Bordering On Insanity: Our Policy for Handling Illegal Immigration Is Suicidal

In a few years many Americans may look upon May 5, 1987 as one of the most pivotal, and perhaps one of the darkest, dates in American history. On May 5th, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) opened 107 "legalization centers" nationwide and began carrying out one of the key provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 -- the granting of amnesty for several million illegal aliens.

This one act may result in an unprecedented "chain reaction" of new immigrants, eventually totalling in the tens of millions, as illegal aliens are at first legalized and then go on to become citizens with the right to bring additional family members into the country. Immigration on this large a scale over so short a period of time would affect profoundly not just the American Southwest but the social, political, economic, linguistic, and cultural foundations of the United States as a whole.

In addition to being the day the "legalization" program went into effect, May 5th is also Cinco de Mayo, Mexico's "Independence Day" and its most prominent holiday. Cinco de Mayo has already displaced our 4th of July celebration of Independence Day in many communities in Texas, California, and other South-western states, and this will increasingly become the case as Mexicans become the predominant nationality in more and more U.S. communities.

The new law was passed by Congress on October 17, 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan on November 6th of that year, thus ending a decade and a half of congressional wrangling over U.S. immigration policy. The then-existing immigration law, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, was amended in 1965 and 1976 to adjust the national-origins quotas, and again in 1980 to set an additional quota for refugees, but Congress repeatedly balked at taking the steps necessary to alleviate the growing border crisis. Illegal entry along our Southern border amounted to a relatively small trickle in the 1950s and early 1960s, but grew to a steady stream in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, and eventually became the veritable flood that it is today. The border patrol and the INS have literally been overwhelmed, lacking sufficient personnel to handle the crisis. In fact, we had "lost control of our borders" years before President Reagan made that announcement to the nation in 1983.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter became the first president to recommend redefining the illegal alien program out of existence. Under Mr. Carter's amnesty plan, most illegal aliens already in the United States would have been legalized. Presto! No more "illegal" aliens! And to discourage additional aliens from entering illegally, he asked Congress to prohibit the hiring of undocumented aliens.

These proposals represented a radical departure from traditional policy, under which the federal government accepted responsibility for enforcing immigration laws and maintaining the integrity of U.S. borders. Under the Carter proposals, this responsibility would, in effect, be shifted from the U.S. government to employers in the private sector. Congress rejected Carter's plan; nevertheless, as if to emphasize his commitment to decontrolled borders, he drastically reduced INS manpower and terminated many of its investigative operations.

In October 1978, Congress established an independent Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. The committee was headed by the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, then-president of Notre Dame University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. In February 1981, the Hesburgh panel issued its long-awaited report. Not surprisingly, its two major recommendations echoed Jimmy Carter's -- amnesty and employer sanctions. And, in an apparent attempt to win broad-based support for their proposals as a whole, the commission also recommended stepped-up border enforcement. These three elements -- amnesty, sanctions, and stepped-up border enforcement -- were supported by the Reagan Administration and were the key elements of the immigration bill introduced in March 1982 by Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) and Representative Romano Mazzoli (D-KY). With the Administration's blessing, the Simpson-Mazzoli bill was passed by the Republican-controlled Senate in 1982 and 1983, but both times it was killed in the House by Democratic leaders who sought to liberalize it even further to satisfy the demands of powerful Hispanic organizations.

The bill squeaked through the House in 1984, but died when a conference committee was unable to reconcile the Senate- and House-passed versions of the bill. In 1986, the bill appeared dead on September 26th, the day the House rejected a rule for consideration of the bill. Nevertheless, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the upcoming elections, the bill was resurrected following backroom brokering. The House passed its version of the bill by a vote of 230-166, and subsequently passed the final version by a vote of 238 to 173. The Senate passed the final version by a vote of 63 to 24.

From Jimmy Carter onward, amnesty was perennially the most controversial and most hotly debated of all the immigration reform proposals. Most Congressmen conceded that their constituent mail registered overwhelming opposition to the idea. The fact that it was part of every major immigration package that was offered is a testimonial to the combined influences of the radical Hispanic lobby, the liberal element in the Catholic Church, and the major media's pro-amnesty bias.

In a last ditch attempt to prevent amnesty from becoming law, Representative Bill McCollum (R-FL) offered an amendment to delete legalization from the bill. During the House floor debate on October 9th, he told his colleagues that, by granting amnesty to illegal aliens, we would be "slapping in the face the thousands and thousands of immigrants ... waiting in line, who have waited for years to come to this country legally." The Congressman warned: "If we leave amnesty in this bill, we are going to take in millions and millions of immigrants the next 10 years beyond the capacity of our institutions to absorb and assimilate .... In ten years, we may have as many as 90 million eligible to come into the country."

Congressman Henry Hyde (R-IL) also rose in support of the McCollum Amendment. "If you add 6 million people [a median estimate of the number of illegal aliens] and you have three children and a spouse," he explained, "you are talking about 24 million people, one third of the population of Mexico, eligible to come into this country." The ramifications of an influx of this magnitude are frightening to consider. So Congress simply ignored these considerations, and amnesty advocates wrapped themselves in the cloak of humanitarian righteousness. For instance, Representative Bill Richardson (D-NM) argued: "Legalization is just, humane and necessary. In the traditions of this country, it will eliminate the underclass that exists right now. It will allow 5, 7, 9, 3 million people to come out of bondage...."

The McCollum amendment was defeated 199-192. (A switch of only four votes could have struck amnesty from the legislation. The votes of all members of the House on the McCollum amendment were included in "The Conservative Index," Vote Number 20, in the January 5, 1987 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN.)

Under the amnesty provision of the new law, aliens who can show that they have resided here illegally and continuously since January 1, 1982, have one year -- until May 5, 1988 -- to apply for legal status as temporary residents. Eighteen months after temporary resident status is granted, they can be upgraded to permanent resident status, and five years after that they can apply for citizenship.

No one knows how many millions will register for amnesty. After preparing for the possibility of an overwhelming number of applications to process, INS legalization centers instead were underwhelmed by the bare trickle of aliens who submitted applications during the first week of the program -- less than five thousand nationwide. But the pace is expected to pick up very soon, as the 600 private "designated entities" across the country -- mostly churches and immigration organizations that are permitted to pre-register aliens -- begin turning in their applications to the INS.

The Immigration and Citizenship Office of the Los Angeles Catholic archdiocese is operating the largest private program, with 136 pre-registration sites. Spokeswoman Linnea Dahlstrom told THE NEW AMERICAN on May 8th that the archdiocese had already "pre-registered well over 300,000" illegals and that they had really just begun their effort.

In addition to the general legalization program, the new law also contains a Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) amnesty program. Under this provision, authored by Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY), illegals who "performed seasonal agricultural services in the United States for at least 90 man-days during the 12-month period ending on May 1, 1986" may also be eligible for legalization. June 1st marks the beginning of an 18-month period during which illegal aliens may apply for amnesty under the SAW program. The law also permits the Secretaries of Labor and Agriculture to allow still more alien farm workers into the country between 1990 and 1993 and to offer them SAW amnesty as well.

Employer sanctions also go into effect on June 1st. Under the new law, "it is unlawful for a person or other entity to hire or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States ... an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien...." Employers must maintain on file a separate federal I-9 form for each employee hired after November 6, 1986. (A small snag has developed here, in that the INS may not have its final version of the I-9 ready and available for employers by June 1st.) On the form, employers must attest, under penalty of perjury, that they have made a good faith effort to verify one or more documents submitted by a worker establishing his or her identity and authorization to work in the United States. The law applies to all employers -- regardless of how few employees the employer may have, and regardless of whether or not the newly hired workers are members of an employer's family or are known by the employer to be native-born U.S. citizens.

To allow time for employers to acquaint themselves with the new regulations, no fines were assessed during the first six-month period. For the next year of enforcement, first-time offenders will be issued warning citations. Subsequent violations may result in fines ranging from $250 to $10,000 for each illegal alien hired, or $100 to $1,000 for each case of failure to produce the proper paperwork at the request of INS inspectors. Repeat offenders may also face criminal penalties that include prison time.

"I think the main thing that is going to cause a lot of problems," says Don Tungate of the California Association of Employers, "is that so many employers still believe that the law does not apply to them. We hear this repeatedly from our members and the businesses we deal with." Another problem, he says, is the confusion engendered by the government's continuous revision of the regulations and forms. "Policy changes have been announced so frequently, that there is a great deal of uncertainty [among employers] over what is required."

To complicate matters further, the law also provides penalties for employers whose hiring practices "discriminate" against aliens who are authorized for employment, or against certain U.S. citizens merely because of their "national origin." Thus, employers must not only screen out unauthorized aliens from their work forces but must take care that their hiring and firing practices do not leave them open to charges of discrimination from disgruntled job applicants and former employees.

Stepped-up protection of our Southern border is supposed to be the third leg of the immigration reform package's "strategic triad." The reality, however, is that this leg, which should be the most critical element of immigration control, has never been treated as a priority issue by United States lawmakers. Neither Congress nor the Reagan Administration has given any indication of serious intent to provide the INS and the Border Patrol with the manpower and resources necessary to regain control of our national boundaries.

Title I, Section III of the Immigration Reform and Control Act expresses "the sense of Congress" that the Border Patrol and the INS receive an increase in personnel "at least 50 percent higher than such level for fiscal year 1986." Toward that end, the bill authorized an additional $422 million for enforcement in fiscal year 1987 and another $419 million in fiscal year 1988, which is more than a fifty percent increase over the 1986 budget of $600 million.

That may seem like a sufficient budget increase -- until one considers the enormity of the crisis and the fact that the INS has been pitifully understaffed and underfunded for years. The Border Patrol, the front-line defense force of the INS, has only 3,200 men to secure America's entire borderline. The bulk of them are assigned to the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexican boundary, where most of the 1.8 million illegal aliens arrested last year were apprehended.

Immigration Watch, published by Americans for Immigration Control, points out: "The total enforcement staff of the INS, including the Border Patrol, numbered 7,599 in 1985, less than a third the number of officers in the New York City Police Department. There are fewer Border Patrol Officers to guard the entire country than there are federal protective officers guarding buildings in Washington, D.C." At any given hour there are no more than 400 to 500 officers patrolling our entire southern perimeter. As a consequence, in most areas the border is wide open. A personnel increase of 400-500 percent, not 50 percent, would be needed to correct this deficiency.

However, over the more than six months since the law was passed, the INS and Border Patrol have yet to see any relief. The bill's $400 million dollar enforcement augmentations, as stated above, were authorizations, not appropriations. By contrast, the legislation did appropriate funds for the amnesty programs. This was another case of congressional liberals making sure that all of their demands would be met, while the conservatives accepted lip service and empty promises. In actual practice, the law has stretched the already undermanned INS even thinner by giving them the enormous additional hassles of amnesty and employer sanctions, without providing them with the much needed staff increases. Yet, this year, the Reagan Administration requested INS budget increases that are even smaller than those authorized by Congress in the legislation!

There is another way in which the new law will adversely affect enforcement. Title I, Section 116 requires that INS officers obtain a search warrant before going into open fields after illegal aliens. Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who helped to lead the opposition to the search warrant requirement, offered this practical observation: "If the Immigration and Naturalization Service suspected that there were illegal aliens working in the field, they would have to find out who the owner or the leasees of the field were. That would require a title search, and in States where leases are not recorded, it would be practically impossible."

But even if they did carry through with this procedure, reasoned Sensenbrenner, "when the Immigration Service people show up, the illegal aliens could simply scamper across the fields to the next adjoining plot of land, which was not covered by the warrant, and then the INS would be thwarted...."

Administering this section of the law, warned Sensenbrenner, "would be a nightmare .... The Border Patrol doesn't have the manpower or resources to spend the time necessary to track owners or agents to obtain a warrant. With fewer Border patrol agents than Capitol Hill Police, why are we doing everything in our power to make their jobs more difficult?" Why indeed?

Last year was the fourth year in a row that apprehensions of illegal aliens topped the one million mark. That is an incredible amount of "traffic," as the border officers call it. Most Border Patrolmen will readily admit, however, that for every illegal alien caught, two to three, and sometimes as many as eight to ten, successfully slip across the border. Not all of these will stay in the United States, of course. Many of them return to Mexico each year after several weeks or months of work. But there is no denying that increasing numbers of these illegal entrants are taking up permanent residency here.

No one knows with Certainty how many illegal aliens are in the United States today. For the last several years, the federal government has used the "conservative" figure of three to six million. The Hesburgh Commission put the figure closer to eight million. Maurice C. Inman, general counsel for the INS, believes that 12 to 15 million is a more realistic figure. The Environmental Fund claims that the number is closer to 20 million. If only the lower estimates are correct, we could be swamped with a chain migration of incredible proportions. But if the higher estimates are instead correct --

"Open-border" advocates often argue that illegal aliens are an economic asset to the United States, but there is an abundance of data that indicates that the alien population has become a very significant burden on the American taxpayer. Sponsors of the Immigration Reform and Control Act were aware of this economic burden, and they recognized that, in order to quell opposition from state and local governments, they would have to assist these entities in providing welfare social services to aliens. The bill earmarks $1 billion per year over four years for this purpose, but no one believes that this will offset the increased burden.

"There is no way $1 billion can cover the huge costs," claims San Diego County supervisor Susan Golding, whose county is in the main point of entry for Mexican nationals. Los Angeles County alone is expected to spend around $700 million on health, welfare, and educational services to aliens. Meaning, just one county could soak up 70 percent of the allocated federal funds. Children of illegal aliens have caused an overcrowding problem in many Los Angeles schools and account for 75 to 85 percent of the babies born in Los Angeles County hospitals.

In recent years the illegal alien population has harbored an ever larger criminal element. INS Deputy Assistant Regional Commissioner in Los Angeles, Donna Coultice, rattles off some sobering crime statistics: "Illegal aliens are involved in one third of the rapes and murders and one fourth of the burglaries in San Diego County. In Orange County they account for over half of the homicides .... Aliens are responsible for about 90 percent of the narcotics trafficking in Santa Ana (CA) and 80 percent of that in Fullerton (CA) .... Four hundred illegal aliens a month are added to the California prison system for various crimes. The cost to California taxpayers for incarceration of illegal aliens is $136 million annually."

The failure of the federal government to reverse the deteriorating illegal immigration crisis has seriously compromised our national security, It would be foolish in the extreme to believe that terrorist organizations and Communist governments would not take, and have not already taken, advantage of the porous U.S. borders to infiltrate saboteurs and terrorists into our midst.

Intelligence experts believe that Fidel Castro planted several thousand agents among the Mariel refugees who reached our shores from Cuba in 1980. Castro himself brazenly boasted of this coup at a secret terrorist conference in Minimbo, Nicaragua later that year.

Mexico plays host to virtually every international terrorist organization, and the Soviet embassy in Mexico City has long been known as the center of KGB terrorist and espionage operations for North America. In the summer of 1986, a Texas county sheriff drew some national attention when he went public with information that his department had gathered on terrorist training operations in Mexico.

At a July 18th press conference, Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter displayed a map of Mexico with markers designating the locations of a least five terrorist bases that had been verified with hard evidence. The evidence had come from Mexican nationals with whom the sheriffs office had previously cooperated to obtain information on drug smuggling and other criminal activities. '"these were proven, reliable sources," Sheriff Painter claimed, "and the authenticity of the documents was corroborated independently by other reliable informants."

According to the Mexican sources, the camps were financed with drug money from Colombia and were used to train Libyans, Cubans, Colombians, and others for terrorist operations. According to the informants' map, base sites were located in Mexico near Hermosillo, Jalapa, Oaxaca, Monterrey, Ciudad Obregon, and several other cities. The sheriff was frustrated, however, by the total lack of interest shown by federal officials, when, in June 1986, he traveled to Washington to present them with this information. Painter met with a representative of Vice President George Bush, an aide to Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), and officials of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Customs. An official in the State Department's anti-terrorist division told him that the information was "most accurate and up-to-date," but that was about the extent of interest shown.

Sheriff Painter recently told THE NEW AMERICAN that, in the year since his Washington trip, he had not been contacted by any of the federal officials. "It just seems incredible to me that none of these folks were interested enough to even look at our information and check out our sources when it involves such serious matters of national security."

In order to stanch the flow across our border, two objectives must be met: first, adequate border enforcement to stop the flow of new illegal immigrants. Second, legislation to head off the grave threat of legal chain migration. The first of these objectives can be accomplished by drastically increasing the personnel and resources of the INS and the Border Patrol, by deploying U.S. Armed Forces along the U.S.-Mexican border, or by a combination of both methods.

In an editorial that expressed the view of a growing number of Americans, The Dan Gabriel [CA] Valley Tribune stated: "President Reagan should order the military to help the INS and Border Patrol stop the startling surge of humanity and narcotics across our border. Our present force of agents is simply outnumbered."

Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) has also endorsed this approach: "I believe that we've got enough military personnel that we could pull out from some of these other places around the world where people are not satisfactorily doing their share in their own national defense," and use them to fortify our own border, he said. With no end in sight to the flood of illegal aliens, and with every indication that the turmoil in Central America will result in an escalation of immigration northward, deployment of adequate forces to secure our borders is one of the most urgent issues before the United States today.

The objective of heading off legal chain migration may not be as immediate a threat, but it is a serious threat nevertheless. It poses a danger unlike any other that America has faced in the past. It is a "ticking time bomb," says Palmer Stacey, executive director of Americans for Immigration Control (AIC). "Under the law, most of the amnestied aliens will be allowed to apply for citizenship in 1993 .... Once these lawbreakers get citizenship they can send for their families. Millions and millions of aliens will legally pour into the U.S. -- unless we change the law." AIC proposes that the current law be changed so that immediate family members of naturalized U.S. citizens will no longer be exempt from our immigration quotas. Presently, there is no limit to the number of family members who may be admitted over and above our annual immigration cap of 270,000.

Stacey is confident that this change can be made. "There is a growing anger and backlash to this betrayal by the politicians," he says. "This issue is not going to go away. In fact it is going to grow and grow. Very soon the politicians are going to be beseiged by outraged constituents demanding a stop to this invasion, and even the most liberal politicians will be forced to listen if they want to stay in office."

In 20 years from the first amnesty program 1986, we went from 3 million invaders to 20 million and counting.

It seems like this 1987 article could have been written today

A companion article:

The Silent Invasion: The Subversion of Sovereignty by Illegal Immigration
By William F. Jasper
First published in The New American, June 2, 1986
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1637233/posts

after the next terrorist attack in America, all this nonsense will come to a screeching halt.
the borders will be secured, the illegals and the Muslims will have to pack up and go back to whatever hellhole they originated from and the walls on BOTH BORDERS will be constructed.

Our ancestors didn't risk life and limb to come to this country just so a bunch of camel jockeys could terrorize our women and children and make hamburger out of our families and so Vicente Fox could dump his problems and illegal drugs on our back porch. No illegal drugs, no illegal aliens and no Muslim terrroists. Point, Game, Set, Match!

Enough is enough...the "free lunch" is over and Mr. Nice Guy will have left the building.

Semper Fi,
Kelly

Unfortunately, this is "in your face" from our elected officials to their constituents, the American people. Immigrants are people who apply for, go through the ropes, wait until accepted into our country. Invaders are people who sneak across our borders, or enter through our ports hidden in container ships. That the U.S. governing body gives preference to the latter over the former, AND the American people should certainly tell us SOMETHING. If the majority remains silent, we have only ourselves to blame.

>Our policy for handling Illegal Immigration is Suicidal>

Actually, it is Genocidal. Genocide against the American People. A true holocaust against the country.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.