GETTING SERIOUS ON IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT

Just before Congress adjourned for Christmas break, the House voted to pass the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (HR 4437) by a vote of 239 to 182. Introduced by James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), I am proud to be one of its co-sponsors.

Among its provisions, the bill mandates that:
· All business must use an electronic system to check if all new hires have the legal right to work.
· A security fence and other physical infrastructure must be built along the entire Mexican border.
· The federal government has to stop its interior catch and release program in which it tells local governments to release most of the illegal aliens that they catch. HR 4437 mandates federal cooperation with local authorities in picking up all illegal aliens they detain.

Pro-illegal immigration forces are outraged. The Wall Street Journal, for example, in an editorial on December 29, is particularly incensed that the bill makes being in America illegally a crime. How unfair that something illegal should be a crime!

Now it is the Senate’s turn to vote on its version of HR 4437. We in the House hope that our Senatorial colleagues will have the courage to withstand the deluge of demagoguery coming their way, and support our efforts to preserve our national borders and economy.

A good place for the Senate to start would be by dispatching the biggest myth: “Americans won’t do certain jobs, that’s why we have to import foreign labor.” There are no jobs Americans won’t do. No matter how physically difficult, intellectually challenging or personally dangerous an occupation might be, Americans will do the job that needs to be done — provided the compensation is right.

We used to understand that dirty, dangerous jobs deserved good pay, even if the job did not require much education. Meat packers used to make a solid middle-class wage. They were not rich, but the arduous and bone-chilling work of carving up animal carcasses and packaging them for grocery sale was considered a decent job.

Middle-class meat packers supported a home and family and were the strength of their communities. Now, with the huge influx of illegal alien laborers, the job is being relegated to low wages and few benefits. Home ownership, along with other upwardly mobile middle-class expectations, is being left behind.

With decent wages and health benefits big, medium and small businesses can find plenty of citizens or legal immigrants to take almost any job. But that isn’t necessarily in the interests of the current captains of American industry.

Elite business executives pay themselves enormous salaries and stock options, even when they fail. The ratio between what is paid employees and what is channeled into the pockets of top executives is totally out of sync with past pay differentials in our country.

Yet these very same patronizing executives, who pay themselves colossal sums, say they can’t afford to pay their employees a living wage and thus have to import foreigners to do the work on the cheap.

And if foreigners aren’t around, they are imported: brought in either legally, through the H1B visa program, or illegally. Just recently Tysons Company executives were found guilty of collaborating with coyotes to smuggle illegal aliens across the border.

Some employers claim a shortage of educated or trained Americans to fill available tech related jobs. That’s when H1B visas are called for. But this should be only a short-term alternative. A shortage of educated labor doesn’t mean we need to bring in more foreigners, it means we need to educate, train and motivate our kids.

Bringing in foreigners depresses the pay level for such tech jobs and that is certainly no way to encourage young people to study science, engineering or mathematics, rather than become lawyers.

Furthermore, without taking the easy path of bringing in foreigners to do tech jobs, a number of those jobs could be filled by training disabled people. Yes, there would be a cost involved in such training and in redesigning the workplace, but the disabled will never get it if we flood our tech market with young, healthy, cheap workers from India, Pakistan or China.

HR 4437, to its credit, at least partially addresses big business’ addiction to foreign labor by preventing them from “gaming” the labor market by unlawfully bringing in and taking advantage of illegal immigration.

By demanding all businesses use the Basic Pilot Verification Program and verify every employee they hire is in the country legally, we will end the “wink and nod” system of hiring those with forged documents.

This is certainly a step in the right direction, but HR 4437 could have been much stronger by eliminating another huge magnet for illegal immigration: public education, welfare and health benefits.

By providing a free education and free emergency-room health care, we attract enormous numbers of illegal immigrants from all over the world. By not addressing this issue, HR 4437 leaves intact a major draw for illegal aliens to do everything in their power to get into the land of plenty, so their families can receive a treasure of benefits.

Clearly there are those in business, on the other hand, who want illegal labor with lower wages with and have the taxpayers pick up the tab for benefits like health care. The agriculture industry, for example, cries the loudest about the necessity for foreign labor.

But there is an alternative pool of workers to a guest-worker program for agriculture. Who are they? They are in America’s prisons. The United States has the largest number “per one thousand population” of healthy young males incarcerated than any other country in the world. Instead of providing prisoners with gyms and TVs, we should use this population in physically demanding farm labor and pay them for it.

A well-structured prisoner work program could secure a third of a prisoner worker’s paycheck to cover some of the costs of incarceration. Another third could provide restitution for victims. And the final third could be placed in a savings account, to be given to the prisoners upon release, a nest egg to start a new life, which is far better than our current system.

This example is a win-win-win situation. Prisons will gain much-needed income, prisoners will have a productive way to spend their days, and an untapped labor pool could provide relief for industries that claim they need it.

HR 4437 is a good bill and a step in the right direction. For the first time since I began serving in Congress in 1988, this body now has a serious immigration-enforcement bill with real teeth. I urge the Senate to work with us to enact it into law. The voting public may then use it to judge their elected officials.

(Note: a good description of the bill, together with all of its 25 amendments, can be found here. The full text and other related information as provided by the Library of Congress is here.)

Dana Rohrabacher represents California’s 46^th Congressional District, and is chairman of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.