Underneath the roar of “Scooter” Libby’s legal problems, Judge Alito’s unpopularity, several pockets of civil unrest, details of “a bad spy novel” turning out to be true, and the great bird flu panic, there is a quiet crisis bubbling throughout America.
It would be real easy to lose track of illegal immigration as a problem in this country. And no wonder: our policies are convoluted and downright contradictory.
Job growth is anemic, but employers claim they need low-cost H1-B and undocumented workers. GOP lawmakers in one state want to crack down on illegals while GOP voters in another state want to help illegals become citizens. We want a guest worker program and yet we want a fence across the Mexican border. We have The Secretary of Homeland Security saying we will get rid of every illegal while the courts point out this little thing called “due process” And finally, certain GOP lawmakers say that just because somebody was born here doesn’t mean they should be a citizen. Now, be careful with this one. They say it’s because they don’t want pregnant illegals deliberately giving birth here, but it sets a very dangerous precedent: the idea that citizenship can be taken away from Americans born in this country.
Of course, the vast majority of illegal immigrants are here because — however bad things may be here — it’s better than where they came from. This of course brings us to the fact that if we want to tackle illegal immigration, we have to work on improving conditions beyond our borders.
Employers tell us they need these undocumented workers. They tell us they can’t find Americans who are willing to work in terrible conditions for minimum wage or less. Imagine that! They tell us that — oh the horrors — prices might go up if they had to hire Americans to do the work. It makes me wonder what other laws they just can’t be bothered to follow.
I’m going to say this again, because apparently there are people who haven’t figured it out: we don’t know who illegal immigrants are. They might be just another person trying to escape crushing poverty or even persecution in their homeland. However, they might also be Bad Guys: smugglers, drug dealers, slavers, hit-men, and yes, terrorists. If illegal immigrants can get jobs in this country cleaning our buildings, processing our food, and sometimes even getting security clearances to work in sensitive places like military bases, then so can terrorists.
Illegal immigration is bad for American workers, bad for governmental budgets, bad for security. It’s even bad for immigrants, who often have little or no legal recourse should Bad Things happen.
In closing, a must-read article from Bruce Schneier on how the State Department wants to make Americans less safe overseas, Wal-Mart discovers the hard way what statisticians have known for years, poor people — their potential employee pool — are generally sicker than middle class people, Get Rid Of Your Junk! and even the Vatican thinks people should listen to science over “fundamentalism” so what’s Kansas’s problem?