Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor
January 14, 2004
Q: U.S. President George W. Bush's immigration proposal has been welcomed with applause by some and skepticism by others. Is the president's proposal to grant working immigrants renewable, three-year visas too limited? Would it reduce illegal immigration? How will Bush's plan be received by the U.S. Congress?
A: Enactment of President Bush's guest worker/amnesty proposal would be an enormous mistake. The U.S. government does not have the capacity to manage the program. Immigration authorities already face a backlog of six million applications and are implementing vast new computer systems to better track visiting foreigners. Adding to their duties by requiring them to process and check the backgrounds of millions of additional people would overload the bureaucracy and contribute to fraud and security breaches. After all, a leader of the first World Trade Center bombing, Mahmud Abouhalima, was fraudulently legalized in the last amnesty.
What's more, the program would almost certainly create a permanent servile class, as the guest workers applied for green cards but were required to wait in line for many years.
Also, children they had while in the United States would automatically become U.S. citizens, making the 'temporary' nature of these visas even more fictional.
Finally, the importation of unskilled foreign workers harms the United States by imposing huge social-service costs and by slowing the process of technological innovation in immigrant-dependent industries.
What, then, to do about illegal immigrants? Start a comprehensive strategy of unyielding immigration law enforcement, denying illegal aliens the ability to work, drive, open bank accounts, etc., and the illegal population will begin to decline through attrition. Only after many years of such stern and successful enforcement would it be appropriate even to contemplate the possibility of amnestying the remaining illegals who didn't go back and managed to elude arrest.