NO ILLEGAL LEFT BEHIND

By Diane M. Grassi

Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security nominee, will most likely be sworn in after an expected full Senate confirmation within the next week. He will still have much of an uphill climb ahead of him in overseeing the relatively new agency created in 2002. Former Homeland Security Secretary, Tom Ridge, was given few guidelines in merging the INS as well as 22 other agencies including the Secret Service and the Coast Guard, in an effort to implement better border security, port security, protecting our railroads, highways, waterways and energy plants with great haste.

The HSA also works in concert with the Transportation Security Agency, also newly created in November of 2001 shortly after the 9/11 attacks. And as communities and cities nationwide still struggle with absorbing the added expenses of security and oversight, the proper allocation of funds for first responders in high risk areas is still being deliberated on Capitol Hill.

Although the public is no longer bombarded with the color code alert system, phased out by Secretary Ridge prior to his departure, there is no question that holes remain in our homeland security with our national sovereignty at risk. All too often it comes down to an overactive political pendulum in the name of party expediency, leaving the public to suffer.

Recently we learned the Mexican Foreign Consulate issued a comic book style “how to manual” for illegal “immigrants” titled “A Guide for the Mexican Immigrant” with blow-by-blow advice on circumventing the U.S. Border Patrol on our southern border and U.S. authorities within our interior. Added to that is the acceptance by counties in California of the ‘matricula consular’ as legitimate IDs in the U.S., only needed by people who are not legally in the U.S. in the first place. Relying on the Mexican Consular ID for purposes of identification is tantamount to admitting that the bearer is in the U.S. illegally, as it is not recognized as a legal instrument in the U.S. Every non-citizen other than an illegal alien, which is the proper legal term, is required to possess identity documents issued by the U.S. government such as a valid visa.
The effective enforcement of our laws already on the books is critical to our security and survival, especially as we prosecute the on-going War On Terror. We seem intent on shoring up the borders of Iraq and spend billions of dollars on airport security, yet our government seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the sanctity of our own borders. As such we are more vulnerable to the terrorists we are fighting in the Middle East if we do not defend our nation’s borders.

Alien smugglers compromise the security of our borders by facilitating the illegal movement of aliens across them without being inspected as required by law. The smugglers are often violent, employing snipers to take out Border Patrol agents and endanger the lives of the aliens they smuggle in and for that reason alone our border requires beefed up security.

Such illegal aliens who gain entry into the U.S. who are not lawfully admitted nevertheless wind up on the streets of our cities and towns. They are not screened as they enter the U.S. and thus we have no record of their entry nor do we have a record of their presence here. While the majority of the illegal aliens who gain access to the U.S. in this fashion do so with the intention of simply gaining illegal employment, unfortunately our porous border is a sieve allowing drug dealers, terrorists and assorted felons into the U.S. as well, evading the inspections process.

The public needs to be informed about the efforts being made or not being made to apprehend the people who violate these laws and to enhance the enforcement of our borders not to diminish such security while forfeiting the lives of our Border Patrol agents. We are long past the point of recognizing the enormous cost to our social services, healthcare, schools, jobs, infrastructure and prisons we all must collectively bear brought by our unenforced laws. An unaccountable Congress and presidential administration barely addressed the topic during the past presidential and Congressional election cycle.

But as recently as the president’s State of the Union address, he once again used the misguided phrase, “jobs that Americans don’t want,” to justify his looking the other way when upwards of 5,000 illegal aliens enter our southern border each day. His ideology is a fallacy and only helps to jeopardize the health of our economy as well as the health of our national security. His Guest Worker Program proposal will only exacerbate the problem.

While the unenforcement of immigration laws is a big part of the problem, employers as well as small businesses and individuals also continue to evade the law. The phrase, “jobs that Americans don’t want,” is a travesty and is more about cooking the books than one actually not wanting to stand behind a hot stove. Many landscapers, for example, pay a decent wage for work once predominantly held by legal residents, but many avoid the law by not paying the proper Social Security or payroll taxes to the government. Therefore, they can afford to pay a $10.00 an hour wage to an illegal alien, which for a U.S. student or young person is almost twice the minimum wage, and is not a bad wage or a bad job to hold. Americans competing with illegals for unskilled labor jobs do not have a chance if a small businessman is looking to obfuscate paying into the system. It has nothing to do with “lazy Americans” but is rather about greed and unaccountability. And after all, who supposedly did these “low paying” jobs prior to just ten years ago when the illegal invasion started to reach its peak?
The recently passed overhauled intelligence bill known as the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was signed into law on 12/17/04 by President Bush. It called for adding 2,000 Border Patrol agents each year for a period of five years beginning in fiscal year 2006 but will now not be funded by the president’s budget proposal just given to the Congress. Therefore instead of adding 2,000 agents per year it will total no more than 200 agents per year.

The bill was passed in response to the 9/11 Commission Report’s recommendations and the Senate hearings which followed the issuing of the report. Sadly, before Tom Ridge left office on 2/01/05 he stated, “It would be an insufficient use of homeland security funds,” when referring to adding the 2,000 agents. Much like with his No Child Left Behind Act, the president received much criticism by many members of both the House and the Senate, because his own mandate lacks the proper funding for his keynote legislation in order to be effective.

House Judiciary Chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (WI-R), introduced the Real ID Act of 2005 or H.R. 418, which was successfully passed by the House of Representatives on 2/10/05. It readdresses the use of a driver’s license as a valid form of identification for a federal official. Sensenbrenner and Rep. Duncan Hunter (CA-R) were fighting for such language in the 2004 intelligence bill but it was eventually yanked. “It will establish tough rules for confirming identity before temporary driver’s licenses are issued” according to Sensenbrenner. In addition the bill calls for the rebuilding of a 3-mile border fence at Imperial Beach bordering San Diego County which had been torn down. Environmentalists are now opposing reestablishment of the fence for their own reasons. The bill also provides for a mechanism for the deportation of illegal aliens seeking asylum, if proven necessary. Although this added legislation looks like a real effort to right perceived oversights in the 2004 Act, it will have difficulty passing in the Senate, and still does little in the way of securing our borders.

And while a lot of glad handing continues on Capitol Hill, the president’s new budget proposal also would require the security of our ports to compete with other transit systems for security grants in contrast to the Maritime Security Act of 2004, which would have supplied the necessary funding for port security on its own through 2009, but was tabled by the Congress at the end of 2004.

Neither grandiose promises by the president or the Congress will fulfill priority funding for our nation’s security. It should not come down to what sells at the moment with promises of funding legislation without serious intent. Our security policy is a national issue first and one of the few areas where partisanship was to be checked at the door. Especially while still at war, while still hunting down the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, our security laws should be immune to the conflicts imposed by political correctness, pork barreling legislation and back-pedaling justice.

And as the Republican Party fondly looks upon illegal aliens as a reservoir for cheap labor, and the Democratic Party looks to them as a future voting block, neither will take a stand, as party self-interests sadly take precedence over the best interests of the American people once again. Not until that seriously changes, our border policies and security will continue to be compromised and leaving us at unnecessary risk.