Immigration Enforcement: A Better Idea for Returning Illegal Aliens
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D
www.heritage.org
Sep 11, 2006
By some estimates, more than 15 million individuals are unlawfully present in the United States. If the U.S. government actually succeeds in appreciably reducing illegal border crossings on the border with Mexico, the number of people unlawfully present in the United States could actually rise significantly. No voice in the immigration debate—on the right or on the left—believes as a practical matter that millions of immigration violators can be detained and deported in short order. Before implementing comprehensive immigration and border security reform, Congress needs a realistic answer to solve what will be a very real and significant problem.
Getting immigration and border security right will require a quick and efficient means of getting large numbers of illegal aliens to return voluntarily to their home countries. Indeed, if reforms are conceived and implemented correctly, many of these millions will want to leave so that they can seek the opportunity to return for lawful employment. The best solution would be for Congress to establish a privately funded national trust fund that legitimate nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) could use to help unlawfully present persons to return to their places of origin.
The Border Security Paradox. Much of the debate over immigration and border security has focused on sealing the southern border with gates and guards, with little regard to the implications of these policies. According to a study by Dr. Manuela Angelucci, an economist at the University of Arizona, each additional Border Patrol agent hired will stop roughly 771 to 1,621 illegal border crossings annually. This sounds impressive, but hundreds of thousands of people cross the border illegally every year.
A Better Answer. The simplest “answer” to this problem is to give amnesty to people already unlawfully present in the United States. Along this line, the Senate’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 (S. 2611) would allow most of the millions of illegal immigrants, who have broken U.S. immigration laws, to remain in the United States. However, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 has already demonstrated that amnesty does not work, largely because it encourages further lawbreaking. Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, 2.7 million undocumented workers received amnesty. Predictably, over the next 20 years, the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. exploded to about five times that number.
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