Apr 4, 2006 3 min read

A battle is brewing in Congress over illegal immigration, and it’s about time the federal government does something tangible to crack down on this serious problem. Illegals continue flooding across the U.S. border with Mexico, with no apparent end in sight. This swelling population places huge financial strains on schools, health care and social services, at a time when many U.S. citizens are seeing an erosion in their own quality of the aforementioned items. The unabated influx of illegals also places an extra burden the U.S. taxpayer for running the penal system.

How many illegals are currently in this country is subject to debate, but the most-quoted estimate is around 11 million. Considering that the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimation of Pennsylvania’s population was 12.4 million as of July 1, 2005, that’s no small number of people living here illegally.

And that’s the key word: illegally. For far too long the federal government has taken a laissez-fair approach to illegal immigration, treating it as sort of a benign inevitability. It doesn’t have to be that way, and now conservatives in both political parties, Republican and Democratic, are allied in calling for meaningful reform.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives last fall passed a bill that would make it a federal felony to live in the U.S. illegally. It also calls for building a wall along our porous border with Mexico.

Now the Senate, also controlled by Republicans, is taking up the issue, offering its own weaker bill that would give the current 11 million illegals a chance for citizenship. It would also, with the blessing of President Bush, expand a guest worker program to 400,000 such workers each year.

And just how many of those “guest workers” do you think will return home?

The U.S. working class is already under siege from “free trade” agreements that have sapped millions of jobs from our economy. The nation’s trade deficit with China alone has reached monstrous proportions, with projections of even more imbalance to come.

Coupled with that drain, U.S. business interests and liberals in general continue to beat the drum that says that illegal immigrants only take jobs that U.S. citizens don’t want. Here’s the reality: They are taking jobs that U.S. workers won’t perform for the current rate of pay, or under conditions that skirt established labor laws. Raise wages and benefits, and workers will take those jobs. Isn’t that classic capitalist economics?

It’s time to debunk theory that millions of illegal immigrant workers are somehow beneficial to the American economy. They are not what made this country great – that was millions of legal immigrant workers, who came here lawfully and chose to make this their new homeland. They didn’t sneak across the border, take up residence and jobs,, and then expect the government to acquiesce to their presence.

Proponents of turning a blind eye to widespread illegal immigration are foresaking what’s best for the country in the long term, in order to make a quick buck or get another vote. They are putting us on track for a speedier race to the bottom, in terms of middle-class living standards.

There is a limit to how many illegals we can absorb.