THE CRUX OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

By H. N. Burdett

Political campaigns have a way of bringing out the beast in even the most reasonable, fair-minded politicians. This year's congressional elections are no exception. How else to explain an act of calculated contretemps by a throwback to the days of principled conservatism in the nation's capital such as Senator Lindsey Graham?

In an era when rigid polarization dominates the Washington landscape, motivating the Republican minority in both houses of Congress to adopt the deplorable option of voting against virtually every piece of substantive legislation, and even a hint of compromise is synonymous with betrayal, the South Carolina senator was among the scant few reminders of a time when conscience and conciliation rather than contrived conflict was the order of the day. It was a time of Dirksen of Illinois, Scott of Pennsylvania and Mathias of Maryland, lawmakers who brought civility and honor as well as brain wattage to the Art of the Possible, as opposed to today's minority party preference for parroting bumper sticker slogans.

Graham, along with John McCain, once infused a measure of hope that immigration reform might be the breakthrough one dared to dream might resuscitate the long dormant if not comatose concept of bipartisanship in the corridors of power.

As a presidential candidate, McCain was taught the bitter lesson that Republican moderates with White House ambition either learn or resign themselves to forever harnessing their aspirations: deviation from the conservative gospel is the minefield route to the party's nomination for leader of the free world.

It is a lesson that was driven home to the 41st President of the United States. A paradigm of Republican centrism as a congressman from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush was subjected to an old-fashioned whuppin' by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 GOP presidential primary. That a Grade B film actor could inflict such a thorough thrashing of a politician who had one of the most impressive resumes of anyone who has ever sought the presidency -- from congressman to chairman of the Republican party to director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Ambassador to the United Nations -- spoke volumes for the direction American politics had taken in the second half of the 20th century.

Bush 41 was subsequently chosen as Reagan's vice president running mate in the last year it was still regarded as important for Republicans to balance a conservative at the head of the ticket with a moderate candidate in the second spot. In that position, the elder Bush wore his new mantle as validation of his commitment to the tenets of his newly found aversion to rapid change. And he wore it proudly enough to succeed the Great Communicator in the election of 1988. As president, the senior Bush challenged Americans to read his lips as he pledged not to raise taxes, but eventually lapsed into responsible behavior when circumstances dictated, thereby assuring his fate as a one-term chief executive.

Following eight years of the Clinton administration, Republican boy genius Karl Rove never allowed George W. Bush to forget the sins of the father. That formula proved sufficient for the eldest son of the House of Bush to squeeze out a victory (by a single vote in the United States Supreme Court) in the controversial presidential election of 2000.

So disciplined was W. at adhering to his party's dogma that riding the crest of misplaced patriotism in the wake of the 9/ll attacks he could order the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the suicide assaults on the trade center and the Pentagon, declare a victory that was a full decade premature, and still be re-elected in 2004.

Indeed conservative allegiance has been of such necessity for the nomination of Republican candidates for the presidency that even Nelson Rockefeller, with all of his millions as far back as the 1960s discovered that moderation was too much baggage for a presidential hopeful to haul into a GOP national convention. The last moderate to win that party's nomination was Dwight Eisenhower; the next may require credentials more impressive than merely winning a world war.

So it has come to pass that Lindsey Graham, though he has never actually revealed overt lust to reside in the White House, has now the requisite bona fides for that quest. He has toed the party line by renouncing his previous willingness to find a viable bipartisan solution to immigration reform. The South Carolinian has assumed a leading role in calling for a thorough review of arguably his party's foremost achievement: the adoption of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution which decrees, "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."

Those words that sounded the death knell for slavery now incite the animus of conservative Republican extremists who have pushed their party ever further to the right. So much so that
a leading GOP spokesman, Senator Jeff Sessions, is so comfortable with the idea of re-positioning the party of Lincoln that he feels wording of the 14th amendment that terminated the institution of slavery could also mean "somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home and that child would forever be an American citizen."

Well, yes, the 14th amendment could technically lead to entire planes loaded with pregnant Brazilian women landing at Miami International, be herded into taxis and ambulances waiting to transport them to reserved rooms in the nearest available maternity wards.

Those who have been naively unaware of the extent of the so-called "anchor baby" problem infecting the United States are indebted to the Federation for American Immigration Reform for doing their homework.

FAIR estimates that there are 13 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Taking into consideration that the crude birth rate for the entire foreign-born population is 33 births per 1,000 population and adjusting downward to allow for women as a smaller share of undocumented workers, FAIR figures 363,000 children of illegal immigrants are born anually in this country.

A 2004 United States General Accounting Office report shows that three states submitted their annual cost estimates of educating children of undocumented foreigners. According to FAIR, "The estimates provided ranged from $50 million to $87.5 million in Pennsylvania and $932 million to $1.04 billion in Texas."

This same organization calls for more realistic quotas to be assigned to U.S. immigration and a moratorium on all such immigration until such figures can be determined, claiming, "By not correcting this mis-application of the 14th amendment, the funds that state and local governments must provide to anchor babies amount to a virtual tax on U.S. citizens to subsidize illegal aliens." FAIR does not seem to feel it is relevant to adjust for the taxes that illegal immigrants do indeed pay.

Rather than tackle symptoms of undocumented immigration like so-called "anchor babies," which amounts by and large to punishing the impoverished from south of the U.S. border who mostly want nothing more than to guarantee the survival of their families and are willing to leave their homeland, at least temporarily, to achieve this goal, Senator Graham and his conservative brethren might take a closer look at what drives south to north migration in the Americas and worldwide.

The crux of the problem is not the foreign worker who often enough risks his life to cross the border illegally, opts to live in constant fear of being caught, deported and even permanently separated from his family. Senator Graham, other anti-immigration lawmakers and immigration suppression organizations might find it more productive for achieving their stated goals to focus on the very source of clandestine trafficking in undocumented cheap labor. Law enforcement agencies need to home in on the human sleaze that lures impoverished, unemployed foreigners across the border with jobs for which they are paid under-the-table wages, violating an array of laws from those covering minimum wages and maximum hours to those designed to ensure employee safety, not to mention enrollment in health care programs and employment insurance and pensions.

Curiously little attention is directed towards those who promulgate, promote and perpetuate illegal immigration while their off-the-books employees are blamed and punished for the crime of struggling to survive. Only when legislators like Lindsey Graham recognize and act upon levying serious fines, in some cases temporarily suspending and, in others, permanently shutting down operations that seek to increase their profit margins through human exploitation, will true immigration reform finally be achieved. Meanwhile, foreign-born laborers continue to proliferate, they and their offspring desperately grasping at employment opportunities for which they are willing to subject themselves to multiple hazards, all the while learning to evade and subvert the laws of the land to which they have been lured.

Immigration, lawful or undocumented, traditionally inspires distrust and fear of foreigners, most frequently from the tier of workers whose jobs are most threatened by their existence. The inconvenient truth is that merchants of greed who represent the dark underside of capitalism contribute to the decay of an economic system that can be viable and productive through adjustments -- serious rules and regulations that are seriously enforced. Those conservatives who resist regulation with their familiar mantra that the marketplace can seek its true level only when it is completely unfettered are arguing for nothing less than exempting themselves from the concept of a level playing field, preferring to game the system to their own advantage.

As long as capitalism successfully defends itself against the notion that laws, rules, regulations, prohibitions on questionable behavior represent untenable restrictions on the free market, it is pursuing a course that is nothing short of suicidal. Unchecked exploitation of the system and of human resources can lead to the downfall of the world's most emulated economic system. Eternal vigilance is required to safeguard against it.

To replenish human resources, entrepreneurs will always resort to seeking the neediest, the hungriest, those eager and willing to take any job -- no matter how menial or hazardous -- to acquire their basic needs. Such a system is a predictable indicator of xenophobia, which is ever more pronounced among those whose livelihood is threatened by each succeeding wave of immigration.

The source of the United States's historic and continuing vigor and vitality -- the reason it is envied and emulated at the same time it is is mocked and hated -- is that despite ubiquitous immigration bashing, it is the immigrant's belief that hard work in this country can lead to a steady rise in economic status, and can even make one rich, wherein resides the secret of the United States's uniqueness. Waves of immigrants have accounted for U.S. growth and wealth from the very founding of the nation until the present day. To deny this is to deny our very history.

If the immigration saturation point has been reached and even passed in the United States, it is all the more reason for rational reform to take dead aim on eliminating the "pull factor" of avaricious and unconscionable traffickers in the cheapest possible labor to achieve the highest possible profits. As long as the former are allowed to exist and are, in fact, time and again subsidized by government, these merchants of greed who respect neither laws nor common decency will always be perfectly content to allow the very people they routinely and callously exploit to absorb abuse and shoulder the blame whenever capitalism appears in danger of imploding from its own excesses.