Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
BCN editor’s note: please contact the author for reprint permission.
What’s love got to do with it?
Amnesty to President Obama is defined by an “open border” policy. Jeb Bush seems to agree. Crossing the border is a matter of love, he said.
Unfortunately, since January 2014, 47,000 unaccompanied minors entered the U.S. illegally (double the number of last year) from Central America and are still being flown and bused between U.S. cities (specifically Arizona and Texas) and dumped by the federal government with no plans to stop or deport. One hundred and thirty thousand more are expected to arrive next year, and $2.2 billion has been allocated by our government for their care. It’s their plan. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona said, “This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure-now apparently intentionally-while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable.”
The failure to secure the border is “de facto amnesty”, said Stu Harris, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council. Those who would have run away from the border patrol are now looking for agents to surrender to because they know they will be released into the United States, said Harris to Breitbart Texas. This is a sham of monumental proportions, but President Obama did say that the arriving migrants would not be eligible for legalization under proposed immigration reform legislation. Now this would be comforting if not from the man who promised, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
Beyond the insanity of this administration’s open border policy, amnesty for illegal aliens has an economic impact that seems ignored. The Cato Institute reported in its Cato Journal (2012) on the Economic Consequences of Amnesty for the Unauthorized Immigrants that “Tax revenue is likely to increase, an important consideration in an era of large deficits. There are costs as well: an amnesty entails losing the benefits of having a relatively cheap flexible workforce; there may be a negative labor market impact on competing workers; and government transfers to the legalized population may rise.”
In other words, tax revenue will increase but so will unemployment and entitlement programs like welfare and food stamps. Why would we provide amnesty that will directly grow our already massive entitlement complex that is unsustainable while also virtually eliminating cheap labor–until the next wave of illegal immigration?
We would pass amnesty because we allow our leaders to promote a political agenda at our expense. Without securing the borders, amnesty is merely a perpetual Voter Registration Drive for Democrats. It’s a set-up to grow Democrat voters as evidenced after amnesty in 1986 under Ronald Reagan. We are repeating the mistakes of our past.
We must be credible with our system of legal immigration; after all, that is a contributing factor of what makes this country so great. It is founded and governed by the rule of law. Conversely, we must not promote the flagrant violation of United States law.
“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.” “…for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process, ” said (former) Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) in 1995. That is still the gospel today. Sorry, Jeb Bush, it’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of law.
Marc Little is the author of The Prodigal Republican: Faith and Politics. His web site is The Prodigal Republican.
Photo credit: Kow626 (Creative Commons)
