ILLEGAL SHOULD MEAN ILLEGAL BY BOB UNTERMAN

Curtailing illegal immigration

Suppose bank robbery was not punished. If you robbed a bank and you were caught, you'd simply have to give the money back. And oh yes, you'd get a lift home. Obviously, if that were the case, we would have banks being robbed every second of every day. So why are we surprised that illegal immigrants flood across our borders every second of every day? If caught, Border Patrol agents simply ship the illegal immigrants back home. Our government's attitude seems to be, 'no harm, no foul'. And now we are going to spend a ridiculous amount of money on an utterly ridiculous, and useless, fence as the "cure" for this serious problem afflicting America.

There is a better solution. I have a radical idea; let's make illegal mean illegal again. Let's pass a federal law saying that instead of merely being sent home, anyone convicted of illegally entering the United States would serve 6 months in jail for the first offense, 18 months for the second offense, and 36 months for the third offense. And only upon completion of their sentence would an illegal immigrant be sent home. This would remove the primary impetus for such illegal immigration, sending money home. An incarcerated illegal immigrant can't earn money; he or she can't send money back home, so why cross the border? Hence once America seriously enforces such a law on a nationwide basis, illegal immigration would drop precipitously.

(Depending upon how seriously we want to curtail the flow of illegal immigration, we can remove other rewards for crossing our border illegally. We could end the practice of granting automatic citizenship to children born here even if the mother is here illegally; we could stop free health care and free public education. All these reward illegal entry. America needs to decide just how firmly we want to deal with this problem.)

But wait, you say, can we afford to build and staff thousands of new jail cells? Wouldn't incarcerating this veritable flood of illegal aliens cost billions? But no, I say. Let's steal an idea from Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. Let's set up large tent city jails near the US/Mexico border. We could house the illegal immigrants in these inexpensive, temporary facilities. Those caught in other locales around the country could be transported to these southwestern locations. Again, I suspect that once we were to seriously enforce such a law, the need for such facilities would fall dramatically.

{Yes, we need some sort of guest worker program (a future blog entry from someone smarter than I), and some sort of grandfather clause for folks who have been here and paid taxes for many years (another future blog entry). Yes, the United States bears some responsibility for the crushing poverty in much of our hemisphere (yet another blog entry). But the lack of legislation in these other areas should not deter this crucial first step. This fairly simple, cost effective, solution can become a reality, but only if we have the national will to do it.}

So when will Congress grow some cojones and pass such a bill? Believe it or not, something quite similar to this law is already on the books. This is precisely why these people are already called 'illegal'! So why isn't the Bush administration enforcing the law? Beats the hell out of me.