RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday, May 10^th President Obama traveled to El Paso, Texas to deliver a speech about immigration and why it is now time for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR).

Time and time again the citizens of our nation have opposed a succession of previous efforts to enact such a wrong-headed program and yet, once again, President Obama went to the border to push exactly that.

The President made many outlandish statements in support of legislation that, in my opinion, if enacted would do grave, irrevocable harm to our nation’s security and decimate the American Dream.

The President resorted to the usual argument that the immigration system is broken.  It is broken, but not the way he would have you believe. Our nation admits more than 1.1 million lawful immigrants each and every year and the level of fraud in the legal system is stratospheric.  But it is not just the lawful immigration process that is dysfunctional.  Illegal aliens who run our nation’s borders have no reliable way of establishing their true identities; they are “undocumented.”  They haven’t a shred of official documentation to attest to their true identities.  There is no verifiable way to know their countries of citizenship, their true names, their true backgrounds or their potential affiliation with criminal or terrorist organizations.

By running our nation’s borders they create no record of their entry into our country.  Most efforts aimed at identifying criminal aliens who are convicted of felonies are identified as aliens by virtue of their fingerprint records.  An illegal alien who is able to speak English and lies about being a United States citizen stands a fairly good chance of getting away with his false claim to United States citizenship.  Furthermore, an alien who runs the border can claim to have entered the United States as long ago as necessary in order to qualify for any amnesty program the politician may concoct.  In part, this is how some of the aliens who participated in the 1986 amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) were able to game the system.

Additionally during his remarks, the President unbelievably alleged that the fence is complete.  Apparently he has yet to read the GAO report which said that it would take 10 to 15 years to complete the fence.  The President focused on the Southern border which currently serves as little more than a speed bump to smugglers and the human tsunami of illegal aliens. He then proceeded to ignore the Northern border completely, where only a few percent of that huge border is under “Operational control.”

The issue is not what the Republicans want, the issue is about what the citizens of the United States want and what they should be entitled to.  The Republicans certainly have not demonstrated a real desire to control our nation’s borders or create an immigration system that has real integrity and have often been as much as part of the problem as have the Democrats.

Time and again the GAO and the Office of the Inspector General have conducted investigations and issued reports about how USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) handles its mission of adjudicating applications for various immigration benefits including the conferring of resident alien status and even United States citizenship upon aliens.  These reports made it abundantly clear that USCIS lacks to the resources, the leadership, and the integrity to effectively carry out its critically important missions now; and this is the very same agency that would be called upon to implement CIR if our government is sufficiently duplicitous to pass this legislative disaster.

Recently, New York State Senator Chuck Schumer called for the implementation of a program that would require trains to implement the equivalent of the “No Fly” list employed by airlines to keep potential terrorists off airliners.  The fact of the matter is that an illegal alien who has no reliable identity documents and has been using multiple false names could easily acquire official identity documents under the auspices of CIR and use the documents that USCIS would provide them to acquire driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, library cards, credit cards and other such documentation in order to embed themselves in our country and defeat the sort of name-based system that Schumer is now calling for.  Meanwhile, Schumer, the Chairman of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee has been leading the charge for the creation of CIR.

The President attempted to create the illusion that the opposition to CIR is about bigotry–attributing the resistance to a distrust of the newcomers.  These statements are unfair and divisive.  Our nation is as multiracial as any country on the planet and, in fact, there is more diversity to be found among our citizens than in the citizenry most any other country.  To dismiss the objections of the citizens of our nation to CIR by playing the “race card” is insulting.

To commend Janet Napolitano, as the President did, for a job well done in securing our borders is outrageous beyond words.  If our borders were so secure, how did the Mexican cartels manage to infest more than 230 cities of our nation from coast to coast and border to border?  If the borders are so secure how do the narcotics that the cartels peddle in towns and cities across our nation get into our nation to replenish the supply of drugs as the cartels peddle them to Americans across our country?

It is also extremely important to remember that it is estimated that from 5 million to 10 million illegal aliens who are present in our country did not run our nation’s borders but entered through the inspections process and then, in one way or another, violated the terms of their admission.  It is estimated that fewer than 300 special agents of ICE are on the hunt for those millions of illegal aliens.  This problem is further exacerbated by the ever expanding Visa Waiver Program that currently enables aliens from 36 countries to seek to enter the United States without first applying for and receiving visas.

The President and others who advocate for CIR and the influx of foreign workers speak glowingly about the work ethic and talent of foreign workers, spewing the outrageous and infuriating mythology that somehow American workers don’t meet the high standards to be found in the foreign workforce. How many times have we heard that we need to import foreign workers to keep America competitive?

This nonsense is how companies make certain to hire foreign workers who are willing to work for substandard wages and undercut American workers who are finding it increasingly difficult, if not altogether impossible, to support themselves and their families.  This is, in part, why it is estimated that one in five American families now live below the poverty level.

There is, however, a place where an influx of new workers would help improve the prospects for our nation’s future, and that place is Washington, D.C.