The Scuttling of America

President Bush is expected to formally announce his plan to send National Guard troops to patrol the US/Mexico border later today. Already widely reported in the media, it's being framed as a 'gimme' to conservatives in order to drum up support for a revived 'immigration reform bill' which if enacted would turn our current immigration policy on its head with potentially disastrous and obviously counter-productive results.

The immigration reform bill that the Senate takes up today would more than double the flow of legal immigration into the United States each year and dramatically lower the skill level of those immigrants.

The number of extended family members that U.S. citizens or legal residents can bring into this country would double. More dramatically, the number of workers and their immediate families could increase sevenfold if there are enough U.S. employers looking for cheap foreign labor

All told, the Hagel-Martinez bill would increase the annual flow of legal immigrants into the U.S. to more than 2 million from roughly 1 million today, scholars and analysts say.

These proposed increases are in addition to the estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal aliens already in the U.S. whom the bill would put on a path to citizenship. These figures also do not take into account the hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants who would be admitted to the U.S. each year under the guest-worker program that is part of the bill.

The percentage of work visas that would go to the highly educated or highly skilled would be cut in half to about 30 percent. The percentage of work visas that go to unskilled laborers would more than triple. In hard numbers for those categories, the highest skilled workers would be granted 135,000 visas annually, while the unskilled would be granted 150,000 annually.

What's more, the Hagel-Martinez bill would make it considerably easier for unskilled workers to remain here permanently while keeping hurdles in place for skilled workers.

But wait, it gets worse.

The flood of unskilled workers could cause other problems as well, opponents say.

Because they would be allowed to "self-petition," their obtaining permanent residency here would bypass the Department of Labor, which currently monitors immigration to ensure that American workers are not displaced by foreign immigrant labor.

But the greatest cost to the U.S. may not be the unskilled workers who immigrate here in the future, but the ones who are already here illegally.

Mr. Rector estimates that the Senate bill would grant citizenship to between 9 million and 10 million illegal aliens. If allowed to become citizens, those immigrants would be permitted to bring their entire extended family, including any elderly parents.

"The long-term cost of government benefits to the parents of 10 million recipients of amnesty could be $30 billion per year or more," Mr. Rector said. "In the long run, the [Hagel-Martinez] bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years."

How exactly is this a good idea? What possible good can come of this?

I live in an area flooded with low-skilled immigrants and I can attest that the economy is not exactly thriving because of their presence. Businesses have left the area and homeowners have fled as the crime rate has shot skyward. How far is this going to go before we stop selling ourselves out?

We're not modernizing our immigration policy, we're letting ourselves be colonized.

Source: Washington Times

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