A New Card Could Help Border Control : Grant another amnesty for those here illegally, then bolster and enforce the 1986 reform law.
Maybe linking a compassionate liberal idea to a tough new law-enforcement proposal would get even a conservative Congress to adopt a plan that could quell the emotional turmoil created by Proposition 187 and help resolve the problems of illegal immigration.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 gave amnesty to illegal immigrants who had lived here continuously before 1982, but it wrongly ignored the mass of more recently arrived immigrants.
For the first time, the law set penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants as a way of getting an inexpensive and compliant labor force. The law has failed, however, because employer penalties were almost entirely unenforced.
Congress must dare to pass an even more generous amnesty law for illegal immigrants already here. It would be opposed by many who backed Proposition 187 because it would nullify the effect of the measure on illegal immigrants now in this country and do it without a lengthy, costly court battle. But to reduce that inevitable opposition and avoid the need for future amnesty laws, Congress must also pass and the Administration must stringently enforce much tougher laws containing severe penalties against employers who hire illegal immigrants to take advantage of their cheap labor.
A new amnesty law must require every job applicant to produce a counterfeit-resistant Social Security card, similar to one recommended recently by a bipartisan, blue-ribbon federal commission on immigration reform. Let’s make the new card at least as secure as credit cards. The law should clearly state that the new card would not be a national identification card that workers must carry at all times, but an identification used only to verify legal applicants for jobs, the main attraction for undocumented immigrants.
Since everyone would have to have the card, discrimination based on skin color should not be a problem. If there was any, it could be remedied by existing anti-discrimination laws.
A counterfeit-proof Social Security card would be similar to computerized systems that guarantee the validity of millions of credit cards in circulation--cards that are secure enough to allow the companies distributing them to make billions with relatively little fraudulent use.
At first, the l986 immigration measure appeared to slow the flow of illegal workers--apprehensions, which had reached a high of 1.8 million in 1986, fell below 1 million in 1989. But when it became clear that there would be little or no enforcement of the law, the number of apprehensions grew sharply in 1990 and have climbed steadily since; 1.3 million aliens were apprehended in 1993. Profit-hungry employers were delighted, as were job-hungry illegal immigrants. There was no adequate way for honest employers to readily and accurately identify those here legally.
The first amnesty allowed more than 1 million illegal immigrants the right to stay and work on U.S. farms. Nationally, another 4 million undocumented workers were granted amnesty to work in any industry. No other country has ever adopted such a generous amnesty law.
Some contend that legal residents just won’t do the hard, dirty jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to perform. The truth is that citizens and other legal residents elsewhere in this country do the very same jobs done by illegal immigrants in a few states like California. And there are few real labor shortages.
While there are extremists who want an open border, allowing anyone who wants to come here to do so legally, polls show that most opponents of Proposition 187 say that something should be done about illegal immigration.
On the other side, few supporters of the measure can seriously expect that those here illegally will leave voluntarily just because they can’t get government services. Nor would they expect any general support for rounding up millions of those now here illegally and shipping them back to their countries of origin--an ugly and impossible task.
Thus if we make almost certain that jobs will not be open to future illegal immigrants by requiring counterfeit-proof Social Security cards, denying them most free government benefits and services (but not emergency medical care), while at the same time stepping up patrol of the border (but not building a wall between our country and Mexico), the United States could finally gain control over its borders, welcome legal immigrants and end the severe competition for jobs that citizens and others here legally must face from the illegal workers.
