Amnesty Bill Not Dead Yet

Posted on June 15, 2007

Just when I was sighing with relief that the ill-conceived, poorly designed, nonsensical Ted Kennedy - John McCain amnesty bill had died a deserved death on the Senate Floor, it appears that it's about to be resurrected. Like a zombie from a B horror movie, this monster simply will not die.

We have federal immigration laws that are not being enforced. We have Americans who can't get jobs because illegal workers will take half the pay and no benefits. We have a porous border through which terrorists can easily slip. And we have the Mexican government which refuses to address the social inequities in its country that are the root cause of this problem. Poverty and the hiring in Mexico of South American immigrants are root causes of the immigration wave of desperate people who are easily exploited by human traffickers. The Mexican government has said that it has to hire immigrants from Central and South America to "do the jobs that Mexicans won't do." Sound familiar?

This ludicrous patchwork amnesty bill -- and make no mistake, it is an amnesty bill -- rewards illegal behavior, penalizes immigrants who have followed the rules and contains language that will allow immigration authorities to violate current privacy laws which prevent them from seeing the tax returns of Americans. It's a mess and it is only going to make things worse.

President Bush is dead wrong when he says we must have immigration legislation. We don't need any legislation at all. We need to enforce the laws we have and get tough with Mexico. Our neighbor to the South is actively working to destabilize our economy, because it doesn't want to take care of its own poor people. Increased drug trafficking and violence have also contributed to the problem. The policies of the Mexican government need to be addressed before we even think about drafting new immigration legislation.

A recent Rasmussen poll shows only 20% of Americans think that the bill should be revived in its present form. Not that our president, Ted Kennedy or John McCain cares what we think, of course.