Enforcement Not Amnesty
The Washington Post December 7 article “Struggles of the Second Generation” describes how second generation Hispanics are doing no better than their parents and perhaps worse, having babies out of wedlock, dropping out of high school and getting involved with gangs.
23-year-old Javier Saavedra, interviewed in the story, lives in the basement of his girlfriend’s parents’ Maryland home with his two small children. He makes $12 an hour when he can get work, didn’t finish high school and has no health insurance for himself or his family. He and his family will likely become burdens to the taxpayers.
As David Frum notes in his most recent book, Comeback, Mexican immigrants receive about $55,000 more in benefits in their lifetime than they pay in taxes. Educating the children of illegal immigrants has also become a costly proposition. In 1982, a Supreme Court decision required local governments to educate immigrants equally with native-born Americans. This means that states must spend more money on resources to teach immigrants English and other basic skills alongside native-born Americans who already have mastered these skills. Frum writes:
In order to have our chickens plucked in America, rather than import them preplucked from Mexico or Brazil, the American nation has assumed a vast and protracted commitment to tens of millions of people-over and on top of the as-yet-unfulfilled debt owed to those who still carry the wounds of slavery and segregation.
About 34% of black children are living in poverty in the U.S. compared to 26% of children born to Hispanic immigrants. As of 2004, almost 70% of all black children are born to unmarried mothers and more than 11% of black males aged 25 to 34 were incarcerated in June 2006. Where’s the Democrats’ sense of obligation to poor, black, native-born Americans?
The first African slaves were shipped to the English colony of Virginia in 1607. Black American slaves built this country, but their descendants have had to wage their own fight and suffer death to gain basic civil rights to get a good education and be allowed to be patrons of restaurants, hotels and movies alongside whites. Today, the divide between prospering and poor blacks is growing. Poor blacks face an increasing rate of out of wedlock births, HIV/AIDS infection, imprisonment, and under-education. Don't these concerns warrant the nation's first attention? Won't amnesty make them all worse, by expanding the population of the nation's most hard-pressed poor?
Instead of throwing more money after bad and granting amnesty to illegals, as the Obama administration seems poised to do, the country needs to change course. Let’s get serious about enforcement and shift the immigration debate from the unskilled to the highly-skilled workers which are of greater benefit and less costly to the U.S. in the long-term. Real immigration enforcement when applied can yield results. Practical solutions to problems such as immigration are a formula more likely to yield winning results than “purity standards.”