Legalization with Work Permits (Amnesty) Has Powerful Friends
01/15/2014
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House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte appears to have suffered some direct hits after his recent declaration of support for legalization on Spanish-language television.

The Daily Caller quoted Goodlatte from his recent performance (Goodlatte reverses statement on amnesty, again, 1/13/14):

“I see no reason why we can’t also have an agreement that shows how people who are not lawfully here can be able to be lawfully here — able to live here, work here,” Goodlatte told the pro-immigration interviewing on the Spanish-language TV channel, Telemundo.

Since foreigners enter unlawfully to grab American jobs, not get US citizenship, rewarding them with immediate work permits, aka legalization, gives them what they came for. Therefore:

Legalization (with work permits) IS Amnesty.

Legalization also would harm American workers, 22 million of whom are jobless, by flooding the employment market with millions of formerly unlawful workers, newly equipped with work permits. To that point, Senator Jeff Sessions remarked, “They’ll be able to immediately apply for much better jobs than they currently have.”

As we know from Econ 101, the economic model of supply and demand informs us that an excess of something (e.g. labor) decreases its value.

Along that line, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Senate amnesty/immigration-increase bill would reduce average wages in America for 12 years, increase unemployment for seven years and reduce per-capita gross national product growth for more than 25 years.

Goodlatte has been tapdancing his legalization declaration back somewhat, writing on his website that he is “opposed to amnesty” but the A-word has become strangely squishy when used by politicians.

Below, foreigners demand amnesty in their language (Spanish).

Another man voicing his self-proclaimed solutions to the problems of immigration anarchy is Lou Dobbs, whose CNN show had excellent straight news reporting on the topic. But the man himself suffers from excessive belief in his own brilliance in creating political solutions, such as his recommendation for a tripling of legal immigration a few years back.

These days, Dobbs is flacking his new book, and he is quite expansive in explaining his fixes for immigration, namely legalization. Giving the lawbreakers work permits, not citizenship, would be a fair compromise — that’s the Dobbsian prescription.

Dobbs appeared on CBN recently and announced his solutions to end immigration chaos (and don’t forget to buy the book!).

DOBBS: (starting around 3:56) “Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has already created a program to solve our illegal immigration crisis; it’s not amnesty as designed by the Democratic senators, it’s not amnesty as desired by this president, but it is legal status, it is a solution and we haven’t had a solution in this country on illegal immigration because the Democrats want the whole hog, they do not want to compromise; they want in its entirety amnesty, and that is the resolution, amnesty without border security and Bob Goodlatte, the Republicans in the House of Representatives are now the de facto leaders on the issue and are this close, if the leaders of the Republican Party have the guts to solving the problem.”

 

Memo to Mr. Brilliant: rewarding lawbreakers only creates an incentive for more of the undesired behavior.

Do we give squatters the deed to the property they are occupying? No.

In the same way, it makes no sense to reward illegal aliens with the object of their desire: work permits giving unlimited access to all American employment. The real solution is punishment, not payoffs.

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