Thursday, June 01, 2006

The Unintended Consequences of Not Granting Amnesty

Got an email yesterday from a friend of many years whose intellect I respect. She advocates strongly not granting amnesty to the illegal aliens now in the U.S. Her arguments are persuasive, if the unintended consequences of not granting amnesty are ignored.

Here’s my thoughts.

The core question of the immigration issue is how to deal with the 12 million people living illegally amongst us legal residents throughout our nation. To refuse these people amnesty requires that they be deported. To undertake the deportation of the illegal aliens now in our country is to open a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences.

During the Third Reich, the entire resources of the German government were deployed to find, incarcerate, and kill all Jews in the nations of Europe that they controlled. To actually round up and deport 12 million illegal aliens would require an even larger effort on the part of our federal government. In my opinion, the effort would turn our nation into a police state.

Illegal aliens don’t appear any different than legal residents. Think about the Gestapo-like police force that would have to be created to find and detain aliens. The issuance of national identity cards and the creation of a national database of legal citizens and aliens, containing your date and place of birth, you social security number, your current address, etc. Consider the laws that would have to be passed to make harboring an illegal a felony. The official encouragement of citizens to turn in neighbors they suspect of being illegal would follow. Imagine the number and the cost of the concentration camps that would have to be built and policed to house the detained aliens. We’re talking about millions of people. The huge number of special deportation courts that would have to be set up and staffed to provide the aliens due-process. Under current law, deportation proceedings would go on decade after decade to process 12 million cases of incarcerated people.

This Nazi-like vision of the future is not one I want for my nation.

Even more basic, is the fact that a significant number of the 12 million illegal aliens are married couples with children. The most fundamental problem of the No-Amnesty approach to the immigration issue is how to handle families where one or more of the parents are illegal but one or more of their children are American citizens by virtue of being born here. A native American citizen cannot be deported because he or she is already in their home-birth country.

There are two possible solutions to this problem: You can deport the illegal parents and leave the young American children as parentless wards of the state or you could pass laws that strip American-born children of illegals of their citizenship. To me, both are as cold blooded and inhumane as the Nazi final solution and not to be thought of much less discussed.

These are the inescapable consequences of a no-amnesty policy. I beg everyone to get past their emotions and think about the consequences of what you are advocating by refusing amnesty.

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