The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“If Republicans are truly worried about the scourge of undocumented immigrants, they should start building that ‘big, beautiful door’ on our borders that Donald Trump always talked about.
“The solution to concerns about ‘illegal immigration is creating more legal pathways to immigrate here.
“Immigration reform has stalled for decades, despite widespread agreement that the existing system is broken, and occasional and occasional bipartisan attempts to fix it. The latest sweeping bill, backed by President Biden, has gone nowhere, unlikely to secure enough Republican votes to avoid a filibuster.
“So now Senate Democrats are attempting a workaround. They’ve signaled that they’ll include a narrow subset of immigration issues in their forthcoming bill, which could be passed with only Democratic votes. , , ,
“Democrats are trying to sneak a massive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants through Congress under the cover of their budget scheme” warned Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
‘The Democrats want to include a massive amnesty in that legislation,’ echoed his colleague Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). That will simply act as a bigger magnet for more illegal immigration into this country.’
“This is nonsense. First and foremost, the population eligible for legalization would likely be restricted to people who’ve already been here for some minimum of time, rather than those contemplating coming, say, tomorrow. This is how that broader, Biden-backed bill works, and how previous legalization proposals have been structured.” –Worried About Illegal Immigration? Create More Legal Immigrants, Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, 7/15/21 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: This article assumes that the total of illegal immigration is a fixed quantity, that will neither rise nor fall in response to policy. Therefore, all we need to do with illegal immigration is to make it legal (i.e., increase the legal quota to include it), and—presto—the problem will be gone. This article also argues that amnesty for illegal aliens already here would have no adverse effects, that it would not serve as a “magnet” for more illegal immigration.
The problem with these theories is that they don’t conform to reality. The first amnesty for about three million illegal aliens passed in 1986. The legislation also contained provisions to enhance immigration law enforcement. Most of the latter, however, never went into effect, or were delayed for years. For about five years, the flow of illegal immigration did go down. But as it became apparent that enforcement had no teeth, the flow soared upward again. This outcome should have surprised no one. When you reward lawbreaking—and offer little deterrent to it—lawbreaking is bound to increase. You get what you pay for. After the 1986 amnesty and subsequent amnesties, people around the globe had encouragement to think that they too could risk a border crossing and win America’s amnesty jack pot.
It’s significant that the Biden Administration proposals offer no new enforcement at all. In fact, since last January, the administration has ended much previously existing steps to enforce immigration laws.
History also disproves the notion that increasing legal immigration quotas will absorb everyone who would otherwise come here illegally. That’s not what happened after 1965 and 1990 when legislation sharply increased legal immigration. In both cases, illegal immigration surged to unprecedented levels. One reason is that admission of one legal immigrant raises the hopes of all that person’s relatives that they too can come to the U.S. Without a relative in the U.S. many of that person’s extended family member would never get the idea of coming to the U.S. Large-scale legal immigration also creates communities where illegal aliens can fit in and not be easily detected.
Currently, our country has the highest sustained level of legal immigration in our history, an average of around one million legal immigrants a year for the past 30 years. Reducing this surge is essential to reducing illegal immigration.