Despite some advances in the battle to reclaim our Southern border we are still unprepared to stop the continued flow of aliens into our country. Over the past two years some 1 million people have slipped past our border protection. At the same time the federal government has done nothing to address the nearly 20 million illegal immigrants who have already claimed the USA as their home.
Seeing this as a chance to further his agenda, Senator Charles Schumer has taken up this cause and, as would be expected from the far left, his plans are anything but real immigration reform and would ultimately hurt America. He gave some insight into his soon-to-be-introduced bill during a June speech describing a seven-step plan that mirrors many of the ideals that brought about comprehensive reform’s well-deserved demise in 2006.
Amnesty is tops among Schumer’s goals. Rather than forcing them from our borders, millions of illegal inhabitants will be granted — with no questions asked and no existing laws enforced — the fast track to citizenship. These criminals (that’s what every one of the illegal immigrants are) who broke into our nation and stole from us billions of dollars in health care and education, will be granted the same rights and privileges that we have rightly possessed or earned. It’s disheartening to realize that once the smoke clears nearly 7 percent of our population will have become Americans through entirely corrupt means. A number that significant does not speak well about the quality of character of a nation and its people.
Senator Schumer’s plan includes another slight of the American citizen: He hopes to attract more workers to our nation by legal means which include more H-1B visas. The current cap for H-1B’s is 85,000 per year, but exclusions exist for academia which push their actual annual issuance to approximately 120,000. Following the example of the failed Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, Schumer might increase the cap to 115,000 while adding a market adjustment that allows for a 20 percent growth in the cap if it was reached in the previous year. Due to the value and popularity of American jobs to foreigners, it is guaranteed that the adjustment will kick in every year, pushing the number of visas to more than a quarter million in five years.
Considering the state of our economy, granting amnesty and adding visas would be dangerous. The unemployment rate stands at 9.7 percent with more than 6.3 million Americans unemployed. It will take many years — at least a decade — to get close to what many economists see as the full employment rate of 4 percent. Despite such economic trauma, Schumer sees value in giving employment not to those American families who need a breadwinner but rather to outsiders. This will only prolong the recession by making our citizens unemployable through no fault of their own.
It should be noted that a bill so large in scale would not be complete were it not outfitted with an unrelated attack on our rights. Schumer has said that legal workers can only be verified through “a biometric-based employer verification system.” This all-out assault on our privacy would demand that all Americans — working or not — submit to tracking criteria that uses fingerprinting and iris scans to verify their citizenship. This is something that Big Government advocates have been clamoring for (as a part of a larger national identification policy) and the immigration issue would make it a convenient backdoor for them to institute it.
Schumer hopes to have these supposed reforms enacted by the end of the year and plans to officially launch his bill very soon. As for timing, he could not be more cunning. The bill’s primary opponents are stretched thin from fighting health care reform and, as working middle class families who don’t have the time to devote to policy debate that lobbyists, elected officials and their staff have, it would be difficult if not impossible for them to maintain a similar effort against immigration reform. Related to that, the health care fight has left them and their ideals unfairly marginalized by the mainstream media and, therefore, in the eyes of Schumer and his peers, poorly-equipped to address any issue proposed by the Obama Administration or Congress which, in comparison to the 2006 attempt at reform, has more in its ranks who are open to amnesty and the like.
That said, it looks like Schumer’s bill has a good chance of becoming a reality in the months ahead, marking a huge victory for those who delight in the ongoing destruction of America’s identity, security and economy.
Bob Confer is a Gasport resident and vice president of Confer Plastics Inc. in North Tonawanda. E-mail him at bobconfer@juno.com.
Bob Confer
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COLUMN: Schumer’s so-called immigration reform
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