TruthNews Commentary, March 28, 2006

In Paris, the French are rioting because they don't want to work. In Los Angeles, the Mexicans are demonstrating because they do want to work. There's something wrong with this picture.

The French are upset about a law adopted earlier this month that allows companies to hire young workers for a two-year probationary period. The government says the law will help create employment. Opponents argue the law lets bosses fire employees during the period without cause. You would think that since youth unemployment in France is already as high as 50 percent, even a probationary job is better than nothing. But then, living off the dole in the European welfare state has never been more attractive, so maybe these rioters are just upset at the thought that they might have to go to work. Or maybe they want to go to work and goof off without the threat of getting fired. In any case, they're demonstrating against a law that should create more jobs, so the ultimate conclusion is that they don't want to work.

Meanwhile, millions of people immigrate to America just so they can work. The people who can't get a green card come illegally, because America is the land of opportunity. The demonstrators in Los Angeles and other cities in the U.S. were upset about a bill that passed the House of Representatives that would make being in the U.S. without proper documentation a felony. Apparently, Congress wants to crack down on illegal immigration. Or maybe they're just smoking dope. Because when you think through the criminalization proposal, you'll see that it doesn't make a lot of sense.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that in January of 2000 there were 7 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. If the House bill becomes law (it still needs to pass the Senate), all 7 million of these immigrants would become felons. A felony is defined as a crime with a penalty of a year or more in jail. Are we going to arrest all 7 million of these illegal immigrants, build a concentration camp the size of Los Angeles, and imprison these people for a year or more? If it costs $10,000 per year to keep a prisoner, the tab would amount to $70 billion a year. And, of course, these people are currently productively employed, so just removing them from the economy is going to have an negative impact.

Of course you've first got to arrest these people and try them. How long is it going to take to run all of these people through federal court? If each illegal immigrant demands his right to trial by jury, it would take 84 million jurors, roughly one-third the population of the entire country. All of this would probably be unconstitutional in the first place because it amounts to an ex post facto law, making something illegal after the fact.

Naturally, Congress isn't going to appropriate money for all this, because they don't plan to enforce the law in the first place. The laws are already in place to secure our borders and deport illegal immigrants, but the federal government doesn't bother. How hard is it to track down people whose visas have expired? How hard is to determine whether someone is working under a fake social security number? Ah, but this would require Congress to actually do something, rather than just making a lot of noise.

President Bush proposes to fix the problem by opening up a guest worker program. I say, let the workers bring their families and stay here. A guest worker program means the families stay at home, and the U.S. ends up exporting huge amounts of cash. If the families are here, then the money stays here. Most illegal immigrants are decent hardworking folks who want to embrace the American way of life. The people we shouldn't let in are those who want to destroy our freedoms and our way of life. Unfortunately, the immigration policies adopted during the Clinton administration let a lot of people in legally who seem bent on America's destruction, while excluding many who just want to work hard and become Americans.

The troubling thing about illegal immigration isn't that these people are in the country. The problem is that if 7 million people could get here illegally, what's to stop terrorists from sneaking through our borders? The answer is, very little, as we found out on Sept. 11, 2001.

The government needs to do a better job of enforcing the laws already on the books rather than inventing new laws it doesn't plan to enforce.