Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Is a Terrible Idea for the Nation!

There is a huge push on the part of the current administration, certain members of Congress, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Mexican government, many industrial and growers' organizations, and many unions, to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in the United States. No one has any good idea of how many - estimates range as high as twenty million and at NAFBPO we would not call that an unreasonable guess.

Let's call it what it is, an amnesty. That's what the aliens who would benefit call it, so we will too. The American proponents of it don't like the term, though, for the word says we are forgiving the criminal violation of the law by the illegal aliens - and the American people would not look favorably on something presented in that light. You can't change what it is by calling it something else, though, so "amnesty" it is, and it is a corrupt bargain to boot.

They say the beneficiaries will have to pay a fine, and application fees, and will have to learn English. NAFBPO says that's like letting a burglar off the hook AND keep everything he stole if he will just 'fess up and pay a thousand-dollar fine. In fact, it is that aspect of the process that makes it a corrupt bargain. It is indistinguishable in concept from the practice so common in other nations of buying your way out of a legal bind by passing money to an official to get what you want, whether that is staying out of jail or buying a favorable decision on an application for some benefit. It is corruption and it should not even be tolerated, much less proposed as the solution in a nation ostensibly devoted to the rule of law.

We had an amnesty in 1986 for three million people. It was supposed to be in conjunction with getting control of the border so the situation would not get out of hand again. As we know now, it didn't work, and it's not hard to understand why not: Illegal behavior rewarded encourages more illegal behavior. Yet despite the failure of what was to have been a solution back then, certain people want to do it all over again.

Never mind why they want to have another amnesty, we'll examine that in another essay (hint: it's about money - who'd have guessed?). For now, let's look at all the reasons it's a bad idea for America and for Americans.

Look for links to detailed information in each box. We are working on them now.

If you have come here from outside the NAFBPO website, click HERE to go to the main site.
The aliens will permanently displace American workers. There is no such thing as "work Americans won't do", and it is a contemptible thing to say. But they won't do it for substandard wages and working conditions. What's wrong with that?
There is no labor shortage in the U.S. and we don't need an amnesty that will drive down American wages.
Go here for details.
There are many criminals in the bunch, we don't know who they are - and we won't find out before we give them status. That's because meaningful fingerprint checks in the U.S. will be impossible due to volume, and no foreign record checks at all will be conducted.
Go here for details.
Millions will not assimilate. The Mexican government is encouraging them not to, and helping them not to. Aliens of other nations will also benefit, of course, but their governments are not encouraging them to maintain their foreign identity as aggressively as is the Mexican government.
Go here for details.
They will have an adverse public health impact, both as to imported disease and cost to the U.S. medical system. The community of illegal aliens from around the world already suffers from diseases not commonly found in the U.S, many of them contagious - and mostly, they can't pay for their own care. The U.S. will have to formally take them on to care for if they are legalized.
Click here for disease information.
Click here for health costs information.
With the stroke of a pen we will create more poor Americans.We have spent trillions in the War on Poverty trying to alleviate poverty for Americans. No wonder we can't succeed in reducing the poverty numbers - we keep providing recruits for the other side of the war. And the jobs the illegals take result in more poor Americans, too.
We can't afford an amnesty - it would cost too much. Applying a conservative estimate of the per-person processing cost from the 1986 amnesty, unadjusted for inflation, it would cost about $2,500,000,000 (two billion, five-hundred million dollars) to process ten million illegal aliens. What else could we do with that money that would be worthwhile for the country?
The government lacks the resources to carry out the job, and there is no way to hire and train enough people to do it well. So it will become just a rubber-stamp operation geared toward producing the biggest number of approved cases possible.
Millions will gain status by fraud, just as hundreds of thousands did in the 1986 amnesty when many responsible officers involved estimated that 30% of the application were fraudulent. Smugglers and manufacturers of phoney documents will make millions.
Click here for more information.
It won't solve the illegal immigration problem; it will make it worse. You have to be pretty naive to look at the 1986 amnesty and not see that it directly contributed to the current problem; naive, or willfully blind, that is. The 1986 amnesty was to be a one-time thing as far as we were concerned, but the aliens knew better, so they came. And now . . .
An amnesty for ten million people now will result in at least sixty to seventy million people over the next twenty years as family members come to join those who got amnesty. Most of them will be uneducated or undereducated. What does that mean for our society? Must we really do that?