“If there’s a silver lining in President Donald Trump’s extreme immigration agenda, it is that it has highlighted the nation’s broken and outdated immigration system. The best hope for stopping the indiscriminate deportation of migrants is through immigration reform, which hasn’t happened in a comprehensive manner in almost 40 years.
“Miami Republican U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar has shown the political will to start getting that done with a bipartisan bill she’s filing Tuesday called the Dignity Act. It would provide legal status to undocumented migrants who meet certain requirements, have no criminal record, pay restitution and give 1 percent of their earnings to the U.S. government. . . .
“Salazar is introducing her 250-page bill with Democratic U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, and there are about 18 to 20 other co-sponsors from both parties, she said.
“The legislation covers a large range of immigration-related issues, from border security to reforms to the U.S. asylum system. Most notably, it creates a ‘Dignity Program; available to undocumented migrants here since before Dec. 31, 2020, who don’t have criminal records. . . . It’s simple: Come out of the shadows, keep on working, pay taxes, go home for Christmas, join a union,’ Salazar said. . . .
Ideally, a House committee should hear Salazar’s legislation and air out some of its details. Mainly, would it fair and feasible to require mostly low-income migrants to pay $1,000 per year for seven years? And what about the bureaucratic burden of having to process the applications of up to 10 million people her office expects would benefit from the Dignity Program when Trump has slashed the federal workforce?– Miami Republican Has ‘Simple’ Plan to Stop Mass Deportations. Trump Should Listen, Editorial; Board, Miami Herald, 7/15/25 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: As for “solving” illegal immigration with amnesty, all we can say is that we’ve been there and done that—and it didn’t work. Immigration restrictionists have learned from hard experience that immigration advocates seldom keep the compromises that they promise. Famously, they broke the promises they made before passage of the 1986 immigration bill, namely to increase immigration law enforcement and never propose another amnesty.
Given that history, and the on-going efforts of illegal alien advocates to keep them from being held accountable for anything, we can expect more of the same following another amnesty. Interestingly, this editorial seems to be carving out some possibilities for loopholes by suggesting it wouldn’t be “fair” for amnestied illegals to pay a fine.
It’s interesting that Salazar calls her bill the Dignity Act, as if illegal aliens have some kind of dignity which we’re supposed to acknowledge. They have broken our laws and disrespected our country, so there is no reason why we owe them anything—least of all a pathway to eventual citizenship.
Illegal alien advocates never explain why rewarding illegal immigration with amnesty will not encourage more of it—which was the case following the 1986 amnesty and the de facto amnesties that followed that legislation.. Maybe those advocates really do want to encourage it, as it provides cheap labor for the Republicans among them and cheap votes (after amnesty) for Democrats. Forget about appeals to “dignity” and other high sounding ideals. The true motivations behind this bipartisan sellout of our country’s rule of law are nothing more than greed and lust for power.