Burglarizing Our Borders
My wife and I are like most Americans. We are sure to check our doors before leaving the house and turn the burglar alarm on. It just makes sense. I don't need to give an engraved invitation for a thief to rob us! Sometimes I wonder if our immigration policy isn't paying attention to who might get into our country.
If you only read The New York Times or The Washington Post, you might think that every evangelical Christian in the country is in favor of "comprehensive immigration reform." Major news outlets have reported extensively on so-called "pro-reform" evangelicals and their activities. According to CNN, "In new ads, Evangelical Immigration Table–[a] group that has been behind immigration reform on Capitol Hill–asks people to pray for Boehner and House Republican leadership on immigration reform and urge those leaders to listen to their prayers." The article did not mention that Evangelical Immigration Table is funded largely by organizations backed by George Soros, the billionaire who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to far-left causes.
Almost all Christians desire a government that is both righteous and just: a government that enacts policies which are in line with biblical values and protect or improve people's lives without hurting others. But we do not necessarily agree on how best to achieve this. Try as we might, we cannot always legislate the outcome we want, and laws almost always carry unintended consequences. For example, raising the minimum wage seems like a great idea until you consider that it often leads to greater unemployment. High stakes standardized testing appears promising until you catch teachers helping their students cheat.
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In the same way, so-called comprehensive immigration reform would have many unintended consequences. I have written about the many problems with the proposed legislation before. Briefly, it promises the same problems as the Reagan Amnesty in the 1980s; it will flood the labor market with millions of lower wage workers who will undercut the wages of the poorest Americans, and strain our entitlements. More importantly, the proposed changes contain no provisions for greater border security, and the federal agencies responsible for enforcing the law say it will be impossible to process the new citizens in a reasonable time frame.
One of the least helpful ways to discuss social policy is to presume that one particular social policy is self-evidently more compassionate than another. Suppose I wanted to open a soup kitchen to feed the homeless, but the food I was going to serve was incredibly unhealthy. While I could easily insist my efforts were "compassionate," others could oppose me not out of a desire to see the homeless starve, but out of even greater concern for their health. In the same way, it is possible to oppose, or to be very concerned about these proposed changes to our immigration law out of concern for the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, as well for as the immigrants themselves.
Our immigration policy has become so dysfunctional that we cannot even reliably deport violent criminals, and the proposed changes would do little or nothing to fix this. Just to cite a few examples, in Los Angeles, high school football star Jamiel Shaw was gunned down in cold blood by Pedro Espinoza, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Espinoza had only recently been released from jail before the killing. In Fairfax County, Virginia, 19 year old Vanessa Pham was stabbed to death by Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala. Blanco-Garcia had been arrested several times before Pham's murder for crimes ranging from larceny to public intoxication. Elsewhere in Texas, Juan Lozano Ortega and Edgar Derardo Guzman Perez, illegal immigrants from Mexico, were arrested for gang-raping a 13 year old girl. And perhaps most famously, Tamerlan Tsarnaev should have been deported in 2009 after being convicted of assault. Instead he remained in the country and was able to murder innocent people at the Boston Marathon.
These rapes and murders do not generally occur in upscale neighborhoods or high priced country clubs. It is very easy for some well-meaning activists to advocate "compassionate" immigration policy when neither they nor their loved ones have suffered at the hands of a violent criminal whom our government failed to deport. Is it "compassionate" to leave violent criminals on the street to prey on the most vulnerable among us?
According to a Homeland Security audit, as of a year ago an estimated 800,000 illegal immigrants had been ordered to leave the country but had simply ignored that order. You and I both know what happens if you ignore your income tax notification or your credit card bill. Before we race to naturalize 11 million people, we need to make sure we are enforcing the most basic measures of the laws we already have.
I am very pro-immigration. I think our country is better and stronger for the amazing people we attract from all over the world. My own church is full of wonderful families from almost every continent. But we need a real commitment to border enforcement and deporting violent criminals before we can enact any accelerated path to citizenship. We can love our neighbors without leaving our doors unlocked.
