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Over the last couple of years as this column has become more widely read and because I have taken a specific position on Immigration reform that doesn’t quite follow the conventional wisdom of the politicos or the media, I have been faced with a number of debates. More and more the arguments focus on making new laws and calling people with different views, all kinds of names.
I have read the “touted” discussions on the matter such as the Cato Institute offerings, and others such as those published by “U.S. Foreign Policy In Focus” and written Dr. George Weissenger of New York Institute of Technology.
My thirty years in Border Enforcement in Customs as a troop and as a manager, as an instructor in INS and Customs cross training, and as an instructor in the Overseas Training Program providing guidance to foreign Border Officials keeps telling me that there are things that we are missing as we watch the changing positions.
So far the only organized rational examination of the issues has been found in Ruben Navarrette’s columns. His most recent “Blame the Democrats” with its focus on the political rational, for the Democrats, Republicans, Democrat/Republicans and the Republican/Democrats, as well as their constituencies like “big labor” helped put a new perspective on some of the bits of information identified in my earlier research.

In illustration consider that the relatively recent Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act added 5000 Border Agents and only 300 interior enforcement agents. It really appears that the Administration, since the early 1990’s has intentionally avoided enforcing the immigration laws (at the work place) inside the United States. In fact there is evidence that INS shut down internal enforcement in response to Census Bureau concerns that official statistics could minimize the parameters of the illegal alien population.
A number of local businessmen have reported that attempts to verify legitimacy of job applicants with the INS or any other law enforcement agency or even ascertain the validity of social security numbers from that agency were refused, and then when the Border Patrol raided the location, queries identified undocumented workers instantly. The workers in question were not minimum wage employees, working at jobs that others refused to take, but folks, with documents that are more complete and official looking than the real thing; working hard for good money in businesses that can never find enough workers, even on the border!
The raids resulted in substantial disruption of the production of services provided and increased costs to the employer only because the administration refuses to fulfill its primary responsibility in protecting the national sovereignty and ensuring peace and order.
Immigration has been used by both political parties as a political tool for many years, to the point that today, these policies of the government enforcing only the laws that are politically expedient have created a culture where there is no respect for the rule of law or any authority. Whenever anything goes wrong, the “rulers” pontificate that we have to have a new law, so that the problem never happens again; rather than examine the violation of existing controls and then assessing appropriate consequences for misbehavior.
The “consequences” for this misbehavior should probably be that all congresspersons should be limited to no more than 2 terms because they are all guilty.
Until I read Mr. Navarrette’s article, I missed the full importance of my earlier point that the government had intentionally avoided enforcing the immigration laws and that the administration apparently discouraged enforcement in the work place because of demographics.
If undocumented workers were not employed and they did return to their native countries from which they originally came, not only would the economy suffer but the census would not report the larger numbers of people in a specific state or congressional district and therefore reduce the numbers of representatives needed and the millions of government dollars that are apportioned by population. The undocumented 12 million folks mostly don’t vote against the incumbent but still support his job and ability to bring home the bacon.
With this in consideration and the obvious inability of the current bureaucracy to assure that there are adequate workers to support our expanding economy; consider that with all these millions of these undocumented folks unemployment is still in the low single digits and if these folks are doing jobs that employers can’t find others to do then everyone who is able to work is working.
The current system no longer works and needs to be rebuilt. One of the last things we need is to create new criminals and provide bigger paydays for criminal attorneys, require new prisons, etc. To criminalize these folks would be ridiculous when most other similar violations are treated as civil actions. To resolve violations like these legal and evidentiary requirements are much easier to deal with and can be concluded with much less cost and achieve an appropriate measure of consequence for the misbehavior.
Any arrivals of undocumented aliens should be considered civil violations and require a specific remedial action and a scale of penalties (either financial or community service) that will discourage future attempts and pay any costs incurred.
Any legitimization of the current undocumented residents should be dealt with in the same way but any immigrant petitioners who have had their applications approved must be allowed to come to the United States immediately and be granted permanent residence before any other legalization process begins.
Before that, the first thing that must be done is provide a way to validate new workers by verifying social security numbers and the fact that they are not in use anywhere else.
None of this will be accomplished only by making a new law; an independent, fair and impartial bureaucracy that the politicians are discouraged from confounding must be created (one doesn’t exist now) and adequately staffed to administer the entire process exclusive of law enforcement (the Border Patrol is most competent but hampered by politics).