How To Stop Illegal Immigration 101

Those who are not students of their history are bound to repeat  it.  So goes the line, anyway.

Take the immigration problem for an example.  Back in 1986, Congress passed a law that allowed illegal aliens to stay in this country.  That’s despite the fact that they had entered this country illegally, or, that they entered legally and then decided to stay illegally.  The passage of this law was intended to once and for all resolve the immigration issue.  It was generally thought that these illegal immigrants would become legal and then start to pay their fair share of the taxes.  And they would pay their own way instead of being a burden on the state, i.e. the rest of us tax-paying citizens.

Well, here it is 2012, and all of a sudden, 26 years later, we have 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants in this country.  If we use the average of 16 million immigrants over 26 years, that’s 615,000 illegal immigrants coming in per year.  Didn’t anyone notice this? 

Maybe because I am in the restaurant business, I noticed this trend immediately.  I bet that the people in the construction business and landscaping noticed as well.  And, to be blunt about it, you had to be blind to not notice that we had an illegal immigration problem.  Yet, nothing was done.

In my opinion, the reason for this is because we didn’t want to notice the influx of illegal immigrants. It benefited us to not notice.  We were living “high on the hog” and everyone was profiting from it.  Since illegal immigrants generally work for lower wages than our citizens do, this was thought to be a good thing for the “consuming citizen.”  Unfortunately, these days a lot of the ”consuming citizens” do not have jobs.  So, the easy thing to do is to blame the illegal immigrants that are working in this country, and therefore, taking away jobs from Americans. 

I take a different approach.  The illegal immigrants are not entirely to blame.  They work extremely hard for below-market wages, live in sub-standard conditions, so that they may have a better life. 

The people that I blame more are the businesses that hire the illegal immigrants and the consumers that use them.  These businesses entice the immigrants to come over illegally.  And they entice them to come over because the businesses make a greater profit by paying lower wages, not paying taxes, not paying worker’s comp insurance, etc.   Just as important, they compete unfairly with businesses that follow the laws.

If businesses did not hire illegal immigrants, I believe that our immigration problem would resolve itself quickly.  No jobs or money in the USA would mean that crossing the border illegally would not be worth the trouble.  Being poor in your own country is probably a better option than being poor in someone else’s country.  In essence, we would have “self-deportation.”

In the end, based on history, it is evident that the federal government will not stop illegal immigration.  They have not stopped illegal border crossings and they have not enforced penalties to businesses that hire illegals.  But, YOU can fix the illegal immigration problem.  All you have to do is not use businesses that hire illegal immigrants.  After all, in their defense, the government is not hiring these illegal immigrants.  It's the businesses that hire them.  And it's the consumers that use these businesses.