My View: Amnesties undermine immigration laws
Editor’s note: This guest column is in response to Lewis & Clark history professor Elliott Young’s Dec. 11 My View column, “President Obama got it half right on immigration.”
“Our immigration system is broken” ... we hear this line repeatedly, and it’s usually cited as a reason for granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants.
Rarely do we hear discussion of what broke our immigration system, but that’s a very important point to consider before attempting to “fix” the system.
Lax to no enforcement of current immigration laws is why we now have 11 million or more undocumented immigrants in the country, with politicians and open-borders advocates crying that our immigration system is broken and urging amnesties as a remedy. If the immigration laws had been adequately enforced over recent decades, we wouldn’t have a problem of illegal immigration or any arguments about amnesties.
Congress was persuaded in 1986 to grant a general amnesty. Proponents claimed it would be a one-time-only measure and that, henceforth, border security would prevent further undocumented immigration. However, enforcement promises were forgotten, and six more major amnesties followed, the last one in 2000. At least these were amnesties passed by Congress in its constitutional role as lawmakers.
Now, President Obama, in defiance of his inaugural oath to enforce the laws written by Congress, has ordered his appointees in the Department of Homeland Security to give amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. And the claims that the Obama amnesty affects no more people than the number who gained amnesty under President Bush’s executive action of 1990 are false.
A careful analysis of the Bush amnesty of 1990 shows that no more than 50,000 people, at most, gained legal status. Also, Bush’s action was related to — and supplemented — an amnesty passed by Congress. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies calculates that the likely amnesty component of Obama’s 2014 unilateral edicts is 100 times larger than its supposed precedent. As he notes, “Some precedent.”
Why pretend to have an immigration system? We might as well dispense with the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the DHS if immigration laws are not to be enforced. Repeated amnesties have undermined immigration laws and devalued citizenship. Lax immigration law enforcement has led to depressed wages, unemployment and underemployment of citizens, rapid increases in population, overcrowding, and burdensome costs for social services.
Some order and stability could be restored by returning to enforcement of the laws against undocumented immigration.
In addition to undocumented immigration, there are other major immigration problems that need to be addressed, including excessive levels of legal immigration, fraud and abuse in visa programs, and refugee/asylum fraud. Each of these problems should be considered separately by Congress and given careful attention, not mixed in with amnesties in a huge “comprehensive” bill.
Amnesty advocates like to point out that 11 million undocumented immigrants can’t be deported en masse, but no one is calling for that. There are better ways to reduce the size of the undocumented immigrant population.
The federal E-Verify program should be made mandatory for all employers for current work forces as well as new hires. That would motivate undocumented immigrants to leave and discourage others from coming illegally. Publicly-funded benefits other than emergency medical care should not be given to undocumented immigrants. Congress should pass a law ending the practice of birthright citizenship, which arose through misreadings of the Constitution. Citizenship at birth should derive from that of the parents.
There’s an important basic question that too many people never seem to think about: What level of immigration is optimal for the U.S., considering the necessity for a balance of population, environment and quality of life? Immigrants accounted for 80.4 percent of population growth between the 2000 and 2010 censuses. The nation’s immigrant population, legal and illegal, hit a record 41.3 million in July 2013, an increase of 1.4 million since July 2010.
If immigration continues as the Census Bureau expects, the nation’s population will increase from 309 million in 2010 to 436 million in 2050 — an increase of 127 million (41 percent). That projected increase of 127 million is larger than the combined populations of Great Britain and France. It also exceeds the entire U.S. population in 1930.
Because of all these reasons, another amnesty is certainly not the way to fix our “broken immigration system.”
Elizabeth Van Staaveren of McMinnville is a longtime member of Oregonians for Immigration Reform. She previously lived in the Washington, D.C., area, where she was employed by the U.S. Department of Labor.
