Nation's leaders should deal forcefully with immigration
By Yeh Ling-Ling and Donna Locke
Published February 25, 2003, in the Tennessean
Translate
President Bush's budget proposal forecasts a deficit of $304 billion without counting the cost for a likely war with Iraq.
Most states are also facing the worst budget deficits in decades. Meanwhile, a hiring slump continues in many parts of the country.
These stark facts ought to give American leaders the courage to advocate an immigration policy that would drastically reduce the number of service users and save jobs for all legal residents.
Annual legal immigration has averaged about 1 million a year while illegal immigration is estimated to be 300,000 to 500,000 annually. [The INS very recently raised their estimate of illegal immigration to 800,000 a year]. Adult immigrants need employment, just like U.S.-born Americans.
If President Bush and Congress are serious about providing jobs for unemployed citizens and existing legal immigrants, they should temporarily halt job seekers from entering the U.S. by passing legislation to reduce legal immigration from an average of 1 million a year to no more than 200,000.
Deportation of millions of illegal immigrants would open up jobs to legal residents who need work. The benefits of such measures are multi-fold and extend beyond the issue of employment.
Once illegal immigrants are deported and legal immigration is dramatically reduced, we could better protect our homeland security by concentrating on tracking down and deporting all terrorists operating within our borders.
Removing Saddam Hussein will do little to stop terrorism as long as our borders remain porous.
An effective system to stop future infiltration of terrorists or weapons into this country should be implemented. Americans should not die in vain in Iraq, and this country should not squander possibly up to $200 billion of our hard-earned tax dollars because of the incompetence of our leadership.
With illegal-immigrant children removed from public education, school districts in Tennessee and in other parts of the United States could immediately ease their burgeoning budget deficits.
They could then concentrate on providing quality education for all legal immigrant and U.S.-born children.
Simultaneously, all adult able-bodied welfare recipients and unemployed or underemployed low-skilled workers could take the positions held by illegal immigrants, jobs that Americans had decades ago.
A better-educated youth and a more productive work force are necessary to ensure a long-term, sustainable economic recovery.
Currently, more than 25% of federal prison inmates are foreign born. Many states spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year incarcerating criminal aliens.
Deporting those foreign-born convicts would save billions of dollars annually nationwide in costs of imprisonment and court services and construction of new prisons.
Once those expenditures were reduced, the government could invest part of the savings in crime prevention and job training programs for prison inmates who can be reformed.
Once rehabilitated, former prisoners could become productive workers and taxpayers instead of tax burdens.
Millions of illegal immigrants removed from the United States would also mean fewer users of many social services, such as health care, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars annually.
In recent years, immigrant families have contributed more than half of the growth of the uninsured population in the United States. Therefore, once new immigration policies are put in place and savings materialized from servicing fewer immigrants, the United States could start working on a fiscally responsible universal health care system for all law-abiding legal residents.
Drastically reducing immigration could also help preserve our national unity.
Because of high immigration, Hispanics have overtaken African-Americans as our country's largest minority group. Tensions between African-Americans and Hispanics have increased as African-Americans have been losing out politically and economically.
In the meantime, numerous Mexican-American leaders have made public statements that indicate continued mass immigration will lead to further fragmentation and instability in the United States.
For example, Henry Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told a Hispanic audience in 1995:
''As goes the Latino population will go the State of California.
And as goes California will go the United States of America.
My friends, the stakes are big.
This is a fight worth making.''
American leaders should realize that there are no solutions on earth that can please all the governed.
Sensible immigration reform is the first and necessary step if they are serious about realistically dealing with our national crisis.
Yeh Ling-Ling is the executive director of Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America. Donna Locke is founder of Tennesseans for Immigration Reform based in Columbia, Tenn. Her e-mail is tncoalition at hotmail dot com.
|