Mr. Moderate

Suppose you read a story about a criminal gang that broke into a state lottery office and stole a batch of winning tickets. They get caught and punished, but the state gives them their lottery winnings anyway. Would you be outraged at such a set of circumstances?

Well, that is more-or-less what the current “compromise” immigration bill calls for. People who are in this country illegally get a mild punishment, but they still win the lottery and gain legal status within the US labor force. Normal immigrants have to win a real lottery to gain entry visas into the United States. Why should illegal immigrants get to move ahead of all of the folks who have played by the rules?

In my view, the only possible fair treatment of illegal immigrants is to require them to go to the back of the line and start over. That is what we would tell anybody who tried to cut into line, right? So, illegal immigrants, “go to the back of the line!”

No matter what the argument might be for why we need an extra 12 million or so Hispanic workers in this country, surely out of the hundreds of millions of Hispanics that live south of our border, we can find 12 million replacements who are willing to stand in the line to be processed according to our laws and be let in with legitimate green cards or other work visas. It is simply a matter of fairness to require the illegals who broke our laws to not only receive punishment for their crime, but to also “go to the back of the line!”

I am not advocating that these people be kicked out and never let back in. But I am saying that they should never profit from their line-jumping activities. Who out there can rationally argue that this sort-of schoolyard justice is not fair?

The real problem comes from the fact that there are plenty of jobs available for illegal workers. The US government needs to put a stop to that, once and for all. It was tried back in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan signed a bill that provided “the last amnesty, ever” for illegal immigrants. Now, here we are again, and while the anti-amnesty crowd has definitely been heard, the folks who make millions off of illegal immigration have re-labeled their product as “a path to citizenship.” Well, that is exactly what they called “amnesty” the last time around. We did not give those prior illegal immigrants instant citizenship, but we did give them “a path to citizenship.” Except that we called it a more-honest name: amnesty for their illegal immigration into the United States.

Unfortunately, I believe that both the Democrats and the Republicans each see those illegal Hispanics as a potentially huge block of future voters who will vote for their candidates. Democrats are the traditional choice of Hispanic voters, but they quite easily forget that most Hispanics are devout Roman Catholics, and the Roman Catholic Church has stopped advocating Democrat liberal policies and begun to preach a great deal about the kinds of “family values” issues that Republicans have long run on. Thus, by the time these new amnesty recipients gain lawful voting rights, I suspect that the Republicans will gain far more votes out of this than will the Democrats. I just wonder how long it will take for this kind of political calculus to sink in for the Democrat majority in Congress.

Finally, I can’t comprehend just how 700 miles of border fence is supposed to secure a 2,500 mile long border from being easily penetrated by any terrorist able to hitch a ride on a 4-whell-drive vehicle inside Mexico. We have been quite lucky so far and have avoided any major new terrorist attacks. But you certainly can’t credit our Border Patrol for this apparent safety. Without a doubt, there are numerous sleeper cells of terrorists hiding right here among us. The recent arrests in New Jersey make that quite clear. And they could stay “under the radar” because they ran their own business rather than needing to submit to the paperwork normally associated with any regular job in the US economy.

I don’t have a really good suggestion about how to protect the United States from terrorists posing as small business owners or their employees. The government asks us to be vigilant, but fails to provide us with the proper tools, like a web-based identification system where we could check the legal residence status of anybody who proposed to do business with us. However, there are lots of problems with setting up such a system, and way too many opportunities for such a system to misfire and hopelessly injure innocent people. So, establishing any such system would necessarily need to go along with the establishment of an errors compensation fund to reimburse people for legitimate errors made by the system.

Still, having our tax dollars pay off for people injured by the incompetence of our government workers would be a small price to pay for both fixing the immigration mess and doing a lot more to flush out terrorist sleeper cells here in the US.