A Nation of Immigrants - By Sean Scallon

The U.S. received its Camp of the Saints moment recently, just as France did a few months ago.

In Los Angeles, over 500,000 persons demonstrated against a U.S. House of Representatives bill that called for increased security on our nation's borders and for making illegal immigration into the country an official crime with penalties forthwith.

While our Camp of the Saints moment was peaceful compared to France's, the effect was the same, complete with Mexican and other Latin American flags being the demonstrator's preferred flag of choice. Right now the U.S. is having the same debate over immigration that Western Europe had nearly 30 years ago. Unless we want to wind up in the same boat as our European brothers, then we'd better make better decisions than they did.

The first decision, of course, is to secure the borders and it looks like that will happened regardless what immigration reform bill passes Congress. Only 14 years ago, Pat Buchanan was ridiculed for his "Buchanan line" idea, a fence extending across the whole of the U.S.-Mexico border. Now such a fence is close to being reality (or at least a better guarded and constructed one with the latest in security technology). Of course, it sadly took 3,000 deaths on 9-11 to make such a fence a reality but at least now no one is laughing about it, not when Washington Post columnists like Robert Samuelson is saying a fence is needed. Only the most fanatical of the open borders/unlimited immigration crowd (located in the Wall Street Journal editorial page redoubt) is opposed to the fence idea and they're become more isolated. And hey, there should also be a fence on the Canadian border too, which is even more unguarded and more vulnerable to terrorist incursion that the Mexican one is. Why just pick on Mexico?

The second decision concerns a guest worker program. The gastarbeiters of Europe are the ones who shot Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gough in Holland and burned cars in the Paris suburbs. Is this what we want in the U.S.? Most people of course would say but most people in the U.S. do not have the power to make this decision. Several of those who are in favor of such program and they include, as Edward Abbey would put it, liberals who want their cheap cause and conservatives who want their cheap labor. It's a truly bipartisan issue.

Fortunately even some of the elites are starting to gag even on a guest worker/amnesty plan. New York Nerwsday columnist James Pinkerton pointed this out in a recent column pointing out that NewYork Times economist Paul Krugman is against a guest worker program for what it does, further depress wages, further erode the middle and working classes and both officially and legally create a separate class of people for the first time in U.S. history who's only worth in the eyes of government is the hard work that they do cheaply and in some cases dangerously by employers unwilling to pay American's citizens an honest day's pay for honest work (in past with many immigrant groups it was unofficially and illegally). One may think earning four times what one would make in the home country is enough to satisfy people into being good little workers, but long will it be before they start demanding their dignity along with more money. Then what will the demonstrations look like?

The third decision comes over immigration law enforcement and here is where it gets tricky and complex. For the reality of any law enforcement is its community's willingness to enforce it and unfortunately such sentiment is not uniform all over the United States.

By some estimates there are over 11 million illegal aliens currently living in the U.S. One could classify illegal aliens as criminals officially speaking, even though they are already breaking U.S. law, as the House bill proposes. That may make some feel better, but it's not a practical way of dealing with the problem. There's also no way you could deport every illegal immigrant all at once and all at the same time. And the reason for this is that such deportation could never occur over the entire nation.

Many communities across the country have instructed their police forces not to ask about a suspect's immigration status. Many communities have sanctuary movements that protect illegals from being caught by the police. Some communities, especially those with lots of immigrants living in them, will not even enforce the nation's immigration laws. Indeed, even if the House bill passed, it would probably be as enforceable as the Fugitive Slave Act was. In that case the state of Vermont declared the measure null and void within its borders and many northern communities made it impossible for slave catchers to find runaways. How will catching illegals, when there are so many willing to help them, be any different? The reason the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform measure failed was that vigorous enforcement never followed for one reason, nobody wanted to enforce the law to its full extent. Thus it became worthless law other than a s a leverage to provide amnesty to 3 million people and draw more millions to the U.S. as a result.

Besides, any bill that has more penalties for the migrants than for the ones who employ them is not one that seriously addressing the immigration issue. The Republican Party, being the party of state capitalism, will try in any fashion to shield the employers of illegals from the penalties they honestly deserve, namely to be declared the traitors that they are and dealt with on that basis along with losing their business licenses. No one is prosing we do that.

So if there's no chance at a uniform law enforcement of the immigration issue unlike the setting up a border fence, then the issue must be decentralized. States and local communities must decide for themselves what their immigration policy to be. They have to decide for themselves if they can bear the costs, if they can maintain the cultural balance and if immigration helps their economy. It's really the only way out. Some communities, for sure, will welcome immigrants with open arms and others won't. At least then the migrants can got to where they are wanted and not to where they are not wanted. And vise-versa when it comes to rest of us.

If the law enforcement aspect of immigration is already decentralized when it comes to a community's preference for immigration and tolerance for enforcement, then so should the policy be. Protect our borders yes, but let San Francisco be San Francisco and let Utah be Utah when it comes to immigration. It's the least painless way to extract the U.S. from the immigration briar patch it is currently in.