The Immigration Dilemma

Everybody in America knows that we have a serious problem with immigration. However, very few have offered any reasonable and workable solutions.

One “solution” that will not be effective is building a “Berlin Wall” along our southern border. Building and guarding it would not only be outrageously expensive, but it could be easily bypassed on both ends by boats or even swimmers.

Deportations to the other side of the border are also mostly ineffective. The illegals simply come back again and again until they finally get far enough inside to escape the law officers.

During the 1950’s, President Dwight Eisenhower developed and implemented a plan that did work—Operation Wetback. He loaded the illegals onto boats and shipped them to southern Mexico—to Veracruz and beyond. It took them considerable time and expense to get back to the border and cross again. The few that did come back were easily manageable. However, this was still not a real solution.

Let’s forget an impenetrable barrier. The only effective solution is to eliminate the temptations that draw them here. Instead of spending billions of dollars to keep them out, we could save billions of dollars and let them voluntarily stay out.

How do we do it? America’s biggest problem is the gross excess of public assistance programs—so generous and so loosely enforced, they are magnets for riffraff from our own people as well as from abroad. They are also disincentives for people to do productive work. Over the past several decades, more and more people have become addicted to public assistance and converted from self-sufficiency into parasitism. We must put a stop to all forms of public assistance that illegals can currently use—education, health care, EBT, welfare, social security, and the numerous others.

Of course, many come to find work. We require people to have a valid ID to vote. We could do the same for people to be hired. Employers hiring illegals can be fined, and the salaries of illegals could be confiscated. Also, we could place a stiff limit on the amount of money that can be wired or otherwise sent abroad. Eliminating the minimum wage laws would provide a free market and help reduce the disparity in the cost of labor.

A third item is the serious problem of “anchor babies.” As our Constitution is now interpreted, any child born on American soil automatically becomes a citizen by birth regardless of the status of his parents. An estimated several million babies have been born to illegals via this loophole and have not only become citizens themselves, but have allowed their entire families to legally come, stay, consume our resources, and even vote (in the future, perhaps, in big enough numbers to overthrow our government). Closing this loophole with a Constitutional amendment should be a top priority.

Once the above three items have been addressed, we could open up our border to all who want to travel back and forth with little fear of the violence that is now present in that area.

Another problem we must address is to limit the number of legal immigrants to avoid diluting our American culture to extinction. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly all immigrants who came wanted to become like us and adopt our culture. They came to find opportunities to work for themselves and become productive citizens. Today more and more of them want to isolate themselves from our culture and form their own little cliques. Some of these have grown very large and problematic. Many seek various forms of public assistance and/or partake in criminal activities.

And finally, we must face the most serious problem of all, immigrants who come from dangerous parts of the world. It might seem cruel to deny refugees from Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and certain other areas, but it is utter suicide to allow even a single one given the ease that ISIS members and other terrorists can disguise themselves as refugees and then wreak havoc and massacre thousands of people. For many years, and especially since 9/11, we have seen how easily a handful of men, women, and even children have committed jihads against multitudes of innocent victims.

Our country’s biggest vulnerability is its very loose immigration policy. There is not another nation anywhere in the world that is so lax in admitting whoever comes along. We must protect ourselves from an immigration invasion with the same effort we would take in averting a nuclear holocaust.