Here’s another story that flew under the radar on the weekend when the Mueller Report was filed.
An op-ed in the New York Times fashioned itself as “A Grand Compromise on Immigration.” It was written by two House members from New York — Peter King, a Republican, and Tom Suozzi, a Democrat. Call them the Gang of Two.
The first thing you need to know is that this is not a Grand Compromise. It is another ploy to legalize a certain percentage of the illegal immigrants already in our country without doing anything to solve the larger problems that plague our immigration “system” (it is an exaggeration to call it a system when it is more of a patchwork of ignored rules and judge-ordered loopholes, but immigration “sieve” probably won’t catch on).
The compromise involves “a path to citizenship for approximately 1.9 million immigrants brought by their parents, without documentation, when they were 18 or under.” Those are the famous Dreamers — whose dreams are always valued more highly than the dreams of U.S. citizens.
The plan would also “extend similar coverage to the 400,000 people who were invited to America and given temporary protective status after facing natural disasters, violence and extreme poverty in their home countries.”
Finally, “relatives of Dreamers, of T.P.S. recipients and of others who are undocumented — approximately 2.7 million more people — would be eligible for three years of protective status, renewable indefinitely, if they have been in the United States for a significant number of years and have no record of criminal activity.”
You can imagine that by the time Congress and the courts get through with the plan that it would be doubled, but let’s accept King and Suozzi’s assertion that the number of illegals on the road to legal status would be 5 million. How do the authors propose to balance this huge influx of legal immigrants to make it worthwhile? By charging each of them $2,000 to apply for legal status. That is supposed to bring in $10 billion, which after administrative costs are subtracted, leaves $8.6 billion to spend on border security.
Well, not exactly. Half that money would be targeted for “additional physical structures” on the border (supposedly) but half would go to “aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to help prevent further out-migration from those countries, as well as to radar technology, improved ports of entry, immigration judges, border patrol personnel and humanitarian assistance along the border, as recommended by the Department Homeland Security.”
If you think that payoffs to the corrupt governments of Central American governments to make sure it never happens again will result in anything more than bigger payoffs in the future, I have a failed foreign policy I would like to sell you. The rest, of course, is window dressing. No matter what we do in the way of border security — up to and including a wall — will never turn off the spigot of illegal immigration as long as we incentivize border crossing with a steady stream of jobs, benefits and laws to reward those make it into our country.
The only one who has seriously proposed meaningful immigration reform is President Trump. Not the proposal he offered in January, which was very similar to the King-Suozzi plan, but the proposal he made as a candidate in his position paper on immigration. In that plan, Trump spelled out that the border wall was just one component of real immigration reform.
Just as important were mandated nationwide e-Verify, which would elongate access to jobs for illegal immigrants; an end to birthright citizenship; a general decrease in legal immigration at least temporarily; and new standards for refugees and asylum seekers. Those are the real solutions to our national crisis, but you won’t ever hear folks in Congress talking about them. Congress is a get-rich quick scheme for 535 lucky lottery winners, not a serious institution of American governance.
HeartlandDiaryUSA.com hosts the commentary of Frank Miele, former editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. Your support for this blog is appreciated. Please consider purchasing one of my books at Amazon. My new book is “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?” — a look at Fake News from the perspective of a small-town newspaper editor. In addition, my “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy documents the downward spiral of the USA that made Trump’s presidency so important. The books are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. Go here for a free sample of “The Media Matrix”: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/sitb/B07PDQBJM4
