A few years ago, one of my closest friends went on a mission trip to Honduras with one of the missions our church supports there. He fell in love with a young woman who was helping the mission with their work, and he wound up making several trips back to spend time with her. (Talk about a long-distance relationship!)
Eventually, they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. She began the process of getting her visa to come to the U.S. They married in November 2019, and she continued the legal process to acquire her green card.
That process got ever more complicated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it took her months longer than it normally would have because of lockdowns and the complications that the virus brought us.
I know she’s not alone, but at the same time, illegal immigrants are pouring across our southern border to the tune of tens of thousands a month. The month my friends got married, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency processed 51,857 encounters with illegal immigrants.
It’s no secret that our border is in crisis. Just read any of the reports from my Townhall colleague Julio Rosas if you don’t believe it. Federal inaction at every level has only exacerbated the problem. So when we hear of a good faith effort, especially a bipartisan one, it gets our attention.
Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are putting forth a bill in the lame-duck session of this Congress that’s simply bad. Over at Townhall, my colleague Matt Vespa explains just two of the major components of this bill:
“There is no funding to complete the border wall—that would make sense,” Matt writes. That’s bad enough, but another proposal in the bill creates a potential ripple effect that could become disastrous.
Matt writes that this bill “will permit some two million recipients of Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to get on the citizenship track. The buried portion of this provision is that once these two million are through the process, they can sponsor extended family members so that two million-figure could be closer to seven million, and I’m being conservative in that estimate.”
Blanket forgiveness for two million people who arrived in this country illegally when they were children with a ripple effect that could more than triple that number? How can anyone from either party think that’s a good idea?
In a conversation, my PJ Media colleague Athena Thorne made a perceptive analogy.
She said this type of amnesty bill is akin to “If some squatters bring a kid into the house they’re squatting in and the kid gets comfortable, the kid gets to keep the house!” With that ripple effect, the whole family could get to make their home in a house they don’t have any rights to.
There’s a little bit of a trade-off, as the Washington Post reports: “It gives Republicans faster removal from the country of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum, a continued restriction on applications for the next year, and more border security.”
That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t make up for the millions of illegal immigrants who will suddenly become legal. This will allow millions of people who broke the law to jump the line ahead of those who have waited out the legal immigration process. These people already cut in line once when they made their way across the border — and they’ll get to bypass the process again? That’s not right.
One of the characteristics of this nation that people like to brag about is that we’re a “nation of immigrants.” That’s a nice thing to be proud of, but we’re also a nation of laws. We need to honor those laws, too. If an immigrant wants to become part of this “nation of immigrants,” he or she should abide by our laws, and that starts with coming to this country legally.
An immigration policy starts with enforcing the immigration laws that are already on the books before we try to enact more. A bill like the one Tillis and Sinema are proposing is worse than no immigration reform at all. We can only hope that it won’t get enough traction to pass.
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