Introduction

This paper was written in the Summer of 2006 after Congressional debate on comprehensive immigration reform and following passage of legislation in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. While the House bill focused almost exclusively on border control and tougher enforcement of current immigration law, the Senate legislation encompasses guestworkers and provisions for rewarding current lawbreakers with eventual citizenship.

The bottom line is that for all of the political pandering and hand-wringing on this critical issue, we already have laws on the books to meet today’s immigration crisis head-on. Demanding enforcement of these laws and funding long overdue high-tech programs that can better track non-compliance should be our top priority.

For many years our Federal government has failed to stop illegal immigration, with the deplorable result that there are now an estimated 10-15 million illegal immigrants living here permanently, in violation of our laws. Their number grows each year by an estimated 500,000 new illegal immigrants who settle here after either crossing our borders illegally, or overstaying their visas.

Proponents of mass immigration have attempted (fairly successfully until now) to set the terms of the debate about what to do with the many millions of illegal immigrants who have settled here. They have done so by maintaining that there are only two possible options: either mass deportation or citizenship.

Since it is unrealistic to think that 10-15 million immigrants could somehow be apprehended and deported in mass, the proponents of mass immigration maintain that the only other option is to put them on a path toward citizenship. That would amount to a mass amnesty, pure and simple. Such an amnesty would create a large and immediate increase in the size of our already vastly overpopulated country by an estimated 18 to 30 million, because the amnestied illegals would be able to bring their immediate family members currently living abroad into our country. The higher estimate – 30 million – would be equal to a staggering 10% of our present population of nearly 300 million.