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Who Benefits from Immigration "Reform"?
By Peter and Helen Evans
May 30, 2007
What should annoy us more about the current immigration bill; the looming catastrophe or being lied to about it? In other words, which is worse? the national disaster that would be precipitated by the so-called "reform" bill presently on the Senate floor, or the fact that it would have been smuggled through Congress (with a lot of bi-partisan back-patting) had it not been for the alertness of the Heritage Foundation and a few other watchdogs who pointed out what it really says.
We're puzzled by an obvious question. Who will benefit? Who will benefit from the thousand-page pile that's lying on the Senate floor over the Memorial Day weekend? The obvious answer should be "the American people." Isn't that what the law-makers of Congress are supposed to be doing, looking out for the common good of the American people? But it's hard to see how rewarding illegal immigrants with legal status benefits anyone but the law-breakers.
It's promised that the bill contains "tough" measures that will be enacted against employers of illegals. That doesn't sound like a benefit to America's employers. It sounds like a penalty. Perhaps "sounds like" is the operative term in the proposed legislation. Don't we already have lots of tough-sounding measures against the hiring of illegals? Weren't they an integral part of the last immigration policy "reform" more than twenty years ago? Wasn't that one actually called an amnesty? Does anyone remember the last two-term, lame-duck Republican presidency? I guess we have granted ourselves amnesia about that.
Well, won't the tax-payers of America benefit when all the illegals get legal and start paying their fair share of taxes? Not directly, and maybe not even indirectly. IF (and it's a really big 'if') all those currently working illegally do, miraculously, choose to start paying taxes, that will not reduce the tax-rate of existing tax-payers. Tax rate reductions are the sort of thing that tend to happen in the first term of a two-term Republican presidency. However, what all these 'alleged' new tax-payers will do is increase the revenue of the government. Could this be a clue about who this bill is really meant to benefit?
Many on the right, where we hang out, fear that the bulk of the legalized illegals will become a 'natural' constituency of the Democrats, whose policy is openly to give away the tax-payer's money. The Republicans only pretend that their policy is something else, thus convincing the simple-minded that they're cold-hearted.
But let's not be partisan about this issue. That's just a snare and a delusion. Bickering over whether it's 'really' amnesty or not won't change what the bill does. The only guaranteed beneficiary of this fiasco will be government bureaucracy. All those new "Z" visas to administer will breed a whole new generation of paper-pushers as millions of new dependants are embraced by the ever-growing arms of the administrative nanny state. All those blinking people to be brought "out of the shadows" (whatever that means!) will need government-subsidized seeing-eye dogs to find their way in the Byzantine bureaucratic maze whose complexity grows even faster than the waiting list for legal immigration.
Maybe the illegals have the system figured out right! They're here, alone or with families and friends. They're living and working and sending extra money home. They're not bothering with taxes and time-wasting bureaucracy. They're living the libertarian dream! They're also living the socialist dream with free education for their kids, free emergency medical care, police protection in the many 'sanctuary cities' and other welfare benefits. Why bother going the frustrating legal route that would lead, after much complexity and a few wrist-slaps, to citizenship? What for? So they could get to vote for politicians who write laws but don't enforce them?
It is often claimed that this is a "nation of immigrants" as well as being a "nation of laws." That means ours is a nation of immigration laws and the only reform we should be considering at this point is the actual enforcement of our existing immigration laws. If they're not good enough to enforce, let's get rid of them. But before we do, let's get rid of that thousand-page pile in the Senate masquerading as "reform."
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