What ARE our immigration problems and can they be solved?

By Mary Mostert

The heated debate now taking place about the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 is largely emotion with few hard facts being presented by either side. In fact, not even the number of the bill has been mentioned in any of the comments I have heard or read. Anyone interested in finding out what the bill REALLY says can read it by going to http://thomas.loc.gov/ and inserting S. 1348, the bill number, in the little box that says "Search Bill Text."

S. 1348 was introduced on May 9th, has not been even available to read until this week, but it appears that, without reading it, most commentators already have a strong opinion about it — either for or against it. The bill is long. It has 832 sections and amendments are already being introduced to make changes in it.

Some commentators are urging that it be defeated because they claim is provides "amnesty" for most of the estimated 12 million aliens who are here illegally. The first question that the public should ask themselves is why ARE there 12 million aliens here illegally? In spite of claims that aliens are pouring into this country to get free medical care and education, the fact of the matter is — if there are no jobs available for aliens, they either don't come or they go home.

My father was not an American. He grew up in South Africa, but was born in Germany when his parents were there on a diplomatic mission, so he had duel citizenship, German and British, since the Union of South Africa was then part of the Commonwealth of Great Britain. He met my American mother while in college in the USA and after his graduation they made their home in South Africa, where my older brother and sister were born.

In 1926, when my brother was a baby and my sister was 2 years old, they returned to the USA under our father's German passport and started a newspaper in Arkansas. By 1931 in the depth of the Great Depression my parents had lost their money when the banks closed. That caused the failure of the newspaper and unemployment was about 30% of the workforce.

My father, as did many other foreign born people, returned to his home in South Africa, since there were no jobs even for US Citizens available. My parents were divorced, and, ten years later WWII broke out. My brother joined the Air Force at age 17 to serve what he believed to be his country.

After the war, he got his degree under the GI Bill of rights, married and wanted to vote in Chicago where he lived. He was told he could not vote because he was what we call today an illegal or undocumented German alien since he came to the US on a German passport. It took years for him to eventually get the necessary piece of paper from the US Government to be able to vote.

Why, indeed, do we have 12 million or more illegal aliens in the USA? At least 7.5 million of those illegal aliens have jobs. Nationally, unemployment is at 4.5%. In my state of Utah, unemployment is 2%.

Furthermore, about 1.5 million illegal aliens were prevented last year from coming into the USA.

The total work force currently in the USA is about 120 million, which means that 6.5% of the nation's workforce is illegal aliens. The NY Times reported today that "Democrats plan to offer amendments to eliminate or scale back provisions under which hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers would be admitted to the United States each year." On the other hand, some Republicans plan to introduce amendments that would round up the current illegals in our workforce and send them home.

Where are our young people and why are so few of them are working the kinds of jobs that illegal aliens are doing? Would we really have enough workers if we sent 12 million illegal aliens home?

Recently I had a conversation with one of my college age grandsons about the kind of job he wanted to have this summer. With 2% unemployment, he can literally choose the job he wants from the many employers looking for employees. The highest paying job would be in construction. Since he has worked construction he was offered a job running a framing crew. Only, he needs to be able to speak Spanish since most of the construction workers in Utah are Spanish speaking. He didn't pursue the job because his second language is Italian and, besides, he would prefer a job in an air conditioned building rather than working in the heat of the Utah desert.

Why are there so many jobs? Well, one third of my grandson's generation is dead, having been killed by their parents via abortion before they were born. Those of his generation who were allowed to live are mostly in school and are not much interested in picking fruit or even working high paying construction jobs. One of my grandsons who did work in construction was making $25 an hour at the age of 18 during the summer months.

I am reasonably sure that most of the politicians and the public know that there have been approximately 5 million deaths of unborn babies due to abortion in the USA during the same time period we have lost 3300 military men in Iraq. Since Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, there have been about 47 million unborn babies killed. We now have an aging population who are leaving the workforce and a very small rising generation that is not large enough to do the kind of manual labor their grandparents did at their age.

What IS the solution to that problem? I suggest that burying our collective heads in the sand while whining about those illegal Mexicans is not the solution to the problem.

So far, I'm hearing mostly emotion and little in the way of intelligent discussion of the illegal immigration problem from EITHER side of the aisle in Congress. S. 1348 is far from perfect, but its Section 1 deals with securing our borders, increasing border agents and implementing a biometric fingerprint identification system to block false identification papers.

That is something we need to do. S 1348 needs to be passed.

© Mary Mostert