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Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: Immigration Bill
Doesn’t Secure the Border
James Carafano
April 29, 2013
Must
Washington fix our broken
southern border? You bet.
Will
the comprehensive immigration
reform bill help? You bet it won’t.
The
number one flaw of the bill is
it starts by giving amnesty to the unlawfully present population in the
United
States. As soon as the bill passes, those in the country contrary to
U.S.
immigration law are granted status to stay.
Amnesty
immediately creates an
incentive for illegal border crossings and overstays. Thus, the bill’s
strategy
would drive up the cost of securing the border. To make matters worse,
the
draft law states that anyone who was present in the U.S. before 2012
qualifies—creating massive opportunity for fraud, since there is no
proof
required that applicants have been here for several years.
While
supporters of the bill
trumpet its “border security” features, in reality, the law delivers
nothing
new—other than the promise of spending a lot more money and running up
our
debt.
The
bill trashes fiscal discipline,
exploiting “a loophole in the Budget Control Act (BCA) that allows
Congress to
spend more than allowed under the spending caps adopted in 2011.”
In
other words, Washington is
willing to draft a bounced check to justify an amnesty bill.
To
make matters worse, there is
very little likelihood that that Americans will get much for the next
border
security buck spent.
The
Secretary of Homeland Security
has repeatedly stated that our borders “have never been more secure.”
In the
past five years, the White House has never asked for this additional
border
security funding. Yet, this bill lavishes billions of additional
spending on
the department with no clear requirements on how the money is spent. At
least
$2 billion could legitimately be labeled the Secretary’s slush fund.
Supporters
of the bill trumpet
requirements to “certify” border security, yet its standards are in
some ways
weaker than existing law. Present law requires gaining “operational
control” of
the whole border, while this bill sets standards only for “high-risk”
sectors.
Since smuggling trails shift to where the security is not, even if the
standards were attained in one area, the traffic would just go
somewhere else.
In
addition, the Department of
Homeland Security has been trying unsuccessfully to define credible
metrics for
border security since 2004. Even if it had effective “triggers,” that
does not
guarantee a secure border. Border crossing conditions constantly
change. Even
if the goal is achieved, there is no guarantee it will stay that way…
Read
the rest of the article at The
Heritage Foundation
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