Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeanfromfillmore
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The Obama administration is committed to making a major push early next year. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ... insisted now is the time to put together the elements of what she called the three-legged stool: tough enforcement, a much streamlined system for legal immigration and a path to legal status for illegal immigrants already in the U.S.
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There are ways to compromise on these matters. A good start is a new Brookings Institution/Duke University study. It calls for ... a big increase for legal immigrants with needed work skills. ...
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The public reactions against amnesty are pretty vital, but the discussion over legal immigration is still heavily clouded. Is it hard to see that increased legal immigration would be worse than amnesty? It would be better to offer an amnesty along with a comprehensive and long term strategy to purge, utterly, illegal immigrants along with a moratorium on legal immigration until that goal is met. Making it easier to immigrate to the US is just another kind of amnesty and if you offer amnesty along with easier immigration, then that's just laying the foundation of another amnesty further down the road. If it is easier to immigrate legally, then it is also harder to violate immigration laws and so illegal immigration has all that much motivation -- the legal reaction is softened and seeing two amnesties from both a Republican and Democratic presidency creates the promise of third.
This is what Reagan should have done instead of posing workplace enforcement as a counterbalance to the amnesty he gave. He should have commited to hunting down all the rest of the illegals after the end of the period of amnesty and clamped down on legal immigration as well until we could say that the country was really free of illegal immigrants.