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Immigration reform—the right way

May 10, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward

Congress and the White House are once again looking to push through an immigration reform measure.

Reform is absolutely essential. Millions of illegal immigrants reside unlawfully in the United States, and many more come each year, posing a challenge to our nation’s security, laws, culture and sovereignty.

Lawmakers must remain cognizant of the essential principles of immigration reform, write Heritage scholars Ed Meese, who served as Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, and Matthew Spalding, director of Heritage’s Center for American Studies.

These are the principles Congress and the White House must keep in mind when considering any change to the nation’s immigration laws:

  1. Protect national security. America’s immigration system must be a national strength and not a strategic vulnerability.
  2. Uphold the rule of law. The rule of law requires the fair, firm, and consistent enforcement of the law, and immigration is no exception.
  3. No amnesty. Those who enter, remain in, and work in the country illegally are in ongoing and extensive violation our immigration laws, and rewarding their lawbreaking is no solution.
  4. Strengthen citizenship. Each nation has the responsibility— and obligation—to determine its own conditions for immigration, naturalization, and citizenship.
  5. Benefit the American economy. Immigration policy should be a fiscal and economic benefit not only for immigrants, but also for the nation as a whole.
  6. Temporary means temporary. Any temporary worker program must be temporary, market-oriented, and feasible.

Meese and Spalding point out that the 1986 immigration reform violated many of these tenets, and as a result did little to resolve the problem of unlawful immigration. Congress should avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and understand “the immediate and long-term implications of their actions,” they write.

“For the sake of immigrants and American citizens alike, any meaningful and long-term policy concerning immigration must be consistent with these principles and, thus, with the highest ideals and long-term good of the United States.”

Punish the crime, not the thought

Liberals in Congress have proposed a broad expansion of federal “hate crime” laws that would not only create new classes of victims but also federalize various crimes now handled effectively by state and local authorities.

Such a policy, writes Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner, is a terrible idea.

Find out why lawmakers should think twice before expanding federal hate crime laws.

Tony Blair’s resignation

British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced today that he will step down as head of government on June 27. His replacement will almost certainly be Gordon Brown, his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

“Tony Blair will be remembered as a staunch ally of the United States who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American people in the dark days following the 2001 attacks,” Heritage’s Nile Gardiner writes. Nevertheless, he will not be remembered as a transformative leader like Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher.

Click here for more on Tony Blair’s mixed legacy for Britain and America.

Our troops are not victims

The left-wing MoveOn.org group has begun a new campaign, one that uses images of soldiers in uniform, some of them injured, to argue for withdrawal from Iraq.

Heritage national security expert James Carafano argues that this is inappropriate. “Portraying members of the armed forces as victims may be an effective way for the anti-war crowd to win sympathy. But just because it’s effective doesn’t make it right.”

Read more from James Carafano on making out the troops as victims.

In other news

  • President Bush said yesterday he will veto the latest liberal Iraq proposal: a plan to fund the Iraq war for only two months, without a withdrawal deadline. This plan would impose extreme hardships on the troops and their commanders, who would be unsure of their future funding.
  • The Chinese government is doing its best to remind the world that Communism’s barbarity did not end with the Cold War: Mao’s successors plan to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of Tibetans from their homes into “socialist villages.”
  • Oregon’s governor has signed a law granting many of the privileges of marriage to same-sex couples.
  • In the absence of expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, Massachusetts has announced a plan to provide additional funds from state coffers. Leaving aside the moral questions of the policy, this demonstrates that the federal government need not be the sole financier of such research.
  • Your tax dollars at work: the Wilmington, DE News-Journal describes how federal homeland security grants bought more than $100,000 in military-grade police equipment for a Delaware town of 1,100 residents and exercise equipment for a fire department in New Jersey.
  • Government regulation really does make energy more expensive. A Wisconsin filling station was ordered to raise its prices at the pump, which the state regulator deemed to be “too low.” Heaven forbid an entrepreneur charge consumers a lower price if he so chooses.
  • The Senate has granted the Food and Drug Administration still greater authority to regulate pharmaceuticals and their advertising and distribution.

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.