Getting Beyond the 'A-Word'
June 20, 2005

By TAMAR JACOBY

Reasonable people can, and do, disagree over whether more immigrants would be good for the U.S. But the reddest of rags in the eyes of immigration skeptics is "rewarding" those who have broken the law by entering the country illegally. Indeed, the restrictionists have been so successful in leveling this accusation, that the A-word—amnesty—is all but universally accepted as one of the graver moral affronts of our day.

It was no surprise, then, that the new immigration reform legislation sponsored by Sens. John McCain and Ted Kennedy has been greeted by a scolding A-word chorus. Every immigration reform proposal of the past decade has met with a similar barrage. Along with the two senators and their House counterparts, Jim Kolbe, Jeff Flake and Luis Gutierrez, President Bush himself is said to be guilty of advocating amnesty—and all he proposed was that illegal immigrants be allowed to work for a few years before being sent back to their home countries.

In principle, the naysayers are right: No one wants to reward lawbreaking or encourage future transgression. Not only is this morally distasteful, but, practically, history shows that amnesty is no solution. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act unapologetically expunged the records of three million illegal immigrants. Yet it failed to deliver the control it promised, and only a few years later, several million new unauthorized foreigners had collected in the U.S.

The conundrum is how to reassert the law—how to retake control of the border and restore legality to the American workplace—given the fact that several sectors of our economy now depend on 11 million unauthorized workers. It's a difficult moral issue, and politicians far more conservative than Sens. McCain and Kennedy are struggling with it. As Sen. John Cornyn put it last month, "This is the hardest question. We cannot simply ... round up and remove millions of people... . Securing our nation's borders at the expense of weakening our economy ... is not an acceptable alternative."
National security, too, demands that we come to terms with the existence of these 11 million workers. As is, they live entirely beyond the reach of authorities. Undocumented or, worse, falsely documented, they have undergone no background checks. We know nothing about their pasts or, in some cases, criminal records. Moreover, the underground world they inhabit—controlled by criminal syndicates with expertise in helping foreigners travel through the U.S. undetected by the law—is the perfect milieu for international terrorists.

Immigration naysayers don't like to admit it, but the fact is that today's immigration reformers—the president and conservatives like Sen. Cornyn, but also, increasingly, liberals once concerned primarily with immigrant rights—are driven by a desire to restore order to this broken system. Their goal is replace the old "nudge-nudge wink-wink" arrangement of unrealistic laws, intermittently enforced, with an honest, airtight system: realistic laws, enforced to the letter. The problem is we can't build this new structure on a rotten foundation. We must first eliminate the underground economy and find a way to deal with illegal immigrants already here.

But how? What do we do if we can't send them home—and yet we recognize the compelling moral case against amnesty?

The compromise solution in the McCain-Kennedy legislation is more like probation than amnesty: not a free pass or an automatic pardon, but a set of conditions that illegal immigrants must meet if they are to earn legal status. They must register with the government. They must pay all back taxes and a $2,000 fine, then undergo a series of background checks and fulfill a prospective work requirement—six more years on the job in the U.S.—before they can even apply for a green card. At that point, they must prove they have been studying English and have mastered the rudiments of U.S. history and government. And then, when they do apply, they must go to the "back of the line."

It's not a perfect solution: even probation may strike some Americans as too generous and Sen. Cornyn and other reformers may yet improve upon the formula. Still, if ever there were a case where the perfect was the enemy of the good, this is it. We need to solve this—for our sake. Besides, none of the other plans put forward so far would take care of the sizeable number of illegal immigrants who, after a decade or more in this country, have put down roots, buying homes and businesses and giving birth to children who are U.S. citizens. They no longer see the countries they left as "home"—and nothing we do is likely to make them return. Punitive demands that they go back will only drive them further underground.

As the failed 1986 legislation taught us, merely cleaning up the old mess—eliminating the underground economy—will be worthless unless it is accompanied by a new way of doing things in the future. But the McCain-Kennedy bill also aims to take care of that by creating a new, airtight legal system: a guest worker program big enough to provide the labor we need to keep the economy growing, combined with tough enforcement measures to make sure that workers use those channels and no others.

Among the bill's stiffer enforcement provisions: dramatically increased resources for implementation all across the system; more technology and better intelligence on the border; an innovative method to ensure that employers who hire immigrants comply with the law; and much steeper penalties for those who break the rules, whether employers or employees.

There can be no mistake: The reform package taking shape in Washington is not just going to be market-friendly—it's also going to be tough as nails. The two aren't mutually exclusive. On the contrary. Unlike our current immigration quotas, which are so unrealistic as to be unenforceable, a more honest, market-based system offers the only hope of restoring the rule of law—and that's not possible without a one-time transitional measure to eliminate the underground economy. Immigration skeptics can call it anything they like. But it's hard to see how "amnesty"—with all its connotations of laxity and lawlessness—is the right word to describe such a demanding bargain.

Ms. Jacoby is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

©2005 The Wall Street Journal

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