PALM BEACH POST

December 23, 2005

Editorial

House on immigration: Pandering, not reform

Samaritans who donate to farmworker charities, landlords who rent to foreigners and parents who give migrant schoolkids a ride home may be promoting criminal activity if the U.S. House gets its way on immigration "reform."

Last week, lawmakers passed a border protection bill that contained no rational plan for dealing with the 11 million undocumented people already in the country. The Republican leadership's solution is to make all of them felons. Under the legislation, people living here illegally no longer would be in violation of civil immigration law; they would be committing a federal crime.

The reach of the provision is insidiously uncertain. A foreign college student who drops a class, a computer programmer who gets laid off — not to mention more than 90 percent of the nation's farmworkers — are people whom House Republicans want to call felons. So are about 2 million children. The bill also would require all employers to use a database to verify Social Security numbers of employees. In a letter to congressmen, the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association says this would kill farming in the state "because Florida agriculture is so heavily dependent upon aliens with fake documents to harvest our fruits and vegetables." It was a remarkably candid assessment of the current system's illegitimacy.

The nation has 7 million undocumented workers who fill jobs Americans don't want. After they are put into databases, identified as felons, arrested and deported, who would we get to do the work? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, two groups with disparate agendas, are united against criminalizing immigrants. In this case, economic and moral principles reach the same conclusion.

The bill's border security provision calls for building five two-layer fences in parts of California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona on the U.S.-Mexican border. The wall would cost perhaps $2 billion to build but cover only about 700 miles of the 2,000-mile border. Migrants are sure to do what they've done in the past: find other crossing routes.

Mexican President Vicente Fox called the wall "shameful" and correctly pointed to the need for comprehensive reform, not political pandering. "A migratory reform that only addresses security," he said, "will not resolve the bilateral immigration problem." Mr. Fox's government is running radio ads urging Mexican workers to denounce rights violations in the United States and offering to help them defend themselves. U.S. employers should worry about that.

While government must tighten border controls for reasons of security, reform has to acknowledge that illegal immigrants make irreplaceable contributions to the country. President Bush and Senate leaders are proposing a guest worker program that would bring them into a legal system with strict requirements and attainable rewards. The House is offering hyperbole and irrationality.