Presidential Myth Busters #2

As I stated in my last posting, President Bush has published numerous “Facts” in an attempt to dispel certain so-called “myths” about SB 1348, the Senate Bill to provide comprehensive immigration reform. Here is the next segment on “Myth and Facts” from our President:
“2. MYTH: This proposal repeats the mistakes of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. ”
“FACT: The 1986 Act failed because it provided amnesty for 3 million immigrants, did not adequately secure borders, did not include a workable employer verification system, and created no legal avenue to meet the labor needs of the American economy. ”
“FACT: This proposal addresses every one of the shortcomings from 1986: ”
“No Amnesty: Illegal workers must acknowledge that they broke the law and pay a fine to be eligible for a Z visa.”
“Border Security: Border security benchmarks must be met before the Z visa and temporary worker programs go into effect. These triggers include: constructing 370 miles of fencing and 200 miles of vehicle barriers at the border and increasing the size of the Border Patrol to 18,000 agents.”
“Employer Verification System: An Employment Eligibility Verification System must be ready to process new hires before the Z visa and temporary worker programs go into effect." “Temporary Worker Program: A temporary worker program will relieve pressure on the border and provide a lawful way to meet the needs of our economy. ”
“FACT: The 1986 Act offered green cards after just 18 months, but under this proposal, green card applicants must meet a number of responsibilities – something which will take most candidates more than a decade. ”

RESPONSE:

As I pointed out in Myth Busters # 1, this is indeed an amnesty program. Additionally, though it provided amnesty to 3 million, it was originally projected to provide amnesty for only 1 million people. It did indeed fail to implement a workable employer verification system, however, the current bill cannot guarantee the implementation of a workable employment verification system either. As far as meeting the "labor needs of the American economy, I’ll go into that a little bit later.

The reality, despite the President’s desire to state that this Senate proposal addresses all of the errors made in 1986, is that it does in fact repeat some of the most egregious errors.

Based upon the estimate of about 9 million applications for the new “Z” Visa, the following calculations are made. Please note, the 9 million applications could become as many as 27 million based upon the experiences of the 1986 amnesty program.

According to Chris Kobach, former counsel on immigration to US Attorney General John Ashcroft, the GAO in 2006 reported that the Immigrations and Customs Service (ICS) currently has a backlog of about 6.3 million immigration cases. This case backlog was already strained almost to the “breaking point” in processing the normal immigrant applications. Now, the plan is to more than double the number of pending case? (Or quadruple if we use the full 18 million).

Additionally, with the need to perform “background checks” on each applicant in under 24 hours, just how are they planning on doing this? How are you going to do a background check on someone from San Jose, Guatemala (beautiful little town on the Pacific coast) in under 24 hours? Fax? E-mail? Carrier Pigeon? The background investigation on my wife took us about 24 hours to complete as we happened to be IN the country of origin. Now we expect a bureaucrat in Washington DC to complete one in less than 24-hours? Especially when you consider that they will have an average of about 34,615 additional background checks to process EVERY DAY!!! At least we could assume they would attain plenty of practice in the performance of background checks.

One of the biggest fallacies of this bill is the assumption that it requires that certain “triggers” in the increase of our border security prior to anybody receiving their amnesty.

Unfortunately, there is a clause in the bill that states that upon the concurrence of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of State, the border can be “certified” secure at any time, and thereby bypass any issues that have occurred in the completion of the actual “triggers”. With all that we have gone through with this bill, and the deceptive way in which it was assembled and attempted to be passed without any debate or discussion, I personally do not feel confident in trusting either this administration or the next in waiting until the actual triggers are “met” before certifying the security of our borders.

The last fallacy is that the presence of a temporary guest worker program will reduce the number of people flowing across our border, or the desire of people to illegally enter the US. However, that discussion shall wait until another time.

You can email Alan at alan@alanfernald.com twenty-four hours a day.