As Congress is gearing up to discuss a new amnesty, it’s striking how many falsehoods and bad assumptions made by liberals are driving the debate. Maybe it’s time to start talking about the truth.
1. Any sort of legalization or amnesty encourages more illegal aliens to come here
During the Reagan administration, we had a “one-time” amnesty that featured promises of security in return for three million illegals getting to become citizens. Today, most estimates seem to put the number of illegals in the United States somewhere between 11-12.5 million. In other words, seeing that we weren’t serious about enforcing our immigration laws led to more illegals than ever coming here in hopes of getting amnesty. If this amnesty goes through, we can expect to see the exact same problem repeated in a few decades.
2. A wall would make a major difference
A wall was never intended to be a fix for illegal immigration in and of itself. To the contrary, it’s a force multiplier. What we see everywhere that we have full fencing up is that illegals overwhelmingly avoid those areas. In other words, you can use a wall to direct illegals to certain areas and concentrate the border patrol in those areas. As we’ve seen in Israel and even around the White House and the Vatican, walls work. If you’re serious about stopping illegal immigration, you support a wall.
3. Illegal aliens hurt the poorest American workers
Because illegal aliens don’t need health insurance and car insurance and they can lie on their taxes to get the earned income tax credit, they can work cheaper than American workers. So, not only do the 11-12.5 million illegals outright take jobs that citizens would otherwise have, they drive wages down for all the workers competing with them. That’s Economics 101. When supply outstrips demand, the price drops.
4. Illegal immigration is almost entirely about votes for liberals
If illegal aliens voted heavily Republican instead of overwhelmingly liberal, you’d already be able to see the wall between us and Mexico from space. Liberals can use any excuse they want, but for every million illegals that become American citizens, the Democrats add about 600,000 more new potential supporters than Republicans. Because of that, there are no limits to the number of illegal aliens Democrats will support turning into Americans.
5. There are no jobs “Americans won’t do”
This is easy to prove because there isn’t a single field where illegal immigrants make up the majority of the workers. So there are more Americans doing all those jobs we supposedly need illegals to do. If every illegal disappeared tomorrow, within a year or two, wages would rise enough in those professions so that American workers would fill those jobs or alternately, automation would be used to replace the workers. There may be rich business owners who benefit from having cheap illegal labor, but we don’t “need” illegals for anything.
6. The crime committed by illegal aliens is a big problem
As someone who hired a researcher to come up with illegal alien crime research, I can tell you that there is no such nationwide data. Why? I strongly suspect that it’s because if we had data, it would contradict the frequently heard claim that illegals don’t commit very much crime. Certainly there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that illegals commit horrible crimes in America, but in some of the places where there are a lot of illegals and we do have data, the numbers suggest there is an extremely serious crime problem with illegals:
The 287(g) program and related efforts have found high rates of illegal alien incarceration in some communities. But it is unclear if the communities are representative of the country:
Maricopa County, Ariz.: 22 percent of felons are illegal aliens;
Lake County, Ill.: 19 percent of jail inmates are illegal aliens;
Collier County, Fla.: 20 to 22 percent of jail inmates and arrestees are illegal aliens;
Weld County, Colo.: 12.8 to 15.2 percent of those jailed are illegal aliens.”
* “From 1998 to 2007, 816,000 criminal aliens were removed from the United States because of a criminal charge or conviction. This is equal to about one-fifth of the nation’s total jail and prison population.
7. If you’re not willing to deport people today, you won’t be willing to deport them tomorrow
The argument we’ve been getting for the last 32 years on illegal immigration is that if we do an amnesty for illegals today, then we’ll start deporting people afterward. Except it never works like that. NEVER – and why would it? What reason would there be to deport people tomorrow that isn’t just as good today? We have every reason to believe that if we choose amnesty over deportation today that we’ll do exactly the same thing tomorrow.
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