Sensible legislation
Immigration bill targets offending employers
Now we're getting somewhere. For years, members of Congress didn't want to go anywhere near the explosive issue of illegal immigration. Now, Capitol Hill is flooded with competing bills, each claiming to address the problem. They touch on everything from whether illegal immigrants should have drivers' licenses to whether their U.S.-born children should be granted U.S. citizenship. Some proposals are half-baked, and, frankly, some look like they never even made it into the oven.
Others show real promise. It's in that category that we find something called the Illegal Immigration and Social Security Protection Act of 2005. Co-sponsored by Rep. David Dreier, R-Glendora, and Rep. Sylvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, and introduced in January, the bill attacks the problem of illegal immigration at the root. That means going after those U.S. employers who knowingly, and in some cases repeatedly, hire illegal immigrants.
The bill would require that any person seeking a new job obtain a new counterfeit-proof Social Security card. It wouldn't be a national ID card, just a more secured version of a Social Security card. The bill also would require that employers verify a prospective employee's legal status against a newly created national employment eligibility database. Those employers who don't do that, or who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, would face stiff fines of up to $50,000 per offense. That's five times what the fines are now. Employers also would face up to five years in prison for each offense. Lastly, the bill would add 10,000 new Homeland Security agents whose sole responsibility would be to make sure that employers follow the law.
Finally. After all the chest-thumping and tough talk about illegal immigration, and all the cheap sound bites about how Americans had to close the border and deport 10 million to 15 million people (neither of which is going to happen), we finally have a mature and thoughtful piece of legislation that actually stands a chance of significantly reducing illegal immigration. No one wants to excuse the actions of those individuals who come into the country illegally, but a big part of the problem has always been the employers and the jobs they offer, without whom there would be no reason to come. We're not talking about people who innocently get taken in by phony identification cards that look real. This is about the hard-core, habitual offender who has come to view cheap immigrant labor as nothing less than an entitlement and the hiring of illegal workers as just another price of doing business.
Eliminate the magnet, and you might all but eliminate illegal immigration. That's the contention of T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, and the person who inspired the bill, which has been nicknamed the Bonner Plan. Bonner uses a great analogy to describe the illegal immigration problem. He compares it to having mice in the pantry. He says you can yell and scream all you want, but the first thing you need to do is seal up the "crackers and cheese" that lured in the mice in the first place.
Until they get rid of the jobs – by punishing employers who offer them – Americans can't expect to stop the flow of illegal immigration. This bill may be the best hope to do that. It deserves to become law.
