Legal Insanity

     As a prelude to this piece, I refer to an editorial from the Dallas Morning News, entitled "The Legal Route", dateline 21 Sept 2007. I encourage interested readers to go to http://www.dallasnews.com/ to review the entire article.

     The first sentence is, "From abroad, a foreigner watching Washington's immigration debate this week could easily conclude that only fools choose the legal migration route." It closes with; "Congress needs to show the world that we reward those who immigrate legally. At the minimum, we need to stop penalizing those whose only fault is obeying the law."

     Your columnist predicted that chaos would rule at the collapse of the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill in the US congress this summer. By congressional abdication of their responsibility to install a workable process to bring order to the migration process, they created a legal vacuum. And nature (along with politics) abhors a vacuum. What we are left with is a conflicting patchwork of state and local entities creating widespread legal chaos.

     Answering the real requirements that exist in the US economy for temporary workers is totally lost. In particular are the agricultural and building sectors. With a politically set annual cap of 65,000 temporary workers, set by political considerations instead or what is actually needed, the result is that in order to compete, businesses end up hiring illegals to do the work. The big problem is that with illegals, they are "trapped" in the US and do not return to their homeland as legals would do and return to work in the next season. The other thing that happens is that the bean pickers of today will eventually move up the employment ladder and have to be replaced later with more illegals.

     By the way, the talked about upgrading of the skill requirements of immigrants ignores the fact that you don't need rocket scientists to pick beans.

    Consider the state of Colorado that is now using convict farm labor to tend and harvest crops. And that state is pleading with an unlistening Washington to increase the agricultural worker quotas to a realistic level. Yeah, and this is the state that good old "ship 'em all back" Rep. Tom Tancredo comes from.

     In Illinois, after the DHS is requiring that employers use the electronic system to verify that all employees are legal, the state is passing a law to make employer participation illegal! The state is being sued by the federal government on this issue. The state's position is that the system, as it is, is only 60% reliable and victimizes many prospective employees. The DHS maintains that the E-Verify system is 95% effective. Who to believe? Remember that it was the DHS that gave us the Katrina debacle. It was the DHS that put Sen. Ted Kennedy on the "no-fly" list (along with many, many other mistakes). The DHS has a very low credibility rating.

     We have "sanctuary" cities that prevent any local cooperation with the ICE on immigration issues. This ends up leaving convicted criminals that are illegals remaining in the US to commit more crimes. And in the other extreme we have Irving, Texas, that is using Gestapo tactics in sweeps to round up anybody that even has a deeper suntan to "ship 'em back".

     Another note on the DHS mindset: They are still almost totally focused on airline security. Get real, cross by land in standard legal crossing points and get waved through with just a glance and no record. And recent tests showed that the northern border, for all practical purposes, is wide open. Test trucks carrying tons of "explosives" were able to cross with no problems.

     If good control of the borders is to be achieved (along with internal security), first set realistic visa levels that are set by actual needs rather than political agendas. If you want better security, have the DHS staffed to address the need and perform their federally mandated responsibility for immigration control. Do the job in a professional manner instead of making "show raids" that are only deporting otherwise honest workers just trying to do a needed job. Yeah, it makes good press showing mothers being separated from their children and trucked off to the border.

     Do I believe in control of the borders? Of course I do, but do it in an effective, realistic way. And it has to recognize real economic needs. My former Father in law who worked in the 40s and 50s in the agricultural worker program of that era, worked on the harvests, returned to his family in México and returned to work again to do the same thing. When the work was there, he worked, legally, and returned to work again when needed, legally.

     President Calderón recently said that migration is "inevitable". More to the point, the history of mankind demonstrates that man is a migrating animal.

     If real immigration control is to be achieved in the US, it must recognize economic reality and have an effective system to enforce it. The present administration has a record of trying to solve problems by creating more bureaucracy. That never works as México keeps demonstrating. Isn't it strange that the party that advertises smaller and efficient government actually does the opposite?

     And it must address a humane and practical way to deal with those illegals that, in the most part, are only doing needed work. Whose fault is it that they are in the US in the first place?
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Richard N. Baldwin T., a HispanicVista.com (http://www.hispanicvista.com/) contributing columnist, lives in Tlalnepantla, Edo de México. E-mail at: R1041643422@aol.com