Close the borders and enforce the immigration laws.

Close the borders and enforce the immigration laws.

The lack of assimilation by immigrants to the United States - both legal and illegal - is culminating in an American identity crisis and poses a serious problem for the future of our country.

This movement toward anti-assimilation stands in stark contrast to the very concept of our nation. E pluribus unum, "out of many, one," is the motto of the United States. This motto, this dedication, was originally selected by the Great Seal Committee in 1776. It acknowledged that the thirteen separately governed British Colonies had banded together to form one inclusive nation, a country that stood independent from the British Crown, the United States.

This problem is best illustrated by two examples; the aggressive Reconquista movement in the Southwestern US and the developing and sometimes violent row with the growing Islamic community in the United States.

The militant Reconquista movement embraces the divisiveness of multiculturalism more fervently than Dr. Leo Buscaglia used to embrace his patients. Their motto, "Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada" - which translated means "For the Race, everything, for those outside the Race, nothing" - encapsulates the dangers multiculturalism poses to a nation's identity.

Violence on the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically over the past three years in what U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has called "an unprecedented surge." ICE has established intelligence and investigative operations along the border to combat the increased brutality.
    In a recent report, ICE said the border gangs, which collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in illicit profits, are becoming increasingly ruthless -- against their victims, rivals and federal, state and local police.
    Much of that violence has targeted U.S. Border Patrol agents, who have seen a spike in incidents as the agency continues its efforts to bring larger areas of the border under operational control. Violence directed at agents has included physical and vehicle assaults, and shooting incidents.
    Gunfire has become commonplace along the border, authorities said, particularly in the alien- and drug-smuggling corridors of southern Arizona. They said about 90 percent of the migrants headed north out of Mexico have hired a coyote to guide them into the United States. State and local law-enforcement officials on the border have said they are outgunned and outmanned by drug- and alien-smugglers armed with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, bazookas, improvised explosive devices, and state-of-the-art communications and tracking systems.
    The rising border violence also has been attributed by authorities to efforts by the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, to win control of drug- and alien-smuggling routes into the United States. The Border Patrol's field-intelligence center said MS-13 has aligned with drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia, and seeks unfettered access to smuggling corridors.
    The intelligence center said the MS-13 presence has increased competition between rival gangs that must vie for areas where they can ply their trade. The result, it said, has been an increase in violence as rival gangs struggle for domination.
    MS-13 members also reportedly have accepted contracts to assassinate Border Patrol agents to intimidate and frighten agents away from the border.

• Border control for national security with sufficient intensity and accuracy to ensure that no terrorist and no drug dealer can cross the border."The first piece is that the major part of the fence is to be built between Calexico, California and Douglas, Arizona and that portion, that's 392 miles, that's the area through which most of the people come who have died of dehydration or sunstroke in the desert sun in the summer months.
• 
  
• Make passing a test on American history in English and giving up the right to vote in any other country key requirements of U.S. citizenship.
• Since becoming a citizen requires knowing English, have all election ballots in English.
• To insure that only legal citizens vote, require every voter to have a photo ID card.
• 
  
• Enforce the laws requiring employers to know that their employees are legal.
• 
  
• Create a systematic worker visa program with a biometric card run by the computer card companies to avoid fraud, a background check to eliminate any criminals and a signed contract to obey the law and pay taxes or else be removed from the U.S. within 48 hours for failure to comply
•  

  What can we do to make English the language of government and civic discourse?  Three action items top the list:

   
• End multilingualism in federal documents.  The requirement that federal documents be printed in different languages was created by executive order. Repeal this executive order.
• Make English the language of U.S. citizenship. Return to English language ballots, to a focus on English language literacy as a prerequisite of citizenship, and to an insistence that U.S. dual citizens vote only in the United States and give up voting in their birth nations. These were principles widely understood and accepted for most of American history, and they enabled us to absorb millions of immigrants and assimilate them and their children into an American civilization.
• Replace bilingual education with intensive English instruction. We should have a National Program for Intensive English Instruction that would provide highly intensive English and U.S. history and civics training for new immigrants so that they can have the practical skills to become successful U.S. citizens.                                                                                                                                      
• Ten Simple, Direct Steps to a Legal American Immigration System
•  
• Keep the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli commitment and control the border.  In The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins, May 22, 2007), President Ronald Reagan wrote that he was going to sign the Simpson-Mazzoli bill because "it's high time we regained control of our borders and [this] bill will do this." For national security reasons, it is vital we regain control of our border. Congress should pass a narrowly written emergency border bill to finish the necessary fence in less than a year and to have complete border control within two years.
• Announce an immediate shift of Internal Revenue Service resources to audit companies that are deliberately hiring people illegally. We do not have to focus on deporting those who want to work. We need to focus on the Americans who are getting richer by deliberately breaking our laws, hiring people illegally and failing to pay taxes. These people are cheating their own country. We should focus on fining and making it economically impractical for Americans to deliberately encourage law breaking. Economic penalties for knowingly hiring someone who is illegal should rise dramatically with each employer (including subcontractors) conviction, making it simply too expensive to cheat. This will eliminate the magnet of illegal jobs, will begin to diminish the flow of new illegal workers and will lead some illegal workers to return home voluntarily.
• Outsource to American Express, Visa or MasterCard the job of building a real-time verification system so that honest companies can confirm the legal status of all workers and identify people with forged papers before they hire them as fast as your automatic teller machine identifies you and gives you money in a matter of seconds. We must distinguish between companies that deliberately hire illegal workers and companies that hire people who they believe are legal. It is the government's duty to help this second group of companies by providing a real-time verification system for identifying the legal status of all workers so that it is possible to screen out those with illegal documents. The government should outsource the creation of this system so that it is easy, fast and accurate.
• Focus deportation efforts on criminals. Those who claim that opponents of the Bush-Kennedy-McCain bill support mass deportations are simply wrong. We want a system in which honest work is available for law-abiding workers and in which the natural attrition of declining job availability will reduce illegal behavior. However, there is one group that should be deported immediately, and the law should be modified to make it easy to do so. Criminals have no future in America. In every major city and increasingly in small cities and even small towns, gangs have become a problem and people feel a rising sense of insecurity. There are at least 30,000 illegal gang members now in the United States. The system should focus on deporting criminals so that people who are here illegally understand that breaking the law will get them deported immediately.
• Cut off all federal aid to any city, county or state that refuses to investigate if a criminal is here illegally. These so-called "sanctuary cities" are in effect abetting the violation of American law and increasing the risk to honest, law-abiding Americans. They should be cut off from all federal aid if they refuse to help enforce federal law.
• Offer intensive education in English to anyone who wants to learn English, and make English the official language of government.  This will begin to reassert the commitment to assimilation and Americanization that has historically been part of legal immigration to America.
• Ensure that becoming an American citizen requires passing a test on American history in English and giving up the right to vote in any other country.
• Within the context of these proven changes, establish an economically driven temporary worker program like the Krieble Foundation proposals. Any temporary worker would have to pass a background check to ensure they are not a criminal, would have to give biometric information (retinal scan and thumbprint) for a special card that would be outsourced to American Express, MasterCard or Visa so it would be harder to defraud and counterfeit, and would have to sign a contract committing them to pay taxes and obey the law or be removed from the United States within two weeks without recourse to long court processes.
• Create a special open-ended worker visa for high value workers who bring specialized education, entrepreneurial talent or capital that will grow the American economy and make America a more prosperous country.
• Workers who came here illegally but have a good work relationship and community ties (including family), should have first opportunity to get the new temporary worker visas, but instead of paying penalties, they should be required to go home and get the visa at home. This way they are beginning their new career in America by obeying the law. It is amazing that those who advocate a large fine and the new Z visa, which would be administered in a hopelessly expedited manner, suggest that going home to get a new legal admission to the U.S. is somehow too complicated. If people can break the law by entering the county illegally, they should be able to obey the law and enter America legally.

• #1) We must pursue enforcement first: The American people simply no longer have any confidence that the government is serious about enforcing our immigration laws -- so they believe, with much justification, that if we combine an amnesty bill with new laws aimed at enforcement, we'll get the amnesty but not the enforcement. So, the simple solution to that is to pursue enforcement first.

  Many backers of comprehensive immigration will tell you that an enforcement first bill won't have the votes to pass. Well, first off, the same apparently could be said of a comprehensive immigration bill, which has now failed twice to gather the votes it needs to make it through.

  Furthermore, how can it be that an enforcement first bill cannot pass when everyone from Ted Kennedy, to Harry Reid, to Lindsey Graham, to Michael Chertoff says that they support enforcing our immigration laws and securing the border? Let's put together a package, put it to a vote, and let the American people see who's interested in curtailing illegal immigration and preventing terrorists from walking across our borders -- and who's not.

  #2) We need to build the fence: We need to build all 854 miles of fencing along the border. Although that will not, in and of itself, secure the border, the fencing will act as a force multiplier that will make the jobs of border patrol agents much easier.

  #3) We need to fully staff our border patrol: Simply put, the border patrol, especially with no fence in place, does not have the manpower to adequately cover our southern and northern borders. Building the fence will help, but the number of border patrol agents needs to continue to increase.

  #4) We need to fully staff Citizenship and Immigration Services: The agency that is in charge of handling legal immigration, Citizenship and Immigration Services, is poorly run, staggeringly undermanned, and working with obsolete equipment. This leads to enormous amounts of red tape for legal immigrants, poor security screening of people coming to this country legally, and an enormous number of people who come here legally and overstay their visas. This situation desperately needs to be corrected not only to help stop illegal immigrants, but because it's horribly unfair to the people who are doing the right thing and coming to this country legally.

  #5)We need an exit visa program: 40% of the people who are in this country illegally have simply overstayed their visas. This will be an unsolvable problem, especially with Citizenship and Immigration Services being such a disaster area, until we put an effective exit visa system in place that will allow us to know when people have left the country.

  #6) We need to take away the "jobs magnet:" The majority of illegals who are coming here are doing so in order to get jobs. If you take away the jobs, you will dramatically cut down on the number of illegals coming to this country -- and most of the illegals who are here will self-deport.

  To do this, we need to improve the current employment eligibility verification system and we need to move beyond a test program to nationwide usage. Additionally, we need to dramatically increase the monetary and criminal penalties for deliberately hiring illegals. Most of the businessmen knowingly hiring illegals today are doing so because it's low risk and high reward. If you change that equation and turn knowingly hiring illegals into an activity that is likely to result in steep financial penalties and/or prison time, the "jobs magnet" will turn off.

  #7) No more anchor babies: Today, if a 9 month pregnant illegal alien sneaks across the border and has a baby 2 minutes later, the child is an American citizen, the mother is eligible to receive government benefits on his behalf, and the child is an "anchor" that the mother can use to make it tougher to remove her from the country. This needs to change.

  Some people think it would take a constitutional amendment to pull that off. That was once my opinion as well, but the relevant portion of the 14th Amendment of the United States actually says,

  "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside..."

  Many people, myself included, believe that illegal aliens are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the nation they come from, not the United States, which means that we could pass a law that prevents the children of illegals from becoming an American citizen without a constitutional Amendment.

  #8) We need to put an end to sanctuary cities and drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens: If cities refuse to follow federal law in regard to illegals by becoming sanctuary cities or, if states severely undermine our ability to catch illegals (and simultaneously make it easy for them to commit voter fraud) by allowing them to have drivers’ licenses, the federal government should retaliate by cutting federal funds to that city and state until they change their minds.

  #9) Refuse to allow anyone caught in the United States illegally to ever become a citizen or return for any reason: This would give illegals who may want to become citizens, participate in a future guest worker program, or even visit relatives in the United States a strong incentive to make sure that they follow the law -- and it would also strongly discourage illegals who might be tempted to come here to get in on some future "amnesty" -- since all it would take would be getting caught one time to put an end to any hope of a legal future in the United States.

  #10) End catch and release: Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, when illegal aliens are caught by local police, oftentimes, the Feds refuse to take the illegal alien off their hands. That means that once the illegal is released, he blends right back into the crowd.

  Another asinine practice is capturing illegal aliens and simply releasing them with a summons to appear in court. Of course, almost no one ever shows up since the penalty for being here illegally is deportation. No illegal alien captured by our government should ever be allowed his freedom until after he is deported. If that means we need more manpower, more beds, or to hold them in local prisons until they can be sent home, so be it, but it is extremely foolish to catch an illegal alien and then just let him go.