EXCERPT: Some businesses in Georgia argue that they need large numbers of immigrants because there are not enough native-born Americans to fill jobs that require relatively little education. However, state employment data show that as the number of less-educated immigrant workers has grown dramatically, the share of less-educated natives holding a job in Georgia has declined significantly.
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2. Limit relatives’ rights: Decide what categories of people to admit, then let in all who qualify
EXCERPT: Rather than accelerating family immigration under the pretext of limiting it, Congress should simply eliminate all the extended-family categories. (One exception: Those who expect to get their visas within one year.) Special immigration rights for relatives should be limited to the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens; they are — and should always be — admitted without any numerical caps. Other relatives should be allowed to move here only if they prove their value to the American people as a whole.
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3. Misguided City ID Plan Undermines Security, Rewards Illegal Immigration
EXCERPT: Ostensibly issued by foreign governments to keep track of their citizens, these cards have been used by Mexican consuls in recent years to provide documents to undocumented (illegally present) Mexicans or anyone claiming to be Mexican. The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and the FBI all have declared these cards worthless as identification. Steven McCraw, then assistant director of the FBI’s intelligence office, told Congress in 2003, ‘There are major criminal threats posed by the cards, and a potential terrorist threat.’
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4. 2007 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration
Panel discussion transcript, June 8, 2007
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5. Amnesty, R.I.P.: A bad deal dies
EXCERPT: It seems that the overreaching of amnesty advocates has politicized a lot of people, and not just conservatives, over the non-enforcement of the immigration law. And that’s a good thing too — if the White House concludes that amnesty is unattainable, there will be a strong temptation to end the enforcement show that’s been staged over the past six months or so, with workplace raids designed to bolster the administration’s credibility on the issue. A vigilant citizenry will be required to ensure that doesn’t happen — that enforcement is not only not discontinued, but that it’s expanded, so we can end the Bush administration’s ’silent amnesty’ and get to work implementing a real strategy of attrition through enforcement.
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6. Senate Amnesty Could Strain Welfare System
EXCERPT: Of course, immigrants, including illegal aliens, also pay taxes. However, because of the education level and resulting incomes levels of Mexican and Latin American immigrants, their tax payments are much less than natives on average. The same is true for illegal aliens. In a 2004 study, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that illegal alien households used about $2,700 more services than they paid in taxes at the federal level only. We also found that households headed by a legal Mexican immigrant created a net fiscal drain at the federal level of roughly $15,000, and for those with only a high school degree the drain was a little over $3,700. However, those with more education were a fiscal benefit. A new Heritage Foundation study estimated the net fiscal drain at all levels of government created by households headed by high school dropout immigrants at about $20,000 a year. A 1997 National Research Council study found the same pattern — less-educated immigrants create a net fiscal drain and educated immigrants create a net fiscal benefit.
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7. The Senate Immigration Bill: Good or Bad for America?
Moderator: Philip Terzian, The Weekly Standard
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8. Legal, Good / Illegal, Bad? Let’s call the whole thing off
EXCERPT: Not only are the flows of legal and illegal immigration related, but the impacts they have on the United States are similar. The effect that illegal immigration has in reducing wages for low-skilled American workers, for instance, is only partly caused by the illegality. The majority of illegal immigrants actually work on the books, having provided a fake or stolen Social Security number, but they command low wages regardless because most of them lack even a high-school education and thus are unequipped for advancement in a modern society. In other words, the chief problem that immigration creates for less-educated or young or minority American workers is that it floods the job market with competitors, illegal and legal.
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9. Without Merit: Why have skills-based immigration at all?
EXCERPT: But to answer whether we should have a merit-based system, you need to clarify for yourself the purposes of having any immigration at all. Others may answer differently, but as I see it, immigration policy is not an employee-procurement system for American business, but rather a citizen-recruitment program for the American people. And while higher-skilled immigrants will be more likely to master the initial indicators of Americanization — speaking English, keeping a job, paying your bills and taxes, and in general exhibiting behavior in lines with middle-class norms — they may be less likely to develop the deeper, emotional connections that mark true Americanization. Higher-skilled immigrants are more likely to arrive here with a fully formed modern national consciousness and have both the means and the inclination to pursue transnational lives — both through the formality of dual citizenship, and also emotionally, by living in two countries simultaneously without developing a genuine attachment to either.
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10. Temporary Means Temporary’? No it doesn’t. And it shouldn’t
EXCERPT: The temptation to delegate certain categories of work to menials is as old as civilization. It was the basis of the Hindu caste system, the Spartan economy, antebellum southern society, and daily life today in the oil states of the Persian Gulf. It is based on the premise that other men are labor inputs destined for those jobs that Americans (or Brahmans or Spartans or white southerners or Saudis) won’t do. It is subversive of republican virtue, moving us back toward the kind of master-servant society America was founded to transcend.
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11. No Alien Left Behind: There’s nothing as permanent as temporary immigration status
EXCERPT: Our experience with TPS leads to only one possible conclusion: Once an illegal alien gets legal status, no matter how ‘temporary,’ he’s here for good. Sponsors of the Senate’s amnesty bill know this full well.
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12. Fort Dix Fix: Immigration policy in wartime
EXCERPT: The nation’s 700,000 state and local law-enforcement officers encounter illegal aliens every day in the normal course of their duties, and police cooperation is essential to any successful federal effort at immigration control. The Senate bill, however, actually undermines security by ensuring, in Section 136(d), that ‘Nothing in this section may be construed to provide additional authority to any State or local entity to enforce Federal immigration laws.’
This is especially pertinent regarding the Fort Dix plot. The three Duka brothers — illegal aliens all — were stopped by police on various New Jersey jurisdictions 75 times without any inquiry into their lack of immigration status.
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13. Proper enforcement is the only solution
EXCERPT: The overriding purpose of the Senate bill is to amnesty illegal immigrants — everything else is window-dressing. Rather than go down this road, Congress would do well to put off further legislating on the issue and instead demand that the president do his job. Only when there’s a demonstrated political commitment to enforce the law should Congress revisit the immigration issue. Until then, bipartisan inaction is the best policy.
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14. Immigration Policy and Organized Labor: A Never-Ceasing Issue
EXCERPT: But the key point is that hitherto the labor movement had been the nation’s most effective advocate for the economic advancement of all American workers eligible to legally work. With these position changes, the issue is open to question. Working people — especially those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder — can no longer be assured that the most effective champion they have ever had is still there for them. The potential loss of public support for organized labor among the general populace may in the long run prove to be more costly than any short run tactical gains achieved by this shift in its advocacy position.
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15. Be Our Guest: New immigration law? Enforce old ones first
EXCERPT: This insistence that the administration do its job isn’t just whining. All these measures are part of an alternative to legalizing illegal immigrants — a strategy sometimes called ‘attrition through enforcement.’ The goal is to enforce the law, across the board, to reduce the number of new illegal arrivals and increase the number of current illegals who give up and deport themselves.
The illegal population would then start shrinking from year to year, instead of constantly growing, gradually transforming what is now a crisis into a manageable nuisance. And we can get started without Congress passing a single new law.
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16. Becoming American: U.S. Immigrant Integration
EXCERPT: What is America’s central, core immigration issue? It is this: How is it possible to integrate the almost one million new legal immigrants who arrive here each year, on average, into the American national community? How do we help them to feel more at home here, while at the same time developing the emotional attachments that will truly help them think of themselves as more American than otherwise? Before the United States adds 12 million illegal immigrants and their families to our citizenship rolls, stimulates the inevitable yearly increase in illegal aliens who will wish to be strategically placed for the next ’status adjustment,’ and adds them to the already record-breaking numbers of legal immigrants who arrive each year, it should seriously consider the ‘attachment gap.’
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17. Low Salaries for Low Skills: Wages and Skill Levels for H-1B Computer Workers, 2005
Panel discussion transcript, May 22, 2007
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18. Faith-Based Approaches to Immigration Policy
EXCERPT: Leviticus 19 commands us to love the stranger. S.1348 is about greed, not love, and Leviticus 19 surely does not command us to exploit strangers as cheap labor or for partisan advantage. S.1348’s reactionary, inhumane provision for 400,000-600,000 ‘guest workers’ violates the Holiness Code of Leviticus that demands dignity for laborers, including the most humble. We are told to be ‘holy because I the Lord am holy.’ Our holiness is tested by how justly we treat laborers.
Cherry-picking the Bible to exploit poor immigrants at the expense of working-class and impoverished Americans — African Americans especially — to enrich wealthy employers is nothing less than sacrilege.
