Time to Get Tough (17 page)

Look, my wife is an immigrant—a
legal
immigrant. Did she have to jump through legal hoops? Of course. Did she complain about it? No, she didn't. She is grateful for the chance to live in America. So she complied with the laws of the land. She worked hard to become a U.S. citizen—and the U.S. got a good one.

In purely economic terms, however, one of illegal immigration's biggest costs to taxpayers involves the monies paid to educate the children of illegal aliens. Illegal immigrant children often require special classes and language specialists, and take time and resources away from our own
students. On this point I strongly disagree with Governor Rick Perry. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reports that U.S. taxpayers shell out $52 billion annually to educate illegal aliens. Liberals like to say that illegal aliens pay taxes too in the form of sales taxes and the fees and taxes that get folded into the costs of things like gasoline. But this argument fails—big time. According to FAIR, on average, less than 5 percent of the public costs associated with illegals are regained through taxes paid by illegal aliens.
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The fact is when it comes to taxpayer-provided social services and welfare, illegal aliens have elbowed their way to the front of the line. In 2011, the
Houston Chronicle
reported that
70 percent
of the illegal immigrant families living in Texas received welfare assistance. That's compared to the already too high 39 percent of native-born Americans who receive welfare.
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That's insane. People who broke into the country use our social safety net with greater regularity than our own citizens! How can we ever expect to get a handle on the illegal immigration crisis when we incentivize and reward it with free welfare checks and health care?

“We can no longer afford to be HMO to the world,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich. He says that the total cost to taxpayers for illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County is $1.6 billion, “not including the hundreds of millions of dollars for education.”
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The root cause of all the welfare payments to illegal aliens is the so-called “anchor baby” phenomenon, which is when illegal immigrant mothers have a baby on American soil. The child automatically becomes an American citizen, though this was
never
the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, “All citizens born or naturalized in the United States, and
subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.” The clear purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, was to guarantee full citizenship rights to now emancipated former slaves. It was not intended to guarantee untrammeled immigration to the United States.

Some 4 million anchor babies are now officially U.S. citizens. This has to stop. The only other major country in the world that issues citizenship based on where one's mother delivers her child is Canada. The rest of the world bases citizenship on who the kid's parents are, which is of course the only sane standard.
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If a pregnant American mother is traveling to Egypt on business and goes into delivery, do we instantly declare her child an Egyptian? Of course not. But that's precisely what goes on every day in America: women who have zero connection to the United States cross the border, deliver a baby, and their kid magically becomes an American citizen eligible to receive all the rights and benefits of those who have lived, worked, and paid taxes in our country.

Republican Senators John Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have discussed introducing a constitutional amendment to clarify and restore the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. It's long past time that America joins the rest of the world in granting citizenship along rational lines.

But in restoring sanity to the interpretation and enforcement of our laws, we'll have to fight liberal myths every step of the way. We've all heard a million times: “We need illegal immigrants because they are willing to
do jobs Americans just won't.” To that one I say, “Says who?” We have 25 million citizens who need jobs, and 7 million illegal immigrants holding American jobs. Do the math. If illegal aliens weren't holding these jobs, American citizens would, because these jobs need to be filled, and guess what? Those jobs would pay more than they do now, because illegal low-wage workers drive down wage rates. Even the
Washington Post
has conceded that “an influx of immigrants has helped depress the incomes of low-skilled workers in recent decades, many economists agree.”
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As research by Harvard University economist George J. Borjas has shown, “the primary losers in this country are workers who do not have high school diplomas, particularly blacks and native-born Hispanics.” Borjas found that from 1980 to 2000, illegal immigrants lowered the nation's average wages some 7.4 percent for America's 10 million native-born men who lack a high school diploma.
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You would think that Obama, who talks a good game about caring for the poor, would try to help raise wages for people at the bottom of the economic ladder. But with black teenage unemployment now at a staggering 46.5 percent, and with the overall black underemployment rate at a breathtaking 18.8 percent, it's outrageous that the president continues to mock Republican efforts to reduce illegal immigration and boost wages.
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“All the stuff they [Republicans] ask for, we've done,” said Obama at a 2011 immigration rally in El Paso, Texas. “Maybe they'll need a moat,” Obama said to laughter. “Maybe they want alligators in the moat! They'll never be satisfied.”
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Mr. President, you might think the border deaths, narco terrorists, and waves of violent illegal criminals into America are a joke, but the people who live along the border and the communities under siege do not. We need a president who will get tough, enforce our laws, protect our people, and pull wages up.

One of the biggest myths we have been told is that illegal immigrants actually produce a net gain economically. This is a cute argument, but it's a complete joke. It assumes, among other things, that illegal workers keep their money here in America. But they don't. In 2006, 73 percent of Latino immigrants regularly sent money back to their home countries, amounting to $45 billion. For countries like Mexico, illegal immigrants in the United States are a cash cow. In fact, Mexico's second biggest source of foreign income, just behind oil exports, comes from—you guessed it—remittances from illegal aliens. In 2008, Mexico got $25.1 billion in money sent back home. Remittances have skyrocketed over the last decade. They went from $9 billion in 2001 to $26 billion in 2007.
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That's money that American workers could be earning, saving, and spending here in the United States.

So what to do?

Before I lay out what needs to be done to get our illegal immigration mess fixed, it's worth first discussing what America needs to do with our
legal
immigration system. It, too, is backwards and in need of a total
overhaul. Thankfully, our neighbors to the north, Canada, have a smart, merit-based plan that America should adopt.

Canada's legal immigration plan starts with a simple and smart question: How will any immigrant applying for citizenship “support the development of a strong, prosperous Canadian economy”? Economic benefit should be our chief aim. America doesn't need freeloaders who come here to live off our welfare system. We need legal immigrants who bring skills, prosperity, and intellectual capital. In Canada, aliens applying for permanent residence are awarded points based on their skills and how they will benefit the Canadian economy. Only 40 percent of the overall determination on whether permanent residence will be granted depends on family relationships or refugee status. The remaining 60 percent of the decision hinges on how the immigrant will add value to Canada's economy. Our system is almost exactly the opposite. In fact, it's worse. Seventy percent of the one million permanent resident admissions the United States grants every year are based on family relations. Only 13 percent depend on employment (the remainder are for refugees and diversity visas).
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This makes no sense whatsoever.

For a Canadian applicant to be considered for permanent residency, he must score a minimum of 67 points out of 100. He must also have a minimum of one year of full-time work experience in a desired skill area within the last ten years. The better the immigrant's attributes, the higher the score. If the alien doesn't earn 67 points and is serious about wanting to live in Canada, he can work on developing his marketable skills until he does qualify. For example, if the applicant isn't a college graduate, he can
go home, get a college degree, and add 25 points to his total and reapply. As a result, roughly half of Canada's immigrants have a bachelor's degree.
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Canada's legal immigration system also requires that before an immigrant qualifies for Canada's equivalent of Social Security, he has to have been resident in the country for at least ten of his adult years. In America, we only require five years.
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Our country's leaders are just so plain stupid. As an example, foreign students come over to our colleges, learn everything there is to learn about physics, finance, mathematics, and computers, and graduate with honors. They would love to stay in this country, but we don't allow them to. We immediately ship them back to their country to use all of the knowledge they learned at the best colleges in the United States back in their country rather than keep it here in ours.

When we have gifted people in this country we should cherish them and let them stay. But instead we fling our arms wide open to the lowlifes, the criminals, the people who have no intention to contribute to our country. We spend billions of dollars taking care of them as they, in many cases, run rampant through our streets, doing many things you're not supposed to do. But the great ones, we immediately expel.

Wouldn't it be better if we invited foreign students graduating from our colleges to stay to build American companies, instead of foreign companies that will be wreaking havoc against Boeing, Caterpillar, and many other of our great American companies in the future?

If we adopted this commonsense merit-based approach, our immigration policy would be guided by what benefits America. That's the way it ought to be. If American businesses need immigrants with particular technical skills, by all means, let's hire them. The privilege of becoming an American citizen should be about the value an immigrant brings to our country, not about an open door for anyone and everyone who wants to come here.

Bottom line: living in America is the greatest blessing a person could ever receive. If people want to live and work here, they should bring something to the table, not just be feasting off it.

Now, as for what to do about illegal immigration, we should follow the repeal of the anchor baby provisions with a five-point program to create a smart and humane plan to get illegal immigration under control. It starts with securing our borders. Look, if a nation can't protect its own borders, it ceases to be a country. We're not just some landmass that anyone who wants to can trample on at will. I believe America is an exceptional nation worthy of protection. That requires getting tough on border enforcement. We can and should have a robust debate over whether that means continuing to build the physical border fence or utilizing “virtual fences” that use lasers as trip wires to monitor illegal border crossings.

From the research my people have shown me, I'm not impressed with the mediocre success rates of the current crop of virtual fences that have been developed and tested. I am, however, impressed with the success of
the double- and triple-layered fence in places like Yuma, Arizona. The wall there is a serious 20-foot wall. It has three walls separated by 75-yard “no man's lands” for border agents to zoom up and down in vehicles. It also has cameras, radio systems, radar, and pole-topped lights.
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“This wall works,” says U.S. border patrol agent Michael Bernacke. “A lot of people have the misconception that it is a waste of time and money, but the numbers of apprehensions show that it works.” After the triple-layered fence was installed, the 120-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border known as the Yuma sector experienced a 72 percent plunge in illegal immigrant apprehensions. Before the fence was installed, 800 people were apprehended attempting to enter America each day. Post-fence, that number was 50 or fewer.
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Some say Yuma's flat terrain makes it a special case and that other parts of the border aren't conducive to that kind of fence. In that case, we just need to be ready to build other kinds of fences, too. The point is that properly built walls work. We just need the political will to finish the job. And by the way, finishing the job will employ a lot of construction workers. Moreover, I call on Congress and the president to hire another 25,000 border patrol agents and give them the aerial equipment they need, such as Predator drones, to provide real-time aerial reconnaissance information to agents guarding the border wall.

Second, we need a president who will enforce our laws. Right now, in a sneaky attempt to appease the strong and well-organized pro-amnesty lobby, the Department of Homeland Security has, on Obama's orders, put a freeze on the deportation of 300,000 illegal immigrants.
The administration says it wants to review each case individually and will only deport illegal aliens with criminal records, and that “no enforcement resources will be expended on those who do not pose a threat to public safety.”
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