The Kennedy-Kyl (K-K) Amnesty bill should be
titled An Act to Destroy the Republican Party because it
pits President Bush against the majority of the Party that
elected him. When Senator Ted Kennedy appeared as the
centerpiece of the photo-op announcing it, that told the
grassroots all they needed to know about the politics of
the deal trumpeted as bipartisan.
The Bush Administration has been tone deaf about how
offensive are the words comprehensive and compromise. The
American people want border security that we can see with
our own eyes on television, and they are ready to defeat
and disdain Members of Congress who vote for a package
deal that contains amnesty and guest worker proposals.
Despite denials, the K-K bill is amnesty. It will give
12 to 20 million illegal aliens exactly what they want,
namely, the legal right to remain in the United States by
being immediately given a probationary visa.
The K-K bill increases legal migration by at least 50
percent over the next decade by granting green cards to
all the remote relatives who are in the chain migration
categories, a number estimated at 750,000 to 900,000 a
year (triple the current number of 250,000). Giving green
cards to millions of additional relatives ensures that
legal immigration will continue to grow as this larger
pool of permanent residents brings in spouses.
The K-K bill will bring into our country at least
400,000 guest workers per year. That's twice the number in
last year's unacceptable Senate bill.
The K-K bill claims that benchmarks must be met before
amnesty/guest-worker provisions go into effect. But the
benchmarks do not require that we have closed the border,
do not require that all the fence be built which Congress
mandated last October, do not require that the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) implement the entry-exit visa
system so we can know if visitors and guest workers
actually leave, do not require employee verification, and
do not require that DHS deport absconders (the 600,000
aliens who have already been ordered deported).
The only thing the bill actually requires is that DHS
speedily process amnesty applications and green cards for
chain migration.
The K-K bill authorizes 4,000 new Border Patrol agents,
but doesn't require that they be actually trained or
deployed. It's difficult to hire and keep Border Patrol
agents because of the way some have been prosecuted and
sentenced to long prison terms after intercepting
professional drug smugglers bringing in vans of illegal
drugs.
Another benchmark is that "tools" will be provided to
prevent illegals from getting jobs, including requirements
for ID standards and an employee verification system. But
there is no requirement that anybody actually use the
tools.
The costs of the K-K bill are mind-boggling, and the
Senate has made no attempt to estimate or figure out how
to pay them. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector puts
a potential price tag on this bill of $2.5 trillion, which
is five times the cost of the Iraq war!
Rector gave the House Judiciary Committee detailed
testimony setting forth how he arrived at this figure.
At least 60 percent of illegal aliens lack a high school
diploma, which means they will work low-wage jobs, pay
little or no income tax, and be heavy users of our schools
and means-tested social benefits such as Medicaid, school
lunches, WIC, subsidized housing, the Earned Income Tax
Credit, and free legal counsel.
Fiscal costs would go up dramatically after amnesty
recipients reach retirement. Each elderly low-skill
immigrant imposes a net cost (benefits minus taxes) on
U.S. taxpayers of about $17,000 per year. These costs
would hit Social Security and Medicare at the very time
Social Security is expected to go into crisis.
Section 413 calls on Congress to "accelerate the
implementation" of the
Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) (announced
by Bush at Waco in 2005) so that the U.S. can "improve the
standard of living in Mexico." Do U.S. taxpayers want to
take on the awesome economic burden of solving poverty
problems in Mexico?
The K-K bill states that we want to increase access to
credit for "poor and under served populations in Mexico,"
and expand efforts "to reduce the transaction costs of
remittance flows" from the U.S. to Mexico (now running at
$23 billion a year).
The K-K bill also puts us into a "partnership" with
Mexico for "increasing health care access for poor and
under served populations in Mexico," for "assisting Mexico
in increasing its emergency and trauma health care
facilities," and for "expanding prenatal care" in the
border region. It looks like Robert Rector's estimates are
only the start of the costs that will put a truly
incredible burden on American taxpayers.
Read this column
online.
