Category: Mike Scruggs' Column

Congress Gets Most of the Blame

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According to North Carolinians for Immigration Enforcement (NCFIRE), in 2018, there were 743 child rapes or sexual assaults on children in North Carolina by 215 illegal immigrants. Don’t tell me the immigration crisis is a manufactured crisis. The Democrat Party and their lock-step mainstream news media need to re-start their brains and moral sensibilities and get their heads out of the sand. 

A 2007 report by the Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform indicated that illegal immigrants have a prison incarceration rate 46 percent higher than the general American population. A recent study by the Crime Prevention Research Center in Arizona revealed that illegal immigrant crime rates were more than double the general population. Ninety percent of heroin comes into the U.S. across our Mexican border and kills thousands every year. Dishonest media and political reports often conflate illegal immigrants with legal immigrants. Legal immigrants are a pre-screened population and therefore should have low incarceration rates. Illegal immigrants have broken not only our border laws but our Social Security identity and tax laws. According to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), 75 percent of illegal immigrant workers use false or stolen Social Security numbers, and the other 25 percent do not report their earnings to the IRS. Americans would be jailed or heavily fined for Social Security fraud. Why do we think it is OK for illegal immigrants?

In the State of Texas alone, between June 2011 and December 2018, 186,000 illegal immigrants were charged with 292,000 criminal offenses. Of these, 539 were homicides. The most common illegal immigrant crime in many states, including North Carolina, is DUI. This is a common cause of innocent non-immigrant deaths.

I have been writing about immigration since 2000, and there was a serious and growing immigration crisis then. The center of the crisis has been illegal immigration, but chain migration and the relentless desire of special interest employers for cheaper and cheaper foreign labor have also corrupted our legal immigration system. Until Donald Trump’s election, Congress had not only neglected the escalating crisis but on numerous occasions has attempted amnesties and “comprehensive immigration reform” bills that served the interests of cheap-labor users and leftist demagogues rather than ordinary Americans.

We have an immigration crisis that has severely suppressed the wages of American workers for over 30 years, robbed tax-payers to subsidize employers using both illegal and legal foreign labor, and caused a painful and often deadly increase in crime by illegal aliens. Illegal immigration has also placed Americans at increasingly greater health risks and caused considerable environmental damage in Border States. It has created a deadly drug crisis coming over the Mexican border and is spreading lawless crime cartels that are corrupting many local governments.

The negligence and complicity of Congress and state legislatures, facilitated by special interest campaign contributions, are at the bottom of an ongoing and potentially nation-destroying crisis.

But let me be more specific about who in Congress is facilitating the demise of law and order and the undoing of our political freedoms, prosperity, public safety, and national security: Almost every Democrat in Congress and as many of 20 percent of Republicans, who continually  cave under the wicked and dishonest propaganda schemes of the increasingly Cultural Marxist Leftstream media: the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, most of the movie industry, and many more. They cover up important news and purvey not only distorted news, but distorted statistics, and even dishonest fact-checks.  

The origins of the crisis go back to the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act that exploded chain migration, allowing priority sponsoring of chains of relatives outside the immediate family rather than sticking to spouses and minor children within the immediate family. It was further exploded by the 1986 Amnesty contained in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).  It was signed by President Ronald Reagan despite his reservations about amnesty. Reagan was persuaded by liberal Republicans that there would be less than one million amnesties, and it was a necessary to compromise to secure the border and enforce immigration control laws. It resulted in 2.7 million former illegal immigrants being granted amnesty and a path to citizenship. Six follow-up amnesty acts gave amnesties to another 3.0 million illegal immigrants, bringing the total illegal immigrants amnestied to 5.7 million. Once the initial 2.7 million amnesties were given, the Democrats balked on the border security and immigration control and enforcement measures. The Democrats got their amnesties, and Reagan, the Republicans, and the American people got the shaft. At the end of his eight-year term, Reagan told his Attorney General Ed Meese that the 1986 Amnesty was the greatest mistake of his presidency. A young Democrat Representative from New York, Chuck Schumer, led the successful effort to scuttle the border security and enforcement provisions of the 1986 IRCA. Furthermore, illegal immigration began to surge again, encouraged by the chain of amnesties beginning in 1986.

The U.S. Congress obviously realized this new illegal immigration surge was at crisis levels, because they established a Commission on Immigration Reform in 1990. Many distinguished American scholars and leaders served on it and studied and reported on immigration problems in great analytical detail. It was ably chaired by African-American Representative Barbara Jordan from Texas. It is now usually referred to as the Jordan Commission. After more than six years of intensive study, analysis, and deliberation, they submitted the final report to President Clinton in 1997

These reports found U.S. border security to be inadequate to deter or prevent illegal immigration. The Commission recommended and emphasized the urgent need to close the gaps. It recommended strong screening and enforcement measures (like E-Verify) to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants. It recognized the enormous fiscal burdens being placed on state and local governments by illegal immigrants and recommended steps to measure and mitigate them. This included making illegal immigrants ineligible for all but emergency medical care. That current fiscal burden is now estimated at $116 billion annually and falls disproportionately on state and local governments. The average illegal immigrant family member costs taxpayers over $8,000 per year. The Commission recommended eliminating chain migration and prioritizing skilled workers over unskilled workers, eliminating the diversity lottery, and limiting total immigration and refugee settlement to 550,000 per year. They recommended ending employer dependence on unskilled immigration and guest-worker programs. Finally, the Commission emphasized the need for strong enforcement on all fronts, including immigration limits and employer and sponsor responsibilities. Moreover, they stressed that protection of American workers was an essential principle for effective immigration policies.   

According to a 2016 CIS study using National Academy of Science data, American wages are suppressed by $494 billion per year by cheap foreign immigrant labor. Divide that by 150 million American workers, and it costs each American worker just under $3,300 per year.

But Congress did essentially nothing with the Jordan Commission reports. Campaign contributions from cheap-labor and Cultural Marxist special interests had become the favored patrons of Congress. The crisis reeled on, growing in size and momentum. George W. Bush, acting contrary to historical evidence and research, believed amnesties and soft immigration policies would gain Latino votes. His plan only increased the level of crisis and alienated much of the Republican base. Barack Obama was much closer to right. Immigration would be the perfect path for fundamental changes in American culture, society, and government. Those fundamental changes, however, throw traditional American values, rights, economics, prosperity, Constitutional government, national security, public safety, and America’s future under the bus,

Two painful lessons have been learned since 1986 but are generally ignored by our globalist class of politicians and media propagandists. First, amnesties result in new and bigger surges in illegal immigration. Judging from the 1986 experience, each illegal immigrant amnestied results in 2.5 more illegal immigrants during the next 10-20 years. The math is horrifying. If you give amnesty to two million illegal immigrants, you are going to cause a surge of another five million illegal immigrants. If you give amnesty to ten million, it will have nation-destroying consequences, attracting about 25 million more illegal immigrants. The second painful lesson is that we cannot trust the scoundrels in Congress who are owned by cheap-labor donors and ethnic special interests to keep their end of a bargain.

For conservative Republicans and independents, there is a third painful lesson. Illegal immigration, amnesties, chain migration, absurd birth-right citizenship policies, excessive legal immigration, and lack of border security and internal immigration enforcement mean more and more and more left-oriented Democrat voters and the end of conservative values and genuine Constitutional government and protections. This ultimate danger of the immigration crisis is upon us and right in our face. The American Republic is within an election of becoming a permanent third-world, radical Marxist Democrat stronghold. Just look at what Marxist Democrats have done in California. The California disaster is spreading, and California is only the first stage. The second stage is Venezuela and the third is Cuba.

A secure border must include physical barriers. It will not be completely effective without E-Verify and internal visa checks, but it is an essential part of the deterrent combination, especially for deterring drug cartels and terrorists. According to a CIS release on January 8, 2019, a border wall or barrier would only have to deter 3 to 4 percent of border crossings to pay for itself in a decade. My own estimate using the same data is that if the $5.7 billion “wall” deters only 25 percent of 200,000 illegal immigrants per year, it would pay for itself in only 1.4 years. It would be extraordinarily foolish not to invest in a border barrier.

President Trump, however, is dealing with Democrats and a few flakey Republicans who would rather destroy the country than slow down illegal immigration and the flood of new leftist Democrat voters. Moreover, experience has shown that the bargaining word of the current Democrat leadership in Congress cannot be trusted. We absolutely do have an enormous escalating immigration crisis, and the President should use his statutory and Constitutional powers to protect the American people.

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