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Tuesday, President Bush asked Congress to reopen a window that allowed
illegal aliens on the waiting list for a
green card
to get legalized here, rather than go home first. The measure, named
after Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, expired
April 30 after a four-month run. Both the substance and the language
of Bush's letter to Congress, with its talk of "undocumented
immigrants" and "family reunification," suggests
that the White House has contracted out immigration policy to the
immigration lawyers and other high-immigration advocacy groups which
are not, at the risk of understatement, animated by a concern for
the national interest. Meanwhile, "conservatives" such
as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Rep. Peter King of New York
are actively working to reopen the 245(i) window so as to allow
even more illegal aliens to get green cards.
The 245(i)
loophole allows illegals to avoid a provision of the 1996 immigration
law that barred from re-entry to the United States for a period
of up to 10 years any illegal alien who had lived here for an extended
time. The re-entry bar was intended as a penalty for illegal immigration,
since really there is no other penalty. The effect of 245(i) is
to render this penalty moot. This is why immigrants have been lining
up around the block to get married, so their new legal-resident
or citizen spouses could submit a green-card application for them
before the window closed.
If the number
of people involved were small, it might not be worth making a fuss.
But the numbers are quite large. The INS has estimated that 640,000
illegal aliens took advantage of the loophole before it expired
Monday, and the Bush letter estimates another 200,000 were eligible
but missed the deadline. And during a prior incarnation of this
245(i) loophole, fully one-fourth of all "legal" immigrants
were illegal aliens using the immigration system to launder their
status.
In the short
term, a loophole like 245(i) hurts mainly those prospective immigrants
stupid enough to actually try to obey the law. But in the long term,
quasi-amnesties like this undermine our ability to regulate immigration.
We are legitimizing illegal immigration — defining deviancy down,
if you will — by effectively incorporating illegal immigration into
our policy structure. In other words, sneaking across the border,
or entering on a legal visa but failing to leave when it expires,
is becoming just an alternative means of moving to the United States
— a little irregular, perhaps, but nothing to be especially concerned
about.
If any benefit
comes from this, it will be a belated realization that legal and
illegal immigration are not separate phenomena, but rather two sides
of the same coin. Legal and illegal immigrants come from the same
countries, live in the same households, and even, as 245(i) shows
us, are the same people. The lesson to be drawn is that in
the modern world, a policy of high legal immigration inevitably
gives rise to mass illegal immigration — and any attempt to reduce
illegal immigration must begin with cuts in legal immigration.
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