"Amnesty" or "plea bargain?"

Let's get one side issue out of the way before starting: Rector consistently uses "amnesty" almost as a synonym for citizenship; in fact, he uses the word "amnesty" forty-one times in this article, starting with the first word of the title.

"Amnesty" means a general pardon prior to trial or conviction. A pardon is "the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty : remission of punishment."

• In law, when the president pardons someone, the offense is erased as if it had never occurred;.

  According to Black's Law Dictionary, "it releases punishment and blots out the existence of guilt, so that in the eyes of the law, the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense."

• When the IRS has a "tax amnesty," you are allowed to repay back taxes with no penalty whatsoever, often even without interest;
• When states or cities declare "firearm amnesties," the same holds true: you can turn in anything, and you won't be arrested or prosecuted;
• When President Carter and Congress declared an amnesty in 1977 of Vietnam draft-dodgers, they were allowed to return to the United States with no charges of any kind.

An amnesty means the crime is "blotted out," as if it never occurred. But in fact, under Hagel-Martinez, the illegals are punished; the crime of illegal entry is not blotted out: they must admit guilt and pay a substantial fine.

The word for the executive reducing a sentence already imposed on someone already convicted is clemency, or perhaps commutation. But what we're really discussing is when a person voluntarily admits guilt in exchange for a reduced sentence. The term for that is a plea bargain.

But I reckon "plea bargain" isn't enraging enough to create a mass, emotional uprising... hence they've settled upon "amnesty." It may be completely wrongly used, but I suppose the ends must justify the means.

Cost in perspective

First, a bit of background of our own. The current U.S. budget is about $2.6 trillion; so an increase of $46 billion at some point in the future -- the first $10 billion about six or seven years from now, the $30 billion (assuming it happens, see below) about 10-15 years after that -- amounts to 1.7% of the budget... and could be paid for by just a slight reduction in any of a number of other areas.

Second, Rector clearly assumes (from the fact that he doesn't even mention it) that we will do absolutely nothing to get a handle on spending on entitlement programs over the next 16 to 22 years. This in itself is a rather breathtaking assumption: since the Heritage Foundation itself has recommended a number of things we could do -- the easiest and most obvious being shifting Medicare from a defined benefit to a defined contribution program -- one must conclude that Robert Rector believes that the Heritage Foundation will have no influence whatsoever on American economic policies... a stunning admission of impotence from a formerly influential body!

From A To-Do List Before Spending Hits Tipping Point, by Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner, December 20th, 2005:

Of course, to really control Medicare spending, lawmakers will have to fundamentally change the program. It's time to design a new system based on personal choice, market competition and light regulation. Such a system should be a "defined contribution" system, not the "defined benefit" system we have now.

That means the government would agree to contribute a certain amount to fund each beneficiary's coverage. This would create a market for private health plans that would compete for customers by offering attractive benefit packages. It also would let seniors keep their pre-retirement health care plan if they're happy with it or design new coverage options tailored to their needs.

Such a defined-contribution plan also would allow lawmakers to control costs. Defined-benefit programs don't work because they're like a blank check -- each new medical advance creates a new government requirement. A defined-contribution plan would allow seniors to enjoy those advances without sticking Uncle Sam with the big bills.

Several states have already begun experimenting with a defined contribution Medicare plan, rather than a defined benefit plan... notably Florida and South Carolina, two states with very large numbers of retirees. And according to yet another Heritage Foundation paper, these state reforms -- made possible by the federal waiver system for state experimentation pushed through Congress by President Bush -- are expected to dramatically reduce Medicare costs, starting almost immediately and into the future.

From the same article I quoted above:

There are plenty of places to make cuts right now. For example:

* The Congressional Budget Office has published a "Budget Options" book identifying $140 billion in potential cuts.

* The federal government spends $23 billion annually on silly special interest projects such as grants to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and efforts to combat teenage "goth" culture in Blue Springs, Mo.

* Washington spends $60 billion annually on corporate welfare, versus $43 billion on homeland security.

And that's just for starters.

Right. So if we could make just 20% of the cuts envisioned in each of these areas, that's $41.2 billion per year right there. The Medicare changes that the Heritage Foundation proposes, along with Health Savings Accounts, would save tens of billions of dollars in Medicare costs almost immediately, a savings that will continue to rise with every passing year.

Potential spending cuts dwarf any increased cost from a guest-worker program or normalizing illegals already here... a cost that even Rector admits would be at least partially mitigated by increased tax revenues from the newly-legalized former illegals.

So Rector's objection is a non-issue from the beginning. The real issue is general control of spending: if we do that, any increase in spending related to illegals made legal will be easily absorbed; if we do not gain control of spending, then immigration won't make any difference -- we're sunk anyway.

Convictions make convicts

But even more than that, the Heritage study demonstrates a rather colossal disdain for the ability of new legal immigrants to support their own families. For example, Rector notes that when adult immigrants (legal or otherwise) become citizens, they are allowed to bring both their parents to the United States as legal immigrants; some of those parents will themselves eventually become citizens.

He estimates, probably not unreasonably, that about 10% of those immigrants' parents will eventually come here and become citizens (though he assumes that every adult immigrant has two living parents who will want to come here, which is not reasonable at all; but let that lie). Thus, he guesses that legalizing 10 million immigrants will eventually produce 20 million parents coming here from the old country, of whom two million will eventually become citizens.

How many does he estimate will immediately go on welfare then? Oh, approximately two million:

If ten million current illegal immigrants were granted amnesty and citizenship under CIRA, as many as twenty million foreign born parents would be given the right to immigrate to the U.S. Once in the U.S., the immigrant parents would receive social services and government funded medical care, much of it paid for through the Medicaid disproportionate share program. [Note, not "might receive" but "would receive." -- the Mgt.]

These immigrant parents coming to the U.S. would also be eligible to apply for citizenship themselves. On attaining citizenship, most would become eligible for benefits from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid programs, at an average cost of over $18,000 per person per year. While it is true that the language require­ments of the citizenship test would serve as a bar­rier to immigrant parents becoming citizens, the tests are not very difficult and the financial rewards of citizenship would be very great. If only ten per­cent of the parents of those receiving amnesty under CIRA became citizens and enrolled in SSI and Medicaid, the extra costs to government would be over $30 billion per year.

What exactly is Rector saying? Medicare is available to every senior or disabled person, regardless of income; but he is talking here about Medicaid:

Medicaid is available only to certain low-income individuals and families who fit into an eligibility group that is recognized by federal and state law.

In other words, Medicaid -- unlike Medicare -- is a welfare program. So is SSI, by the way, another federal payment made only to low-income citizens and legally resident aliens, brought to us courtesy President Richard Nixon.

Perhaps I'm not being exactly fair to Mr. Rector. Maybe he's not saying that 10% of the parents will become citizens, and of those who do, 100% will immediately go on welfare. Maybe he means that 40% or 50% will become citizens, and of those, only 10% will go on welfare.

How many does he think will become citizens, with or without welfare? He doesn't say; nor does he give us any reason to believe that the intersection is 10% of all immigrating parents of immigrants... despite the fact that his entire calculation critically depends upon this estimate.

Perhaps I can be pardoned -- or granted clemency -- for believing that in fact, Rector by and large assumes that the only reason these parents of immigrants would ever become citizens themselves is to suck up welfare benefits; it fits the tone of the rest of his piece.

I think it very plausible that only 10% of elderly parents of adult immigrants might eventually become citizens themselves; but the idea that every last one of them can't wait to jump aboard the "welfare wagon" is insulting, offensive, and absurd..

For one point, you're an "adult" in this country at age 18; in many Third-World countries, people have children at a much younger age. Thus, a great many of those parents brought in by immigrants will be in their forties and fifties and used to hard work. Does Rector think they loafed their time away in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvadore, Armenia, and Ukraine? Why wouldn't a substantial portion of these parents find work themselves?

May immigrants come here and start their own businesses: stores, restaurants, meat markets, dance instruction, computer software... who knows? Family-owned small businesses have become the backbone of the American economy, and the fastest growing segment thereof. Such businesses often hire the whole family, and nobody is on welfare.

And does Rector assume from the outset that all attempts at assimilation will fail, that nobody among the immigrants is responsible and shares the American ethic of paying your own way and supporting your own family -- even your parents when they get old?

Does Rector thus casually assume that current immigrants are morally inferior to all the earlier generations of immigrants -- possibly even including his own parents or grandparents?

The cost of inflammatory rhetoric

This is the level to which this discussion has degenerated, where even respectable and respected institutions like the Heritage Foundation begin any discussion with a hidden, anti-immigrant bias, anger at all these foreigners coming into "our" America, and the assumption that they only come to suck up our welfare and live on Easy Street.

Good God, we deserve better from that side of the debate.

We desperately need continuing input from those for whom border security is paramount:

• We need pressure to build a real wall;
• We need more money and manpower offered for border security;
• We need much harsher penalties for employers hiring illegals once they have legal guest workers available instead;
• We need guarantees that we won't repeat the disaster of Simpson-Mazzoli in 1986 (signed by Ronald Reagan, by the way).

But when the security-side of the debate abandons the field, refusing even to engage in the effort of making a marginally good bill into a pretty good one, preferring a one-sided bill that cannot pass to a balanced bill that will... then our country -- and their own cause of border security -- is ill-served indeed.