Comprehensive Immigration Reform – What Would President Lincoln Have Likely Said?

One hundred and fifty years ago President Abraham Lincoln made what is one of the most momentous speeches ever made by any leader of any country, the Gettysburg Address.

President Lincoln delivered the address at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery at Gettysburg. It consisted of fewer than 300 words and took mere minutes to deliver, yet its eloquence has made this speech one of the most remembered speeches of all time. It ended with these words:

…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The purpose of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the all-encompassing body of laws pertaining to the admission and presence of aliens in the United States, was to protect the lives and jobs of American citizens. This is certainly commensurate with the concept of a government that was “…of the people, by the people, for the people…”

Today the advocates for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) ignore the plight of struggling American workers and their families, but are quick to make assertions that it is compassionate to enable unknown millions of illegal aliens to be granted lawful status and ultimately a “pathway to United States citizenship.” They ignore that there would be absolutely no way to interview what might well turn out to be tens of millions of illegal aliens to make the most superficial attempt to verify the information contained in their applications. There would be no resources to conduct field investigations in conjunction with this massive amnesty program.

This process would violate all of the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and would undermine national security and public safety.

Advocates for S.744 blithely ignore that record numbers of American and lawful immigrant workers are unemployed and underemployed and that dumping millions of competing foreign workers into that overflowing labor pool of Americans living below the poverty line would make it all but impossible for impoverished American families to climb out of poverty. It would all but eradicate the American Dream for American families.

On August 7, 2012, CAPS posted one of my articles, “60 Minutes” Report Shows American Families Hiding in the Shadows. It focused on the plight of the American workers who can no longer support themselves and their children. My commentary was predicated on a heart-breaking report that aired on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday, July 29, 2012 entitled, “Hard Times Generation: Families living in cars.”

Also ignored by advocates for CIR is that increasing the number of foreign workers in the United States would increase the remittances, money wired from the United States to the countries from which those workers came. Last year, these remittances totaled an estimated $200 billion.

America's middle class was created and nurtured by the effective enforcement of the immigration laws by the Labor Department in the years before World War II which shielded American workers from unfair foreign competition. Alan Greenspan has called for a total reversal of such measures and made his position clear when testifying before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee at a hearing on April 30, 2009. His prepared testimony stated in part:

The second bonus (to greatly increasing visas for high tech workers) would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.

S.744, which appears to be dead for this session of Congress, would have acceded to Greenspan's demands, tripling the number of H-1B visas for high tech workers, and, for the first time, providing the spouses and adult children of H-1B visas holders with Employment Authorization Documents which would have given them as much right to work in the United States as an American worker desperate to support himself (herself) and a family.

Clearly this would not be consistent with President Lincoln's dream of a United States of America that, first and foremost, makes its own citizens – of every race, religion and ethnicity – the priority of the government of the United States.