Sentiment Aside, We Need To Support Real Immigration Reforms

November 21, 1993|By Charley Reese of The Sentinel Staff

In 1991, 830,000 legal immigrants and an estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants came to the United States. That's about 830,000 too many.

Professor Don Huddle, a Texas expert, has estimated that illegal aliens cost U.S. taxpayers $11.9 billion annually and legal immigrants, $30.6 billion. That estimate is net, which means these are the estimated costs above and beyond their contributions as taxpayers.

Every time I write about the problems of immigration in the 1990s, someone inevitably replies that we are a nation of immigrants. Yes, that's true. We were also a nation of Indian killers, land grabbers, slave holders, buffalo slaughterers and several other things.

We're talking about today's problems in today's world, not musing about the past. As we work in the present to solve problems that confront us, we simultaneously create both the future and past. We can learn some lessons from the past, though most of the time we don't, but we cannot repeat it nor should we confuse today with yesterday.

Today, we have some 8 million people ''officially'' unemployed, though the real number is higher, and another 8 million or so underemployed. Today, in the large cities, unemployment rates among some segments of our population run 30 percent or more. Guess what: There is a definite correlation between high crime rates and high unemployment rates.

Today, we are living in a world with an excess population and are seeing a steady increase of migration from very poor countries to what's left of the better-off countries. This is as natural as the wind blowing.

Today, we don't need millions more people to do grunt work. Today, the single greatest social and political problem we face is how to provide jobs for millions of people in the face of increasing automation, increasing global competition, and increasing movement of good jobs in the United States to cheap-labor countries.

You don't do it by adding to the labor pool with a shamefully porous border and ridiculous immigration quotas set by a bunch of lousy politicians who dance with the lobbyists for special-interest groups.

I seriously doubt there is an Einstein down there in the slums of Juarez just itching to get across our borders so he can build an atomic bomb. In a time when one man with a machine can plant, care for and harvest nearly 700 acres of cotton, there is even limited opportunity for bent-back work.

Now, because enough of you have begun raising hell, Congress has a flurry of bills about immigration in the hopper. Some of them are just phony reforms - a standard tactic to head off real reforms.

The most genuine seems to be a Senate bill, the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993, put into the hopper by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. This bill would cap legal immigration at 300,000 per year; set a ceiling of 50,000 for refugees; expand the list of felonies for which aliens could be excluded or deported; authorizes 9,600 new Border Patrol officers; impose a border-crossing fee to fund measures; and prevent a person born to an illegal alien in the United States from being granted automatic citizenship.

In short, this is the real bill, the real reform, and so if you want something constructive done, you should let your senators and representatives know that you support Senate Bill 1351.

The problem of immigration will not just go away; if we don't force the government to take steps, it will get worse.

Sentiment aside, immigrants are like people already here - some good, some bad; some productive, some parasitic. Sentiment aside, if you want your grandchildren to live in an America that at least bears some resemblance to the one you lived in, then you had better put the brakes on immigration.

My choice is a flat-out moratorium on all immigration for five years, but Reid's bill is by far the best alternative.

It's your country. Get to work or lose it.

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