Too Soft On Illegals

From the Dallas Morning News via RCP:

By Mark Davis

"The president wants you to know that illegal aliens should have to pay "a meaningful penalty for breaking the law: to pay their taxes, to learn English and to work in a job for a number of years."

I can hear the laughter of illegals already as they realize that the Bush plan will allow some of them to stay exactly where they are in exactly the job they came here illegally to fill, with no price except the same obligations every citizen has already - work, pay your taxes, speak English."

Meanwhile, the suckers who are obeying the law wait patiently in their home countries wondering when the gate will kick open for them. I lose count tallying the people who should be insulted by this.

So, at the risk of offending mightily those who have made excuses for lawbreakers ranging from our borders to the business community, here's what will work. These are not options; they are requirements. Take away one element, and the whole plan is useless.

1. Get serious about border control. A real wall. A virtual wall. Thousands more Border Patrol agents. Take your pick, but we must shut down the cascades of illegals who started the problem and who threaten to perpetuate it.

2. Enact 100 percent deportation of every illegal we find. No more hand-wringing about families. I have the same empathy for those kids that I do for the kids of criminals who must go to jail, leaving children without parents. At least with deportation, the family remains intact - they simply return to the country the parents unwisely chose to leave.

And no more nonsense about the impossibility of finding all of them. No one pretends we can find every illegal immigrant, every speeder, every dope smoker, but we find the ones we can, recognizing that behaviors made illegal tend to decrease.

3. Crack down on employers who hire illegals, thus drying up the job market that attracts them. This cannot be done without a high-tech ID system that provides a card proving a job applicant's legal employability. The expense of this will be considerable, but considerably less than the toll illegal immigration takes on our society every year.

4. Develop a sensible citizenship application process that enables a limited number of candidates to apply easily from their home countries upon verification of a clean criminal record and a signed commitment to achieve English proficiency.

Great leaders know when compromise is appropriate and when it is not. This is not a tax cut debate or even a stem cell debate. It is a battle for what kind of country we are going to have."

Read the whole thing.