Amnesty, By Any Other Name, Would Smell. The current immigration bill, which appears to have wide support among both Republicans and Democrats, has been characterized by anti-immigration conservatives as containing an "amnesty" provision. Pro-immigration business interests who want to bring in cheap labor refuse that characterization, as do supposed liberals, who are predisposed to amnesty out of various misguided sympathies. Many progressives wish the world had no hard borders and people could move anywhere on Earth they found congenial. But the elimination of border controls would not produce an even flow of people moving all around the planet from rich countries to poor as much as from poor countries to rich. We know full well that the United States in particular and other First World countries more generally would be flooded by hundreds of millions of desperately poor people from the Third World in search of a better life. While we may want everyone to have a good life, we can't accomplish that by destroying our own civilization and the economy that sustains it.
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We have had other amnesties, which were always defended as being justified by the responsible, law-abiding people to be granted amnesty, who would 'enrich' the Nation in becoming citizens and making great contributions if they were allowed to stay. How many beneficiaries of those amnesties actually troubled to become citizens? How many instead retained the citizenship of their country of origin, rejecting loyalty to our society, our language, our civilization, while accepting our cash? Of those who did become citizens, how many did it to become "Americans" emotionally and culturally? How many did it for financial benefits available to citizens but not to permanent-resident aliens? One of those benefits from the 1987 amnesty was "chain migration", whereby a new citizen was entitled to bring in parents, siblings, and children from his or her country of origin. That feature of the current amnesty plan is supposed to be closed off. If it is, we have reason to believe that a substantial proportion of people granted amnesty will not, in fact, become citizens but remain a perpetual alien presence in our midst, owing us no loyalty and participating minimally in national life, almost as tho they were still in "the old country". If that's the way they feel about this country, they should remain in Mexico, Guatemala, or wherever else they come from.
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I don't know that anyone has hard data about how many people granted amnesty in prior years went on to become citizens, nor why they did or did not so choose.
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A fairly long discussion of immigration policy by a Senior Fellow of the conservative Heritage Foundation published a year ago, that is still online at the arch-conservative Front Page Magazine, has this to say:

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. The primary purpose of the act was to decrease the number of illegal immigrants by limiting their inflow and by legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already here. In fact, the act did nothing to stem the tide of illegal entry. The number of illegal aliens entering the country increased five fold from around 140,000 per year in the 1980s to 700,000 per year today.

Illegal entries increased dramatically shortly after IRCA went into effect. It seems plausible that the prospect of future amnesty and citizenship served as a magnet to draw even more illegal immigrants into the country. After all, if the nation granted amnesty once why wouldn’t it do so again? * * *

[The article makes 5 recommendations, Nos. 2 and 3 of which are:]
Amnesty and citizenship should not be given to current illegal immigrants. Amnesty has negative fiscal consequences and is manifestly unfair to those who have waited for years to enter the country lawfully. Amnesty would also serve as a magnet, drawing even more future illegal immigration.

Any guest worker program should grant temporary, not permanent, residence and should not be a pathway to citizenship. A guest worker program should not disproportionately swell the ranks of low-skill workers.

There are things in which arch-conservatives and sensible progressives can agree. I concur with the two proposals I quote above (albeit with the reservation that a guest-worker program should target areas of the economy in which there really aren't adequate supplies of Americans willing to work, at things like unskilled agricultural labor, especially during planting and harvest seasons), and with a third of the five made in that article (strict border control and penalties for employers who knowingly employ illegals), tho I disagree with the other two recommendations. One advocates denying citizenship to children born here, no matter the origin of their parents. Such a measure would plainly be outrageously unconstitutional, and Americans are not about to amend the Constitution to end citizenship by birth! The last proposal has two parts, first that we raise standards for immigrants and second that we forbid even legal immigrants from bringing in anyone but spouses and minor children. But (1) (a) the main reason for bringing in large numbers of immigrants is to fill those, very, low-skill jobs that Americans supposedly don't want; (1) (b) to give our best jobs to foreigners is insane; and (2) we have always permitted citizens to bring in their relatives, and family-reunification is an honorable and indeed necessary part of enlightened immigration policy. People who want to make a life here should not have to leave their family in misery back home in order to do so. That would be dishonorable in the eyes of decent people. What kind of immigrants, then, would we get?
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As for shifting immigration preference from the unskilled to the skilled, there are millions of engineers and other highly trained Indians, Chinese, etc., who could take jobs away from Americans in our own country if we let them. Why would we do that? Americans should get the best jobs this society has to offer. If not enuf Americans are being trained to fill all the best jobs in this country, then Americans should be given better education.
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Immigration must serve our foreign-policy objectives, among which is to improve the lot of the poor in the Third World, and serve American economic and social interests. Replacing Americans with foreigners in U.S. industry must not be the goal of national economic policy as accomplished by legal importation of masses of skilled foreigners. An influx of Indian and Chinese engineers, for instance, would subvert wages and benefits for Americans in their fields, while giving us no significant competitive advantage against the bulk of Indian and Chinese engineers who remain in their own country, where they will still work much cheaper.
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As for amnesty, by any name, the last amnesty was in 1987, twenty years ago. When will the next be if this one is granted? And why would anyone doubt that there will indeed be a future amnesty if one is granted now?
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There are sensible positions midway between open borders and sealed borders.
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One is to have generous levels of legal immigration but to set standards for immigrants that protect U.S. economic and social interests. We can make taking assimilation courses a condition to admission to the Nation, whereby all immigrants must learn American English, customs, and laws if they are to remain here.
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Another midpoint position is to extend our borders to embrace the populations now seeking refuge in the United States, as by annexing Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and, over time, creating them into prosperous Sunbelt states. If we have the right and power to change the circumstances on the ground that potential immigrants now live on, we can reduce the "push" factors that drive millions to abandon their place of birth. Given a choice between living in their home village in grinding poverty, without electricity or running water or sewage treatment or education, on the one hand, and moving to the United States, on the other, of course tens of millions would choose to move. But if you electrify their villages, provide them sanitary drinking water and indoor plumbing, good schools, and a chance to work for decent pay in their own village, without their having to learn a 'foreign' language and move away from their family and friends, how many will choose to uproot themselves and move hundreds or even thousands of miles to the older states? Most people in traditional societies like Mexico would much rather live where they were born than cut themselves off from everyone and everything they know. The ultimate solution, then, to our immigration problem is to make life better in the sending countries, and the fastest way to do that, with maximal benefit to us as well, is by bringing Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean into the Union as states.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,409 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:24 PM