Posted on 01/24/2003 1:06:56 AM PST by hoosierskypilot
There is a quaint fact that tends to be forgotten in discussions of immigration policy: the law is the law. The law says that some persons have a legal right to be in the United States and some do not. This law is not arbitrary: it was made by a legitimate, democratically elected government expressing the will of the American people. Therefore, it is high time to get serious about enforcing it by deporting all of our illegal aliens. Fortunately, this is not as hard as it looks, as we already deport some of them and merely need to apply the same programs to a greater number of people. Politically, it may be hard; logistically, it’s no big deal.
The raw numbers are staggering. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimates there are currently more than eight million illegal aliens living within our borders, with more than a million more expected to be here by the end of 2003. It’s not like the public is unaware of the problem. Successive polling in recent years has consistently shown a clear – and thus far unanswered – mandate from the American electorate for its elected officials to faithfully enforce the laws they are sworn to uphold by removing the swelling illegal population. But key constituencies inside the governing class – principally the cheap labor lobby on the Republican side and the ethnic lobbies on the Democratic side – have successfully frustrated American democracy and the rule of law on this point.
Under pressure and in fits and starts, the federal government has been making token gestures of deportation, which prove that something could be done if the political decision were ever made to get serious. Between 1995 and 1998, funding for removing illegal aliens more than doubled, resulting in a rise in deportations from 50,400 to 171,000. Early INS estimates for Fiscal 2002 deportations come in at 147,345.
But with a pool of eight million potential deportees, appreciable progress will only be achieved through a general deportation policy, i.e., the principle that every person whose illegal status becomes known gets deported. The key thing to understand is that this would not require, as opponents would have us believe, some kind of fascistic police state out of a B-grade movie. All it would require is that well-established, existing programs for deportation operate on greater numbers of people.
Fundamentally, the politics of deportation may be heated, but actual deportation is quite boring.
It’s not as though it hasn’t been done before. In 1954, during the Eisenhower Administration, INS Commissioner Gen. Joseph May Swing instituted a mass search-and-removal operation targeting illegal aliens from Mexico scattered throughout the Southwest and Midwest. It coordinated the efforts of the U.S. Border Patrol, municipal, county, state and local police forces, along with the military. The coordinated and strategic use of resources and manpower soon produced positive results. In Texas, the nation’s second-largest state, the government needed only around 700 men to do the job, netting approximately 4,800 deportees on its first day and 1,100 daily thereafter. Deportees were shipped back to Mexico via rail and ship, often deep into the interior of the country to discourage recidivism. When funding for the initiative ran out that fall, the INS claimed some 2.1 million removals, including those who voluntarily returned to Mexico before and during the operation. Following the 1954 effort, illegal immigration dwindled until the mid-1960s.
This is the real benefit of deportation: it discourages illegal immigration in the first place, reducing both the enforcement burden and the social problems that immigration causes. Once would-be immigration criminals realize they will only be deported, their numbers drop within a range that can easily be contained. Ironically enough, this means that a laxer immigration policy, not a stricter one, requires more manpower to enforce the tatters of law that remain, and costs more money to run. Once would-be illegals get the message, there will be a lot fewer of them.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Have to start somewhere.
Why?
Everybody's for it.
You're getting pretty close to 100%.
I know most illegals really do commit other crimes besides being here illegally ---or are accessing government services right and left especially the ones who bring their entire families here. But there are a few like some domestic workers and some farm workers who would be pretty difficult to deport without going door-to-door to find them, they might work for cash and leave their families back in Mexico and aren't the main problem ---but that doesn't stop us from deporting the moochers and criminals ---what's wrong with resolving 90% or 95% of the problem? It doesn't have to be 100% or 0.
How are we going to track guest workers when we currently do not have the means to track people entering the country on legal visas?
How are we going to get the guest workers to leave the country when we "no longer need them" or their guest worker visa has expired, when we currently can't even get the illegals out of the country or those overstaying their visas? The whiners who are putting water bottles & beacons out in the deserts now, are going to be crying when we tell guest workers they have to go home.
If a guest worker has a baby in the US, is the child automatically a citizen?
If the guest workers come in and receive legal wages, benefits and have more legal recourse against employers, while employers have to start paying taxes, the guest workers' wages will be comparable to the wages for US citizens. Won’t this eliminate the “cheap labor” advantage illegals have over American workers? Why hire some uneducated, guest worker that doesn’t speak English at relatively the same cost as an American worker?
I think anchor babies and family reunification that allows someone to "sponsor" a relative they immediately get on SSI and Medicaid need to stop ---I think the entire immigration system needs to be reformed. I just don't know how 100% can be deported because there are some who work for cash and are pretty "blended in" ---how can you get them without federal agents coming uninvited onto private property looking for them? They can be deported if and when they try to access government services or try to obtain free medical care.
I also think that needs to be done ---eliminate the advantage they have because they can bring in families and have taxpayers pay the full cost so are able to work for much less than an American can. They also need to start paying taxes on their income just like Americans must do --and that also will eliminate much of their advantage.
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