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May 23, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward
Rep. Pence: No to amnesty, yes to reform
Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) presents his idea for a "middle ground" on immigration reform Tuesday at The Heritage Foundation.
America needs an immigration plan “tough on border security and tough on employers who hire illegal aliens,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) said today at The Heritage Foundation. This program, he said, should be coupled with “a guest worker program that operates without amnesty and without growing into a huge new government bureaucracy.”
Rep. Pence, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, contrasted his vision with the amnesty plan proposed by the Senate and supported by the President. “Amnesty is no solution. It only will worsen the problem because it will cause more people to come here illegally with the hope of someday having their status adjusted.”
“The House got it right” when it passed its tough border security bill, he said. “My bill begins by including the House bill, with a couple of minor changes.”
But in some ways, the House didn’t go far enough, he continued. The Border Patrol’s job would be much easier if the bulk of those crossing illegally today used legal channels instead of sneaking across. This would let the Border Patrol focus on genuine national security threats like drug smugglers or terrorists. “In order to do that, there must be a legal means for the great majority of people seeking temporary work to come to America,” he said. His solution is to use the private sector to manage visas, an ingenious proposal that he credited to Helen Krieble, who originally presented the concept at The Heritage Foundation last year.
This would also solve the problem of those illegal immigrants already here. While America cannot and should not have any sort of amnesty, he said it would be a logistical nightmare to forcibly deport millions of illegal immigrants. Instead, he said, “the solution is to set up a system that will encourage illegal aliens to self-deport and come back legally as guest workers.”
Such a program “may sound far-fetched and unrealistic, but it isn’t,” he said. But it can only be effective if coupled with steep fines for employers who violate the law and new mechanisms to ensure that workers are legal. “Employer enforcement is the key,” he said. “Once in place, jobs for illegal aliens will dry up.”
Self-deportation
This is how “self-deportation” would work under Rep. Pence’s plan:
- Workers would apply for visas through new private companies that would handle temporary worker visas. These companies would coordinate with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to conduct a background check on each applicant.
- Because private firms would be competing to process these visas, the process could take as little as a few days—rather than the years required under the government-run system.
- No self-deporting illegal immigrant would have any preference over anyone else, so it’s not an amnesty.
- If cleared, a new visa-holder would be eligible to work in America for two years, with the possibility of reapplying twice more.
Rep. Pence has the right idea: use incentives instead of government micromanagement to get things done. Because of the new fines, employers will have a tremendous incentive to find legal workers. Meanwhile, current illegal aliens also have incentives. They would gain access to the legal economy by returning home and reapplying—and they would be able to continue working.
As Helen Krieble explained in her lecture, reliance on private enterprise will allow current illegal aliens to become legal without any sort of amnesty: “They can jump in a car, go across the border, apply for their visas, and be back. It would take maybe three or four days from anywhere in the United States, and then they can come out of the shadows and become regular people in the United States and get regular benefits that American workers get.”
This reliance on the private sector also avoids creating new government rules, one of the main problems with the immigration reform plan pushed in the Senate. The Senate, as Heritage’s Tim Kane explains, would establish “a new bureaucracy within the Department of Labor tasked with centrally planning labor markets for untold numbers of guest workers.” The last thing we need, as Rep. Pence said, is to task the government agencies responsible for today’s immigration crisis with solving the problem they created.
Confirm qualified judges
The Senate is again taking up the issue of the President’s judicial nominees, many of whom have been stalled for months or even years by liberals. For example, Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003, and the Senate has only recently been able to act on his nomination. The body is expected to vote on his confirmation later this week.
A coalition of extremist liberals is working to block President Bush’s qualified judicial nominees, Former Attorney General Ed Meese said in an interview with MyHeritage.org.
“Many of his nominees have been opposed by extreme leftist special interest groups who don’t want Constitutionally-oriented judges,” said Meese, Heritage’s Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow. “They prefer judges who would implement a radical left-wing agenda—which those groups could never get through a democratically-elected lawmaking process.”
Instead of playing politics with the President’s nominations, he continued, the Senate should promptly confirm judges. “The proper role of the Senate is to look at the qualifications of judges and to make sure that they are faithful—that they have a record of faithfulness, that they will remain faithful—to the Constitution, and that they have the intellectual capability, the integrity and the other necessary qualifications for the job.”
Operating on principles, not politics
The left has long sought to match The Heritage Foundation’s ability to influence policymakers with timely, relevant and solid research, and it’s only in the last few years that their operations have gotten off the ground. But politics aside, there remain crucial differences between Heritage and groups like the leftist Center for American Progress: principles.
Lee Edwards, Heritage’s Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, had some advice for the fledgling liberal think tanks: “They should pay as much attention to a philosophy and ideas as they do to process,” he told The Post. Here at Heritage, he continued, “we’re not Republicans, we are conservatives, therefore that frees us to criticize Republicans when they go wrong. The problem for [CAP founder John] Podesta is: Can he say, ‘we are liberal’ — or ‘progressive’ — thereby freeing them to build their organization upon a set of ideas, upon a set of principles?”
In other news
Coming up at Heritage
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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
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