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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Captain Jack who wrote (12132)	12/22/2001 1:12:32 PM
From: joseph krinsky	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Illegals with legal rights Dan Seligman, Forbes Global, 01.07.02 In America illegal aliens have rights, benefits, protection against discrimination, and op-ed cheerleaders. Is it time for a change? Can the U.S. control its borders? It is a painfully relevant question because several of the 19 mass murderers of Sept. 11 were in the U.S. illegally, and the one indictee for this crime was initially nailed only on immigration charges. Unfortunately, the stopping of Zacarias Moussaoui was something of a fluke. Efforts to prevent illegal immigration in the U.S. today are ignored, underfunded, openly violated or certifiably feckless. And there is stubborn resistance to change, even as estimates of the total illegal population keep soaring. The Immigration & Naturalization Service's estimate that there are 5 million to 6 million illegals in the U.S. is disputed by the Census Bureau, which says that the total has to be about 8 million. Indeed, Census speaks respectfully of a study done by the demographer Andrew Sum and his colleagues at Northeastern University, which came up with a plausible count that approaches 11 million. Looniness abounds. Many New Yorkers rolled their eyes recently over news accounts indicating that the City University of New York (CUNY) was giving a break on tuition to illegal aliens. It appears that illegals who live in the state and are studying at CUNY are counted as genuine New Yorkers and therefore pay only $1,600 a semester, versus $3,400 for students living in the U.S. legally but commuting from outside the state. Contributing to one's sense of unreality about this is that any such preference for locally based illegal aliens over out-of-state Americans violates federal law. In the wake of Sept. 11, CUNY is suddenly deciding to comply with the law. Hallelujah! But even this decision is meeting resistance, and New York's new mayor sounds like a resister. Michael Bloomberg said in a radio interview on Nov. 19: "People who are undocumented do not have to worry about city government going to the federal government. We will provide the services, whether they are healthcare services or education for their children or anything else we can do, regardless of the federal government's rightly trying to make sense out of our immigration policy." Illegals have lots of fans, including many in business and agriculture (who like their low labor costs) and in the liberal media (which sees them as heroic underdogs). Maybe that's why the law barring employment of illegals can be so broadly ignored. An especially surreal detail of U.S. law is the "guidance" issued in 1999 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that bars employment discrimination against the illegals. No, that's not a typo. The EEOC is telling us that people who shouldn't be here in the first place and shouldn't be employed if they are here are eligible for back-pay awards if the employer is caught discriminating against them. When illegal aliens manage to have their children born in the U.S., the children are of course citizens, which entitles the family to assorted welfare benefits. The overextended INS Border Patrol continues to turn back illegal aliens when they are caught trying to sneak across the Mexican or Canadian border. (In the 2001 fiscal year, 1.2 million were caught.) But if they make it across the border, they can generally assume that nobody will be looking for them. Indeed, they don't necessarily have to get across the border. If a patrol stops them, they can ask for a formal hearing; of those who ask, many are released "on their own recognizance"--that is, on a promise to show up at the hearing. Recent testimony before the Senate Investigations Subcommittee established that roughly 90% of those released on their own recognizance do not show up--and no effort is made to track them down. The situation is similar for the 40% or so of illegal aliens who enter the country legally, on temporary or student visas, but become illegal when they ignore the visa restrictions and continue to hang around. Like some of the 19 terrorists. forbes.com