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Jewish World Review May 27, 2005 / 18 Iyar, 5765 The McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
This bipartisan deal cut by Sen. John McCain is noxious. No, the
issue isn't judges. (Or campaign finance, or health care, or any
number of other things.) It's illegal immigration and a proposal
that has just been cooked up by the Arizona maverick and the
Massachusetts non-maverick Sen. Ted Kennedy to grant an amnesty to
millions of illegal immigrants.
Under the bill, illegals would have to work in the U.S. — which
they are already doing — for six years as legal temporary workers,
then they would be eligible to apply for green cards. Also, a new
category of guest workers would be created who would work here for
four years, then be eligible for green cards. This category will
likely bring another 400,000 (and probably more) foreign workers a
year into the country.
McCain and Kennedy argue that their legislation isn't an amnesty
because illegals have to pay a $1,000 fine prior to becoming
temporary workers and another $1,000 before getting their green
cards. But an amnesty with a small fine is still amnesty. Mark
Krikorian of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies
calls the fine, in effect, "a retroactive smuggling fee paid to the
U.S. government." The bill could make illegals stand on one foot and
wave their arms before becoming legal — but it would still be an
amnesty.
It applies to any illegal with a job, and to his spouse and
children. There are roughly 10 million to 11 million illegals. Of
them, 6 million to 7 million are employed, and the rest are
generally spouses and children.
We've been here before. A 1986 amnesty gave 2.7 million illegals
green cards. The law spawned massive fraud. A man who would go on to
be one of the terrorists in the first World Trade Center bombing, an
Egyptian cabdriver working in New York, was legalized under the law
as a farmworker.
The 1986 law caused a huge spike in the flow of illegals. It
sent a message of tolerance for lawbreaking, and would-be illegal
Mexican immigrants had an important toehold in the U.S. in the form
of their newly legal friends and family. Today, the illegal
population is double what it was in 1986, and an estimated 800,000
new illegals come every year.
How did such disastrous legislation pass? 1986 was one of the
great bait-and-switches of all time. The amnesty came upfront, and
the enforcement was supposed to happen later.
It never did.
McCain-Kennedy would tell the Social Security Administration to
start the program from scratch. Oddly, it gives the job of auditing
companies to ensure that they aren't hiring illegals to the
ineffectual Labor Department instead of the perhaps slightly less
ineffectual immigration service at DHS. "A lot of it seems intended
actually to handcuff DHS enforcement people," says Krikorian. The
rest of the enforcement provisions are a mishmash of calls for
reports, coordination plans, advisory committees — in other words,
the usual dodges when politicians want the public to think they are
doing something they don't want to do.
The legislation stipulates that it doesn't grant state and local
police any more authority to enforce immigration laws, but it goes
out of its way to include language about securing Mexico's border
with Guatemala. This bizarre concern reflects a concept — bandied
about by the Bush administration as well — called the "North
American security perimeter." It holds that we can all be one happy
North American family, and the U.S.-Mexico border won't matter so
much, if only we can keep those pesky Central Americans (and others)
out of Mexico.
Of course, we should keep our focus about 1,600 miles north of
the Mexico-Guatemala line, at our own border. The first step is
defeating McCain-Kennedy.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
