Border control is the first step to reform

As Congress recently debated amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants in America, the national debt stood at over $8 trillion. The war on terrorism was nearing its five-year anniversary. Education, housing, labor, commerce, agriculture, environmental protection all were pegged for budget cuts. Undecided veterans benefits claims were stacked nearly a million deep. In all, 141 federal programs were poised for reduction or elimination in the next fiscal year.

Today, illegal immigrants are poised to prove the degree to which they have filled into the cracks of the U.S. economy by walking out on their jobs, hoping to paralyze the restaurant industry, meat-packing plants, hotels and construction sites that lured them to America in the first place.

The "guest-worker" program debated last spring in Washington was a Band Aid on a sucking chest wound, a quick-fix approach that we know from history won't work. The main lesson we have from the last amnesty, in 1986, is that the long-term cost of serving newly legalized immigrants can be enormous. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 gave 2.8 million illegal immigrants a free pass. Approximately 142,000 dependents soon followed. Ten years later, the average immigrant who received amnesty made $9,000 a year and had a seventh-grade education. Meanwhile, the taxpayer cost of providing government services to that group alone is estimated at $78 billion. Millions more illegal immigrants have poured into America since the amnesty because one important step was not taken: real border control.

Thus came the brutal "coyote" industry of human trafficking, which has led hundreds to their deaths in the deserts or to be stuffed by the dozens into suburban drop houses with no place to go. Nearly 4 million are estimated to have immigrated illegally into the United States since 2000 alone.

If the 1986 model is applied to current guest-worker proposals, amnesty will cost about $312 billion over the next 20 years, at which time the problem will still be with us and the money spent. That $312 billion would go a long way toward improving access to VA health care, providing education to low-income American children, fortifying the future of Social Security and, lest we forget, toward securing the borders and enforcing immigration laws already on the books.

The American dream is impossible without a robust naturalization process that includes English language skills, allegiance to our laws, denouncement of our enemies, and an ultimate expectation of U.S. citizenship. Since the early 20th century, The American Legion has stood by that principle. Of course, deportation of millions who crossed the border illegally - so many of them desperate to build better lives for their families - is unwise, inhumane and probably impossible.

It is a complicated problem whose ultimate solution may be years away. Border security, not amnesty, must be the first step.

The American Legion has long supported legal immigration, the naturalization process, the adoption of a shared language, and the lawful route to U.S. citizenship. That support is built on the hope that future generations, regardless of their origins, have the opportunity to live out the American dream. The granting of amnesty eviscerates the process - rejecting laws built on the protection of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.

Amnesty without an expectation of assimilation all but guarantees that newly legalized immigrants and their families will stay stuck at the bottom of the income and education ladder, caught behind a language barrier and culture that is growing ever more impenetrable. The world possesses no nation so welcoming as America. But ours is not a house without rules, nor can it be, certainly not in a time of war.

The answer resides somewhere between the deportation of 12 million people and the declaration that everyone in the world, regardless of nationality or intent, has a God-given right to live here. The answer has yet to come fully into focus, but we know from 1986 that amnesty without border control only fuels more illegal immigration, deferring our nation's most imposing problem to future generations. Nothing short of walking out on your job is as great a violation of the American dream.