Birthright Sale

By Thomas Sowell, Real Clear Politics

June 6, 2006

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/06/birthright_sale.html

...In Washington, the Senate immigration bill has been selling our birthright for a message of political pottage.

Far from "controlling the borders" as advertised, this bill reduces our existing control of the borders. Under a provision inserted at the eleventh hour by Senator Arlen Specter, the Senate bill forbids the federal government from building a fence without first consulting with the Mexican government.

In fact, state and local governments are also forbidden by this bill to take any border control actions without first consulting with their Mexican counterparts. In other words, if the city of San Diego wants to put up any sort of barriers, it would have to consult with the municipal authorities in Tijuana before doing so.

This legislation was never about border control. The laws already on the books at this very moment allow us to control the borders, to build any fence we choose, without consulting the government of Mexico.

The laws already on the books allow any illegal alien to be arrested and expelled. Those laws are simply not being enforced. If a Los Angeles policeman arrests an illegal alien and reports him to the federal authorities, it is the Los Angeles cop who will be in big trouble.

Border Patrol agents can knock themselves out capturing people trying to enter the country illegally but nothing happens to most of those people, even the ones organizing the smuggling of people and drugs into this country....

In other words, we have make-believe border control and the current Senate legislation will weaken even that, all the while talking about "tough" enforcement....

"Border control" is just political cover for legalizing illegal aliens. The two things are put together in a package deal that is like horse-and-rabbit stew, whose ingredients are one horse and one rabbit. Border control is the rabbit.

The word games played about "amnesty" deliberately confuse the issue of violations of American law with the issue of acquiring American citizenship....

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who has over the years done some of the most incisive analysis of census and other statistical data, projects the actual consequences of legalizing the existing illegal alien population in the United States to extend far beyond the 12 million estimated to be here now.

...They have parents and they will have children. Nor are their other family members likely to be kept out after the illegals are made legal.

Over the following 20 years, Dr. Rector projects that the real increase in this population living in the United States to be 103 million, not the 12 million that everyone is talking about....

Read the complete article.