For those of us out here who really do have a moderate position
on immigration, who really do seek a reasoned approach that in the
long run allows for some form of “guest workers,” the immigration
bill being considered by the Senate is more and more of an affront
the more and more its details become clear. It is an affront
because it appears to have been written in bad faith, by
illegitimate procedures, with all sorts of smoke screens meant to
snooker us into believing the bill is moderate and balanced.
In fact, the bill is a radical and dangerous attempt to open the
floodgates.
It must be stopped.
That’s the only conclusion one can reach after re-reading,
closely, the report called “20 Loopholes in the Senate Immigration
Bill,” released on June 4 by Alabama’s Sen. Jeff Sessions. (Of
the 20, only one minor “loophole” has since been improved by
amendment.)
For “Loophole 1,” Sessions has identified the provision which,
all along, has been the single biggest stumbling block to people of
good will who wish to take this bill seriously. It is the
now-infamous allowance for “probationary benefits,” which
effectively makes every other law-and-order provision in the bill
utterly worthless. Allow me to quote Sessions’ entire
paragraph:
Amnesty benefits do not wait for the “enforcement
trigger.” After filing an application and waiting 24 hours, illegal
aliens will receive full “probationary benefits,” complete with the
ability to legally live and work in the U.S., travel outside of the
U.S. and return, and their own social security card. Astonishingly,
if the trigger is never met and amnesty applications are therefore
never “approved,” the probationary benefits granted to the illegal
alien population never expire, and the new social security cards
issued to the illegal alien population are not revoked. [See pp. 1,
290-291, & 315.]
Even worse is the combination of that loophole with “Loophole 5 —
Completion of Background Checks Not Required For Probationary Legal
Status.” Again, I quote:
Legal status must be granted to illegal aliens 24 hours
after they file an application, even if the aliens have not yet
“passed all appropriate background checks.” (Last year’s bill gave
DHS 90 days to check an alien’s background before any status was
granted.)… [See pp. 290.].
As Sessions then comments, on the contrary, “No legal status
should [my emphasis] be given to any illegal alien until
all appropriate background checks are complete.”
As long as the probationary visa provisions remain
in the bill, all reasonable people ought to consider this bill
poisonous. No matter how one slices it, this is
complete amnesty, pure and simple, with no enforcement, no respect
for the law, no guarantee of safety, no requirement to learn
English, no reliable insistence that businesses hire only legal
visitors, no protection against Social Security and welfare fraud
that could cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars
over the next several decades.
It is hard to see this as anything other than a deliberate
attempt by the bill’s drafters to provide an end-run around
everything else in the bill, in effect to make everything else into
window dressing. What other reason could there be for cutting the
background check time period from 90 days to a single day?
(!!!!!!!)
Collectively, all the other loopholes identified by Sessions are
at least equally scary. For instance, the trigger does not require
full implementation of the U.S. VISIT system, which is the
biometric border check-in/check-out program that already is two
years overdue. The trigger’s requirements for detention
capabilities for scofflaws is off by about 50 percent, or more than
30 thousand beds, from what a later part of the bill acknowledges
is the desirable amount.
Also, “Aliens who broke into the country illegally a mere 5
months ago are treated better than foreign nationals who legally
applied to come to the U.S. more than two years ago.”
There are loopholes that fail to protect against certain child
molesters, fail to protect against certain people with terrorist
connections, fail against known gang members (who must merely
“renounce” their gang membership on their application), and fail
against absconders (people who already have been given
deportation orders but ignored them and remain in our country).
On and on goes Sessions’ list, with the senator also identifying
a number of provisions that would make the bill financially costly
to American taxpayers. One of these provisions is so bad that it,
too, merits quoting Sessions’ description in full:
Free legal counsel and the fees and expense of
arbitrators will be provided to aliens that have been working
illegally in agriculture. The U.S. taxpayer will fund the attorneys
that help these individuals fill out their amnesty applications.
Additionally, if these individuals have a dispute with their
employer over whether they were fired for “just cause,” DHS will
“pay the fee and expenses of the arbitrator.” [See p. 339:37-41,
& p. 332: 37-38.]
In all, if passed in its current form, this might be one of the
single worst bills in the history of the United States, ranking
right up there with the Smoot-Hawley tariff that helped usher in
the Great Depression. It makes a mockery of law and order and
public safety, and it makes a mockery of the entire notion of
American citizenship. It is outrageously irresponsible.
Not only that, but by concocting it via the alchemy of back-room
deal-making, without benefit of a single committee hearing, its
drafters contemptuously insult the American people by refusing to
trust the people with the ability to analyze and comment on the
legislation the drafters would impose upon them. Such shenanigans
are utterly destructive to all efforts to maintain within our
populace what the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson called “some sense of
duty, something of a faith, some reverence for the laws ourselves
have made.”
There is no way, none whatsoever, that this bill can inculcate a
reverence for this nation’s laws. Instead, it breeds only further
contempt: the contempt for our laws it will instill in the minds of
illegal immigrants, and the contempt for our system with which a
clear majority of Americans will greet such legislation if passed
into law.
