E-Verify Sets off a Firestorm
Shrieks of bloody murder are being raised by the usual suspects--the ACLU, liberal advocacy groups, liberal media, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page--as the House Judiciary Committee considers a federal Legal Workforce Act that would force most employers to use E-Verify, the electronic immigration status checker. As always, the globalists unleash their hyperboles. "Labor shortages will leave unharvested crops rotting in the fields," despite House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith's American Specialty Agriculture Act which would simultaneously provide 500,000 temporary agricultural work visas. "One of (Lamar Smith's) projects is to harass American business into becoming the enforcement agent for U.S. Immigration laws." Well no, this "project" does not make any employer arrest or deport a potential employee: it simply mandates and facilitates following the law of the land--which requires that immigrants have work authorizations.
E-Verify is not perfect; nor is it even a real solution. It is a step towards our nation's ongoing attempt to remain a nation--not a Big Box store on the highway where anyone can drop in at any time and check out at any time so long as it costs less money to operate our farms. It is telling how the WSJ resorts to the typical liberal appeals against supposed xenophobia: "Republicans claim they only oppose illegal immigration but the truth is that many have grown hostile to all immigration." Well, why wouldn't they? It is not hostility; it is frustration and depression over the utter lack of respect shown to the concept of national identity, respect for the rule of law, and the institution of immigration. No one ever consults the American people on what they feel about drastically changing our demographic makeup, rending the national fabric, or ignoring the cultural necessity for one America, not many mini-Americas. That's the price we're paying for cheaper tomatoes.
America is obviously a country of immigrants, and immigration is part of our national identity and our American system. My sense is that conservative antipathy towards increased intake of immigrants is not so much antipathy towards immigration as from antipathy towards those who cheapen and corrupt a noble system. And all for vague economic benefits of "growth" and "investment" that do not always materialize. As the son of immigrants who played by the rules, I would ask the following questions. What does it mean when the first thing you do upon entering a country is to break its laws? And what message does it send to other immigrants when they hear that their future home is a place where laws are not enforced and there is no cohesive sense of national identity? Isn't that what many of them were trying to get away from?
In the long run, bad answers to these questions will cost us more than rotting crops.
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