FAIR Calls for Strong Amendments to Strengthen Sensenbrenner Bill

12 December, 2005

On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill offered by its' Chairman James Sensenbrenner: the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. The bill is advertised to House Republicans and the majority of Americans who demand fixing our broken immigration system as tough medicine: "comprehensive immigration enforcement." While it treats some of the symptoms, is does not, in fact, do enough to actually cure the illness.

The legislation offers some useful changes by addressing alien smuggling, detention and removal, and curbing of court abuses by illegal aliens. However, it fails to address the fundamental incentives driving illegal immigration. Lenders will continue to issue mortgages to illegal aliens, banks will continue to accept unverifiable consular identification documents, illegal alien families will continue to claim and get the earned income tax credit and other benefits designed for citizens, and the babies of illegal aliens will continue to be given the gratuitous gift of citizenship. In other words, it offers little to no real, substantive enforcement.

This is a bill that controls the borders with reams of reports, studies and promises. The heart of the bill, intended to cut off the jobs magnet, does little more than the status quo -and as Ronald Reagan pointed out is "just Latin for the mess we're in." With the public overwhelmingly demanding substantive immigration enforcement, we are baffled as to why the leadership would offer a bill that does so little toward true enforcement.

Not only is there dangers from what is said in the bill, there may be a greater threat from what the bill, if passed by the House, may open the door for in early 2006. Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA), author of widely-supported legislation to promote state and local police enforcement of immigration laws says of the bill, "There is a grave danger that the open-borders crowd will try to use passage of any bill dealing with immigration reform to attempt to bury the issue with the public, while allowing cheap illegal workers to continue poring across our borders. Further, this could be part of a strategy to pass an unobjectionable bill in the House, conference it with an illegal alien amnesty bill from the Senate like Kennedy-McCain then try to jam the conference report down the House's throat next year."

FAIR supports Rep. Norwood's dire assessment. Unless the bill is strengthened in a major way this week, the House will clear a measure that is not true comprehensive reform and lays out a red carpet invitation to the Senate to add a vast amnesty guest worker amnesty program that leaves the nation much worse off than at the present. In this scenario the President and the foreign labor lobby get all they want, the Senate gets most of what it wants, some House members get an enforcement bill they think will pacify angry voters, and the public gets shafted once again.