Reality Check 101

 In 1942 America was literally in crisis. We had been attacked on our own soil. U.S. participation in World War II was officially only eight months old, but already indications were that agriculture was going to experience a labor shortage as patriotic workers marched off to war.

In a misguided effort to find an easy solution, the Bracero Program was born. The program was initially touted by politicians as a way to contract with Mexico for some hundreds of contract workers for vacancies in southern California. It was to be temporary and controlled. By the time it was finally terminated in 1964, 4.5 million laborers had migrated to America. A large portion of them stayed, working at half the rates of those they had replaced, creating a poverty-level unskilled migrant underclass.

In 1986, under the Reagan administration, in an apparent attempt to satisfy all critics on both sides of another immigration crisis, Congress passed IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act). It established employer sanctions, enhanced border security, included a guest worker program and granted amnesty to those three million border crashers. It worked – for six months. After that enforcement lagged and illegal border breaches returned to previous levels and later began to climb.

In May of this year, the United States Senate passed CIRA (Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act). It is purported to re-establish employer sanctions, re-enhance border security, re-include a guest worker program and re-grant amnesty to undetermined millions of law-rebuffing aliens. During that same time period, the Dept. of Homeland Security was rounding up a group of 2,179 people, half of whom had violent criminal records, 367 of whom were members of violent street gangs, and 600 of whom were fugitives who had been ordered to leave the country but had not done so. According to CIRA, many of this group and any other aliens in the U.S. for more than five years would get amnesty, even if they have persecuted others on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion and more.

The rewards for illegals and the penalties for American citizens don’t stop there. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that $29 billion will be paid out over ten years to the amnestied through the earned income tax credit for which they would be eligible. The Heritage Foundation has stated that the Senate bill would initiate the largest welfare increase in thirty-five years.

Protecting American workers would seem like a fairly obvious priority for our senators, but the reality is otherwise. “Temporary guest workers” actually would end up with green cards giving them permanent resident status. In order to maintain green status, they would need only work one day every two months. Agricultural workers (blue card holders) would be entitled to benefits American citizens don’t enjoy. For instance, in the event they are fired, except for very narrowly defined “just cause”, former illegals would be entitled to free, tax-funded, legal council and arbitration. Employers would supposedly be required to report any worker “separated from employment” so that non-workers would leave the country. But “separated” in the senate bill excludes inadequate performance, rule violations, just cause, departure, retirement, expired contracts or if the worker leaves for another job. Employers are also supposed to look for citizen workers first. Again, definitions make the difference. In this case citizen workers also include amnestied illegals, green card holders and blue card holders. There is not enough space to describe the employer tax amnesties and other bennies for illegals such as higher education benefits and income tax privileges.

The answer to our border woes seems far away but in fact has existed for 230 years. President Eisenhower utilized it successfully for eight years and President Reagan for six months. It had nothing to do with no-fault citizenship giveaways or recruiting foreign workers to replace Americans through overseas “Ellis Island Centers” (Rip. M. Pence, R-In).

When President Eisenhower took office in 1953, the southern border was out of control. According to his attorney general, the president understood the treat to the rule of law which illegal incursions created. Under Ike’s new INS commissioner, Joseph Swing, border area officials with cozy ties to agriculture and Washington power players were transferred to less intrusive posts.

Beginning in June of 1954 with 750 agents, an agricultural sweep began. Its goal was 1,000 apprehensions a day. At the end of six weeks 50,000 aliens were apprehended in Arizona and California with 488,000 self-evacuating into Mexico. Three month later, in Texas alone, 80,000 more had been caught and 500,000 to 700,000 more had fled. Significantly, there was no economic collapse and American workers did not end up working at slave labor rates.

The answer then, rests in two fundamental wisdoms which our increasingly impotent and royalist-minded senators either do not understand or choose to dishonor. First, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” (July 4, 1776), not from the international community or Vicente Fox. Further, “We the people” not vocal aliens, form our union to establish justice, tranquility, defense, and general welfare. We do so in order to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”, not to non-assimilating foreigners or alien “anchor babies”. Enforcement is the only just solution under the Constitution as interpreted through the Declaration of Independence and it is the only thing that has ever worked.

Secondly, beyond the fact that amnesty by any name solves nothing, the issue is a moral one. It is economically immoral for illegals and their employers to defy federal statutes and at the same time milk the system for monetary gain through cunning or apathy. It is hypocritical and socially immoral for illegals to leverage their ethnicity, cultural background or life circumstances to acquire benefits which legal foreign applicants and poor citizens must struggle to achieve. Finally it is legally immoral to live outside constitutionally established law. Normally such people are referred to as criminals.

The solutions have already been tried and found true. Our present circumstances are not the result of inability or lack of resources. The problem is a lack of will. Our national and state leadership apparently lacks the courage to stand against foreign interests, special interests, and self-interests for the sake of preserving national sovereignty, the rule of law and social justice for American citizens.