Illegal Immigration, Will It Ever Stop?
So what are we going to do about illegal immigrants? It seems everyone has a plan, even the government. Though yet again, it doesn't seem like the House and Senate can ever agree on anything.
The House passed a bill (summary) that demonstrates a resolve to enact real border security and addressed the problem of the 11 or more million illegal immigrants already in the country. The House also rebuffed President Bush's entreaties to include avenues for illegal aliens to gain legal employment.
The Senate has their own version of the bill (summary) that only received 36 of the necessary 60 votes to bring the bill to cloture and allow an up-or-down vote. Good thing too after being watered down with the teeth extracted, it becomes an exercise in political tomfoolery to amass public perception that they did something about immigration concerns.
The both bills make it unlawfull to hire undocumented workers, well duh it is already unlawfull. Both bills also direct the Secretary to establish, and sets forth the provisions for, an employment eligibility verification system. However only the House bill sets forth civil and criminal penalty provisions for noncompliance.
I agree completely with the House provision on civil and criminal penalty provisions for noncompliance. If the penalties are big enough and include jail time, this alone will dry up the job market for illegal workers. After a few employers do perp walk, the rest will soon get the message, and hiring illegal workers will drop abruptly.
However the verification system needs to be a good one. False documentation is rampant now. When we make employers verify employee's legal status it will only get many times worse. But anyone who says that we can't make documentation secure is just full of it. Look, almost everytime you cash a check the clerk runs the check through a check reader attached to the Point of Sale Terminal. It goes to one of the big check verification services that check the writers against a negative database of bad check writers for a small fee.
Just as checks can be verified for a small fee, so can drivers licenses and social security cards be verified against government databases. No it wouldn't be fool proof, neither is the check verification systems but neither they or the stores get burned often enough to put either out of business. I suppose that a small business, or people hiring nannys and such could phone the information for verification.
There is always identity theft too, but the fake documentation which is the vast majority of it would be rejected by a proper verification system. Hopefully if fake documentation is caught those illegals too would be prosecuted and receive a heavy penalty. In the case of identity theft the heavy fines and incarceration should be put only on the person with fake credentials, unless of course it's obvious that the company should have easily caught it, in which both should be prosecuted.
Furthermore I don't have any objections what so ever to employers doing a cross check on my credentials because it protects all of us.
We still need to control the borders whether the heavy flow of illegals is drastically cut or not, there is a huge national security problem inherent there. Two of the hijackers that flew into the Pentagon were illegals residents who easily obtained false identification.
Go ahead, try it. In Michelle Malkin's book Invasion, she recounts the tale of two fellows who in August 2001 pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Va., in search of fake ID from the illegal-alien assistance network that hangs around there. Luis Martinez-Flores, who'd been living here illegally since 1994, took them along to the local DMV, supplied them with a fake address and falsely certified they lived there. The very next day, the two guys returned with two pals of their own, and used their own brand-new state ID on which the ink was not yet dry to obtain in turn brand-new state ID for their buddies. A couple of weeks later, all four of them used their Virginia ID to board American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles Airport and plowed it into the Pentagon
So al Qaeda knows about the illegal immigrant fast-track network and took advantage of it to do a number on us 9/11/2001. I also hope that excerpt above soaks in for those that say the new drivers license requirements are too stiff and unfair.
As far as sending the undocumented immigrants back we obviously couldn't round up and send 11 million or more home. However they didn't all get here overnight either. We need to get the verificatin database quickly in place. In the meantime let illegal immigrants that have been here for years to start paper work to become legal. We can start deportation with new arrivals, but that wont be necessary if good legislation works as it should. It can if we prosecute employers with stiff penalties, because they will start going home in droves when there are no jobs.