Amnesty Only Encourages More Illegal Immigration

“No amnesty!”

Good luck with that.

“Secure the border!”

Yeah, that, too.

Why not? Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas describes the problem with unenforced illegal immigration laws to Politico’s Ginger Gibson: “The crush of illegals have bankrupted local governments, shut down hospitals, overwhelmed schools and crashed local economies, hurting largely Hispanic citizens.”

He’s against the Senate’s immigration reform plan.

“[It] does not fix our nation’s broken immigration system,” Stockman said. “It rewards lawbreakers and encourages a new flood of illegals, perpetuating the very problems it claims to solve.”

Here’s the money quote: “The surge of illegals strains relations with legal Hispanic citizens, many of whom come from families who have been in the United States longer than most white residents.”

Boom.

From the Gang of Eight Senate proposal: Give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, putting them 10 to 15 years in line behind immigrants being ripped off by lawyers. Make them pay fines and fees from savings accounts they don’t have.

In addition to popular Republican Marco Rubio endorsing the plan, there are more facets appealing to conservatives: the plan shows moral compassion for children brought to this country by relatives, the appearance of fair play and bringing people into the system as contributors to our society.

Problem is, it likely will encourage more illegal immigration.

As for securing the border before proceeding with any level of amnesty, who’s on the committee that decides the border is “secure?” How is “secured” measured?

Robert Gittelson, President and co-founder of Conservatives for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, told me he believes the framework based on this proposal will be passed this year. It reflects the desire of all to get this done while securing the borders and upholding the rule of law.

Daniel Stein, President of the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, hopes not. This sort of amnesty would encourage more illegal immigration, costing society billions. His solution? We already have a plan: enforce the e-Verify laws.

Rewind to Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Radia in the Orange County Register about 18 months ago cataloguing e-Verify failures. They wrote, ” When chipmaker Intel used E-Verify to screen several of its new hires in 2008, over 12 percent were initially flagged as unauthorized. All were eventually cleared to work, but as Intel put it, ‘only after significant investment of time and money, lost productivity and, for our affected foreign national staff, many hours of confusion, worry, and upset.'”

According to a major 2009 audit by research service Westat, 4.1 percent of the system’s initial responses to employment verification queries were inaccurate. E-Verify even approved more than half of all employees who were actually unauthorized!”

And today? While one-third of new hires in Arizona were not even checked through e-Verify, the CATO Institute reports great improvements in the system. Currently, 98.3 percent of people pass E-Verify immediately. 1.7 percent of people who are flagged include a small number of legal, eligible workers.

Nationwide, only about 7 percent of employers use the e-Verify system, which is unfortunate, as a dairy farmer in Arizona told a TV reporter that when federal agents inspected his records, they found 10 illegals working for him. They did not fine him, because he was trying to comply by using e-Verify.

The best start to this might just be to successfully promote e-Verify to businesses in all states, publishing stories like this dairy farmer and showing guilty fat white guys busted for hiring illegals doing the perp-walk on every news outlet in the U.S.

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