will we get 11 million to leave?" Yes, how do we round up 11 million illegal aliens when we do not have a papertrail, nor any other information, including the most basic of all, their names? A rather daunting task, wouldn't you say? What do you suggest? I'd love for someone to come up with a plan that can work. It'd make my day!
While people are trying to figure out how to handle the situation of 11 million illegals already in our country, we need to be securing our borders so that no more illegals can enter.
I basically agree with this. We can't sweep Iraq clean of 5000 deadenders, how can we sweep the US clean of 11 million illegals.
Having said that President Bush has been MIA on Americas southern border and he better get up to speed soon or the democrats will take the house in '06.
And just because we can't round up every illegal doesn't mean that we should have a catch and release policy. Congress needs to pass and fund a law making states responsible for turning illegals over to INS under penalty of law rather than releasing them back onto the streets.
I agree 100% on securing the borders. That is an essential element of the solution.
As far as making the 11 million leave, I don't think it matters at all if we know who they are or where they live or anything else. We have that information for the 300,000 Central Americans and it is totally useless as far as making them leave.
My idea is to have tough consistent interior enforcement that makes it very very expensive for employers to get caught with illegals on the payroll. This should include mandatory on line Social Security Number verification for every job applicant which takes away any excuse for having an illegal on the payroll. Illegals are not hard to find on the job site and their names and addresses are totally irrelevant to this process. Each of the 5,000 ICE Agents should be expected to cite at least one employer for hiring illegals each week (or forego their bonus) and these busts should range from the street-side hot-dog vendor to construction sites to farms to major publicly traded meat cutting plants. That would work out to be 25,000 immigration enforcement actions in one year and that would send a powerful message. (As contrasted to the 3 employment enforcement actions performed by the Bush Administration last year which sent the opposite message). Employers would be firing illegals in droves. To deal with the day labor problem we would dress up a few ICE Agents as illegal workers and when they got hired it would be a lot like a prostitution bust. Employers would be afraid to hire day laborers. I don't advocate any immigration sweeps or mass roundups although each and every illegal encountered by ICE should be detained and deported.
America is an expensive place to live and when illegals found they could not get work they would start leaving the same way they came ... on their own two feet and at their own expense. And meanwhile, on the border as word got out, the problems there would disappear because people would see no reason to come.
We mostly do nothing about it. THAT is the problem. The bureaucracy can't handle the visa programs we have now. People are not vetted, many criminals are allowed in and there's virtually no enforcement to get the overstays out. Remember a few visa overstays that flew planes into buildings? Technology? Ha!
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0510/24/ldt.01.html Aired Oct. 24, 2005
And millions of foreigners in this country illegally, not because they crossed our borders illegally, but because their visas have expired. You'll be shocked -- I think you will be shocked to hear just how few immigration officials we have assigned to track down all of those people with expired visas.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Visa holders who overstay exit date in this country can easily disappear into American life with little risk from immigration authorities. A report from the Homeland Security inspector general estimates at least 3.6 million illegal aliens are people here who overstayed their visas. Yet last year, there were only 51 agents dedicated to tracking visa violators.
REP. J.D. HAYWORTH, (R) ARIZONA: If there are so-called good people overstaying their visas, there are really bad people too. And more than just your garden variety of criminal, probably in that group, sad to say, are those folks who belong to terrorist cells who mean to do us harm. ROMANS: Immigration and Customs Enforcement received more than 300,000 leads last year on visa violators. The inspector general found authorities investigated just over 4,000 and apprehended only 671.(snip)