Immigration is not being properly controlled

Letter date: 
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Letter publisher: 
The Bulletin
Letter author: 
Keith Sime
Letter body: 

With the exception of the Native Americans who preceded us, we are a nation of immigrants.

From the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded on the banks of the James River on May 14, 1607, the country grew to 13 colonies that won a revolutionary war against all odds. Our Constitution was adopted in 1789, and the Bill of Rights was added in 1791.

There was little immigration from 1770 to 1830, but legal immigrants swelled to more than 2 million between 1830 and 1850. Between 1850 and 1930, a wave of nearly 25 million legal European immigrants made the long trip to the U.S. Congress changed the nation’s basic policy about immigration in the 1920s, not only limiting the number but also assigning slots according to quotas based on national origins. However, the legislation excluded the Western Hemisphere from the quota system and allowed immigrants to move freely from Mexico, the Caribbean and other parts of Central and South America.

Legal immigration from 1930 was limited so the earlier wave of immigrants and those limited numbers coming thereafter could be adequately assimilated by the country. In 1952, further legislation affirmed the national-origins quota system and limited total annual legal immigration to a little more than 175,000 per year, according to Wikipedia.

While efforts to limit legal immigration were being implemented, the primary labor source for much of the agricultural industry in the United States was coming from Mexico, both legally through the bracero program and illegally. Between 1944 and 1954, the number of people entering the country illegally coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. Efforts to return the people living in the country illegally had limited success because of questions surrounding the ethics and sometimes mistreatment used to force their return, and the program was abandoned, according to Wikipedia.

By the 1980s, concern for the number of people entering the country illegally spurred Ronald Reagan and Congress to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This act was sold as a crackdown. It gave amnesty to those who had been here since 1982 (estimated to be 5 million), imposed penalties on employers who hire people living in the country illegally and was intended to tighten the border. However, the employer penalties were effectively gutted, and Congress didn’t provide the money for border security. As a result, the act was largely a failure other than to legalize several million people who should not have been here in the first place.

In the succeeding years, neither Congress nor any of the presidents have seen fit to address themselves to the increasing problem of people entering the country illegally and the looming problems they bring.

President Barack Obama, through his overt efforts to fundamentally change the USA, in many cases unconstitutionally, has exacerbated the problem with his recent executive order (blocked by the court but proceeded anyway) shielding those in the country illegally from deportation (upward of 4 million), lack of control of the borders (per Sen. John McCain, 4 million in 2002 alone coming from 75 countries and 120,000 children alone this year), release of people in the country illegally who have criminal convictions (36,007 in 2013 alone) and lack of action against “sanctuary cities” (276 local jurisdictions in 43 states and the District of Columbia have adopted sanctuary policies).

The seeds of our destruction are being sown. Continued uncontrolled immigration is no less than an invasion that will overwhelm our ability to assimilate immigrants and expose us to infiltration by terrorists. Congress has abrogated its responsibility for addressing itself to the immigration problem for far too long.

Democrats haven’t because it seems they are looking for more voters regardless of where they get them, and more recently, Republican leaders, particularly the House Leadership, seem to be more interested in marginalizing their conservative members than taking any effective actions. It has taken a controversial billionaire businessman presidential candidate to bring the issue to the fore. Hopefully his attention to this issue will force appropriate actions to be taken sooner rather than later.