The Top Ten Reasons to Enforce Our Immigration Laws Now
10. It’s time to raise the American standard of living. The real minimum wage has been declining for over a decade. Some advocate raising the minimum wage—but this, of course, would raise the price of unskilled labor above its free-market value. Mass unemployment would result.
Why has the market value of unskilled labor declined? For the same reason that all prices move: supply and demand. It’s hard to change the demand side of the equation: You can’t make anyone “need” an unskilled worker who doesn’t need one already. For years, however, we have been artificially modifying the supply side by quietly tolerating a massive influx of unskilled workers across our borders. We can reverse the trend by enforcing immigration laws. We won’t need to raise the minimum wage. It will raise itself. Millions of Americans will be lifted out of poverty, and millions more from the lower middle class to prosperity.
9. We can immediately create millions of new jobs. Conservative estimates place the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. at 10,000,000. That’s ten million. Taking into account minor children and the aged, that’s still millions of people who are flooding our labor force. Remove them, and opportunities will abound for Americans.
There’s an old canard that says that illegals “take the jobs Americans don’t want.” This is a fallacy! There’s no job an American can’t or won’t do for a living wage. It is a cruel joke on the American worker to allow illegals to depress wages for many jobs below poverty level, and then to mock Americans for being reluctant to participate in the poverty.
8. Breaking the law is crime. Lawbreakers are criminals. Out of deference to the PC crowd, many like to use the term “undocumented workers”—as if illegals were merely missing a piece of bureaucratic paperwork. By the same logic, we can call a car thief an “undocumented driver.”
Our immigration laws exist for good reasons: to protect our safety, our national sovereignty, our standard of living, our health, and our culture. Those who break them may “want a better life for themselves,” but then again, so do all who enrich themselves by disregarding the law.
Besides, many people who wish to immigrate honestly are waiting patiently. Granting privileges like driver’s licenses and social security cards to illegals is a slap in the face to law-abiding citizens and immigrants alike. It’s like opening an express window to give titles and owner’s cards to car thieves, while making legitimate owners stand in line!
7. Open borders threaten our safety. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, two things have become clear. First, we have enemies, and they are vicious and without conscience. Second, our enemies obviously believe that an attack from within is more feasible than an attack from without.
Even before the horrid events of September 11, our immigration laws had the primary purpose of protecting us. The use of visas and passports allows our government to monitor, and to control, who enters our country, and why.
Certainly, few illegal aliens are terrorists. But it only takes one! More importantly, the creeping ideology of open borders—the (usually unspoken) belief that treating foreigners who enter our country differently than we treat our own citizens is somehow “discriminatory” or “racist”—is creating a terrible dilemma: Either we cease to monitor the aliens (and open ourselves up for even worse attacks), or we create the “equality” of the police state by casting aside constitutional protections for citizens and monitoring everyone.
The more resolutely we protect our borders against threats from without, the safer, and freer, we can live within them.
6. We’re a nation of 300 million; the Third World population is in the billions. Do the math. Our country seems large, but its population is tiny compared to that of the Third World. China and India alone have seven times our population.
For whatever reasons, our society has succeeded in creating immense wealth where many others have created only poverty. An American welfare recipient would still be “rich” by the standards of most of the world.
One can’t blame the citizens of countries who produce much less wealth per capita than we for wanting to reap the benefits our forefathers have sown for us. But if we open the borders, our island of productivity and prosperity will soon disappear beneath a flood of Third World squalor.
5. American culture is worth preserving. Culture is more than operas and Shakespearean plays—it’s the sum total of the customs, beliefs, artistic creations, attitudes, goals, and norms that make a society what it is. It is passed down, as a treasure, from grandparent to parent to child. In other words, culture is what gives us our identity.
Some advocate “multiculturalism”—creating a society in which multiple cultures exist side by side, and believe that “diversity”—having as many cultures as possible, with none dominant—is desirable.
The majority of the media elite believes that we need more multiculturalism and diversity; the majority of the population doesn’t. Regardless of how anyone stands on this issue, the fact is that our society is already multicultural and diverse. Anyone who wishes to enjoy, and celebrate, the many cultures now coexisting in America need only visit any American city.
By contrast, genuine American culture—the Founding Fathers, the story of the pioneers and the winning of the West, the Pledge of Allegiance, Columbus Day, the Bill of Rights—is under constant assault. Some of our country’s detractors vilify all that is traditionally American, while others would reduce our traditions to one more example of quaint folklore beside those of other nations. Russian culture can be found in Russia, Mexican culture in Mexico, multiculturalism in any major city... but where can one find American culture? Only in a place where Americans treasure it, and lovingly transmit it from generation to generation. Immigration laws should ensure that those who seek to live permanently on American territory be willing to adopt and preserve its culture. And they are useless unless they are enforced.
4. It’s not your father’s immigration. Previous generations romanticized immigration. The images are still with us: Starry-eyed Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish arrivees toting their bags and trunks onto shore at Ellis Island…The tablet at the base of the Statue of Liberty exhorting other nations to “Give me your tired, your poor…” The native-born American learning to love pizza and bagels.
That was then. This is now.
Yes, there are still many people in foreign lands who harbor the “American Dream,” and who seek to come here to realize it.
Millions of illegal aliens, however, have attitudes and motives very different from those of the immigrants in the fading black-and-white photos of yesteryear. It’s not fashionable to speak the truth about this group. But the truth must be spoken.
What makes this new breed of “immigrants” different? To begin with, they’re not “immigrating” at all—they’re sneaking in. They don’t have an “American dream” of building this country; rather, though still loyal to their home nations, they want to exploit ours economically. Many even dream of taking over regions of our country, and displacing us. There’s already a word for this goal: reconquista. If the members of this group don’t intend to return home, yet have no loyalty to America, what should we call them? Certainly not “immigrants.”
Colonists is perhaps a better term. Today’s colonists, like those of the past, want to build enclaves on American soil from which they can expand their own wealth and power, and that of their homeland, while drawing on the resources that were created by the native population. How can we welcome legitimate immigrants while keeping out colonists? By knowing who is coming here and why, and only admitting those whose presence is in our country’s best interests. In other words, by enforcing immigration laws.
3. It’s an issue we can all come together on. Conservatives, traditionally, aim to preserve the valuable legacy of the past, and to protect freedom by limiting the power of government. Liberals seek to provide all citizens, even the most disadvantaged, with the opportunity to realize their full potential. Both have worthy goals, but often squabble over how to realize them.
Removing illegal aliens can give us the best of both worlds. We can preserve our traditional culture. And without resorting to costly and intrusive government programs, we can give our poor a genuine “hand up”: as the glut of cheap labor dries up, those at the bottom rung of the economic ladder will suddenly find themselves able to climb higher without ruinous competition.
People of good will on the left and the right can only smile approvingly as the free market (hallowed by conservatives) provides our unskilled and uneducated with a decent wage and with a job market that welcomes instead of marginalizes them (the well-meaning goal of liberal government programs).
We can “live better than we did four years ago” and have a rebirth of national pride, as President Reagan wanted for us. And we can have a “New Deal” for our poor, a society where no American is left out, which were the ideals of President Roosevelt.
At last, we can come together. That’s what patriotism is all about.
2. We either face tough issues now, or tougher ones later.
Immigration issues are complex. We need a national debate—which, judging
by the 2004 primary and general Presidential campaigns, isn't happening.
Most Americans, when confronted with the facts, will probably continue to want what they want now: strict enforcement of our immigration laws.
It won’t be easy. We’ll have to find workable ways to deport illegal aliens without creating unnecessary hardships for those who have broken our immigration laws, and without creating severe dislocations for the unscrupulous employers who have benefited from their presence. And, of course, we’ll have to counter, with quiet reason, the voices of those who scream “discrimination” or “racism.”
Some cringe at the challenges that await us.
These challenges, however, pale in comparison to those that future generations will face if we fail to act.
Imagine an overcrowded, impoverished America with shrinking wages and expanding burdens on the social service system. Imagine an America where millions of Americans have been driven out of their neighborhoods by throngs of foreign colonists who neither speak our language nor understand the culture that created American prosperity—but who deeply resent the poverty that inevitably results from their own unwillingness, or inability, to live as true Americans.
Will Americans be forced to tax away their own shriveling wealth, and to transfer it to the aliens within our borders, if they wish to appease the colonists’ anger? Will the shrinking American middle class merge with the alien underclass to form a new “peasant culture” while a tiny American elite trembles behind the walls of heavily policed, gated communities? Or will full-scale cultural and racial war break out? None of these possibilities is appealing. Nonetheless, a society is a reflection of the population that comprises it. If we, as an advanced society with a low birthrate, continue to import a Third World population with a high birthrate, we will become a Third World society, and will face the problems, which other Third World societies face as well.
Isn’t it better to face the issue of illegal immigration now—and to do something about it?
…and the number one reason is:
1. We owe it to our kids and grandkids. Our children and grandchildren will marvel at the digitized archives of the TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s. They’ll see a prosperous, free, united America—the envy of the world, a place anyone would be happy and proud to call home. This, they’ll realize, was the legacy our grandparents and parents left us, the American citizens of the early 21st century.
How will the America we leave to our children stack up against the America our parents left to us? What will future generations think of us? Will we be known as the preservers and expanders of the beautiful legacy, or as its destroyers? By our actions or inactions, we’re deciding which it will be. Right now.
This article appears here with the author’s permission, and can be found, along with more information, at the Team America website where US Congressman Tom Tancredo says of the invasion by illegals, “An amnesty by any other name is still amnesty, regardless of what the White House wants to call it. Their amnesty plan was dead on arrival when they sent it to Congress last January, and if they send the same pig with lipstick back to Congress this year, it will suffer the same fate...”