Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Is a Terrible Idea for the Nation!
This section (the portion in this box) is being written in September of 2007 as a followup to the balance of the piece, which was written in the early spring of 2007. Back then, Congress was being pushed toward a full amnesty (they called it Comprehensive Immigration Reform - it was neither one nor the other) for an unknown number of illegal aliens, probably around twenty million. The American people rose up and made their displeasure at the idea known to Congress. Eventually, in June of 2007, it died of procedural failures in the Senate.

However, those pushing the idea (the Bush administration and many in the Senate,) simply took a rest to lick their wounds. Now, in the fall of 2007, they renew their efforts with several bills. They try to achieve piecemeal and through back-dooring the legislation what they could not get as an overarching law.

One of the new bills, called the DREAM act, would grant legal status to children who are in U.S. schools. That is an oversimplification for a complex piece of legislation, but it is useful shorthand.

In truth, the act has things to recommend it to some people. It appears to be an exercise of humanity because most of these children are at least partially assimilated into U.S. society and many have no known other life - they have been illegally here for years, through no fault of their own, and are a part of the U.S. educational system. Many of them are in higher education and may, someday, have substantial offerings for the U.S. economy or body politic.

We note that the legalization is available, not just to children, but to illegal aliens up to age 30 who were brought here illegally as children.

However, one must always look to the secondary effects of law before deciding it is a good thing. In this case, the newly-legalized children become a home base, a tie to this country for their parents. We need not expect that children granted legal status will see their parents returned to Mexico. No, the parents will remain in the U.S. too, thus roughly tripling the number of illegal aliens legalized over and above what is publicized as resulting from the grant of status to the children. For all the reasons cited farther down this page, that many illegal aliens being legalized is a bad thing.

Instead, those parents should be encouraged, then compelled, to leave the U.S. and return to their homes abroad. The children who have benefitted from a free (to them) U.S. education can accompany them back to their homes and then put that education to work improving their home countries.

There are also moves afoot to legalize or import up to 1.5 million farmworkers. We note that that number is more than all the farmworkers now in the United States. Permitting it would assure that farm labor wages stay depressed, as they have been for decades, by the presence of a vast pool of sweat that has the effect of keeping wages down. Americans can and will perform agricultural labor - but they must be fairly compensated, by U.S. standards, for doing it. Innovative legislation can deal with this problem; it does not require the same old solution called for for over a century when cheap labor is sought: foreigners to be exploited until they move on to other fields that pay better.

And then there is the STRIVE act, which is another call for general amnesty, no more, and no less.

The proponents of each of these proposals would like to see them slide through under the public radar, so to speak. For instance, this week (Sept. 23 - 29, 2007) the Senate is debating the Defense appropriations bill. It is expected that one Senator or another will try to amend the Defense bill with one or more of these amnesty provisions. Politics has always been dirty business, but this intention stinks more than usual. The idea of trying to get something passed by tacking it onto another bill is an old one, but it should not be used to circumvent the full, open process of debate when the subject is of such import.

For details of what each of these bills entails, drop by one of the other websites listed HERE. FAIR and NUMBERSUSA both do an excellent job of tracking these things day to day, and both provide information that will allow you to contact your Senators and Representatives immediately. We encourage you to make your views known.

There is a huge push on the part of the current administration, the Senate, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, many industrial and growers' organizations, many unions, and the Mexican government (yes, they very much want us to have one) to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in the United States. No one has any good idea of how many - estimates range as high as twenty million. A more probable figure is ten to twelve million.

Let's call it what it is; an amnesty. That's what the aliens who would benefit call it, so we will too. The American proponents of it don't like the term, though, for the word says we are forgiving the criminal violation of the law by the illegal aliens - and the American people would not look favorably on something presented in that light. You can't change what it is by calling it something else, though, so "amnesty" it is.

They say the beneficiaries will have to pay a fine, and application fees, and will have to learn English. NAFBPO says that's like letting a burglar off the hook AND keep everything he stole if he will just 'fess up and pay a thousand-dollar fine.

We had an amnesty in 1986 for three million people. It was supposed to be in conjunction with getting control of the border so the situation would not get out of hand again. As we know now, it didn't work, and it's not hard to understand why not: Illegal behavior rewarded encourages more illegal behavior. Yet despite the failure of what was to have been a solution back then, certain people want to do it all over again.

Never mind why they want to have another amnesty, we'll examine that in another essay (hint: it's about money - who'd have guessed?). For now, let's look at all the reasons it's a bad idea for America and for Americans.

Look for links to detailed information in each box. We are working on them now.

If you have come here from outside the NAFBPO website, click HERE to go to the main site.
The aliens will permanently displace American workers. There is no such thing as "work Americans won't do", and it is a contemptible thing to say. But they won't do it for substandard wages and working conditions. What's wrong with that?
There is no labor shortage in the U.S. and we don't need an amnesty that will drive down American wages.
Go here for details.
There are many criminals in the bunch, we don't know who they are - and we won't find out before we give them status. That's because meaningful fingerprint checks in the U.S. will be impossible due to volume, and no foreign record checks at all will be conducted.
Go here for details.
Millions will not assimilate. The Mexican government is encouraging them not to, and helping them not to. Aliens of other nations will also benefit, of course, but their governments are not encouraging them to maintain their foreign identity as aggressively as is the Mexican government.
Go here for details.
They will have an adverse public health impact, both as to imported disease and cost to the U.S. medical system. The community of illegal aliens from around the world already suffers from diseases not commonly found in the U.S, many of them contagious - and mostly, they can't pay for their own care. The U.S. will have to formally take them on to care for if they are legalized.
Click here for disease information.
Click here for health costs information.
With the stroke of a pen we will create more poor Americans.We have spent trillions in the War on Poverty trying to alleviate poverty for Americans. No wonder we can't succeed in reducing the poverty numbers - we keep providing recruits for the other side of the war. And the jobs the illegals take result in more poor Americans, too.
We can't afford an amnesty - it would cost too much. Applying a conservative estimate of the per-person processing cost from the 1986 amnesty, unadjusted for inflation, it would cost about $2,500,000,000 (two billion, five-hundred million dollars) to process ten million illegal aliens. What else could we do with that money that would be worthwhile for the country?
The government lacks the resources to carry out the job, and there is no way to hire and train enough people to do it well. So it will become just a rubber-stamp operation geared toward producing the biggest number of approved cases possible.
Millions will gain status by fraud, just as hundreds of thousands did in the 1986 amnesty when many responsible officers involved estimated that 30% of the application were fraudulent. Smugglers and manufacturers of phoney documents will make millions.
Click here for more information.
It won't solve the illegal immigration problem; it will make it worse. You have to be pretty naive to look at the 1986 amnesty and not see that it directly contributed to the current problem; naive, or willfully blind, that is. The 1986 amnesty was to be a one-time thing as far as we were concerned, but the aliens knew better, so they came. And now . . .
An amnesty for ten million people now will result in at least sixty to seventy million people over the next twenty years as family members come to join those who got amnesty. Most of them will be uneducated or undereducated. What does that mean for our society? Must we really do that?