Collegiate Times

According to a recent CBS news poll, nearly eighty percent of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to secure the borders and enforce immigration laws. This begs the question ? why are the Senate and President turning a blind eye towards illegal immigration? The answer is that this is the result of a convenient alliance between multicultural ideologues and big business neoconservatives.

Liberals get ?diversity? (and free votes should amnesty pass) while business tycoons get cheap labor. This essay works from the perspective that as a sovereign state, the United States has the duty and obligation to enforce its borders and screen potential citizens. Immigration is a privilege, not a right.

Despite a deluge of pan-humanist rhetoric and claims of economic necessity, illegal immigration is an exponentially growing problem that has an overwhelmingly negative impact on Americans.

The most pressing concern is national security. Letting millions of undocumented foreigners into your country without knowing who they are or what they are doing is simply not intelligent (to put it mildly). If millions of Mexican nationals can successfully cross the border without being apprehended, what is there to say that a smaller number of more cunning and highly-trained Al-Qaeda operatives could not do the same? Those who claim there is no terrorist threat from illegal aliens crossing the border couldn?t be more mistaken.

The government?s 9/11 commission cited law enforcement reports that ?associates of al-Qaeda used smugglers in Latin America to travel through the region in 2002, before traveling onward to the United States.? A smuggling ring in Tijuana that specialized in smuggling Arabs across the border was discovered in late 2003, and a Mexican consul was implicated with over 150 stolen passports. Mexican national security advisor Adolfo Aguilar admitted the presence of Islamist groups operating in Mexico, one of them being Hezbollah. Enforcing our nation?s borders and adopting a more rigorous screening process for potential citizens is essential for keeping Americans safe.

Illegal immigration adversely impacts American standards of living and wage rates. According to Harvard economist George Borjas, the immigrant workforce helps to redistribute income from native workers to employers.

The ethnic groups most affected by cheap foreign labor were also the poorest ? American born blacks and Hispanics, followed by whites and Asians. If immigrants were really ?doing the jobs Americans won?t do,? then there should be virtually no impact on native wages. Immigrants with limited English skills and low levels of education will not be economically independent and amnesty would only serve to further swell the welfare payroll.

American public education is also negatively influenced by illegal immigration. Educating children who cannot speak English is extremely expensive and Americans citizens are the ones who must foot the bill. The state of California spends over four billion dollars a year on mostly Spanish education. Americans already spend the most per-capita on education costs than any other nation on Earth, and the last thing we need is to increase the burden on taxpayers to assist illegal immigrants.

Unfortunately, New York University professor of education Diane Ravitch says we will never have a comprehensive view of immigration?s cost on our already expensive school system, because ?no research is going to be done on that question because nobody wants to know the answer.?

Massive illegal immigration has consequences for law enforcement agencies and the people they protect. Pressure from Hispanic and immigrant lobby groups has caused several police units in alien heavy towns such as Maywood, California, to close drunk driving checkpoints because they were disproportionally arresting intoxicated illegal immigrants. Since the city became a ?sanctuary? for illegal aliens, the robbery, rape and homicide rates have risen well above the national average. When illegal aliens commit crimes, they are often sent to prisons at taxpayers? expense and are not deported when their sentence is served.

A report by Richard Ward, director of the Center for Criminal Justice, concludes ?Globalization is producing new challenges for criminal justice practitioners and researchers ? To the law enforcement community, particularly at the local level, global crime is frequently linked to illegal aliens.? While I am not proposing that all or even most illegal immigrants are felons, it is important to realize that they are more likely to commit crimes compared to upwardly mobile legal immigrants. Granting citizenship to illegal aliens would be a slap in the face to all who came to the United States legally. The ?we are all a nation of immigrants? defense of illegal immigration is not valid ? The United States was founded on the notion of legal immigration that was conducive to assimilation, not massive illegal immigration that promotes divisive multiculturalism.

With the majority of Americans taking border enforcement seriously, liberals and their turncoat Republican allies (Arlen Specter, John McCain and George W. Bush) promote their anti-American agenda at their own electoral peril. Despite what some shrieking leftists may decree, enforcing our borders is not ?racism,? it is common sense.