Illegal Immigrants Shouldn't be Allowed to Stay until Citizenship is Granted

Over the last few months most conservatives have quite naturally been distracted by Barack Obama's frightening incompetence, his elephantine spending, and his zealous attempts to swallow as much of the private sector as the government beast can stuff down its gaping maw. But while the cat's away, the mice will play. The little feet you may have been hearing pitter-patter back into the public square? They belong to advocates of amnesty for illegal aliens. Oh, they don't necessarily call it that. They call it comprehensive immigration reform, earned legalization, a path to citizenship -- but, it all amounts to the same thing: rewarding people for breaking our laws.

1) It will only encourage more illegal immigrants to come here. We've already had a "one time only" amnesty deal for illegals. It occurred during the Reagan Administration and the idea was supposed to be that we'd allow the illegals who were here to become citizens and we'd simultaneously beef up security to try to keep the problem from occurring again. Well, guess what? That very bipartisan sounding compromise didn't work. To the contrary, it failed miserably. So why in the world would anyone who actually wants to stop illegal immigration want to try something that has already been proven to be counterproductive? We have far more illegals in America today than we did when the "one time" amnesty went through. Do we want 20 million illegals here when the next amnesty goes through? 30 million? Are we going to be accused of racism if we say the next huge wave of illegals shouldn't be given citizenship either? Where does it end?

2) Illegal aliens take jobs from American citizens. The economy stinks. American citizens are out of work. People are going out every day looking for jobs to support their family and they're coming home empty handed. Meanwhile, there are illegal aliens in this country holding jobs that American citizens would otherwise have. "Oh, but those are jobs Americans won't do!" There's no such thing. There's no job in this country that couldn't be filled if every illegal disappeared tomorrow -- but, here's the catch: the crooked business owners who are knowingly hiring the illegals might have to pay what the job is worth instead of hiring people who let everyone else pay their health care, pay their car insurance, and pay their share of the taxes.

3) We're importing poverty. It's no secret that the majority of illegals are uneducated manual laborers. In fact, that's supposed to be one of their selling points, isn't it? Don't advocates of amnesty say we need illegals to do the dirty, hard, manual labor that "Americans won't do?" But even if that were true, which it’s not, people with very limited skills often turn into liabilities for a society as they age. There aren't a lot of people picking oranges and scrubbing floors at fifty years old. In other words, in order to help crooked business owners get cheap labor today, the rest of society has to be burdened with people who are going to cost society far more than they ever pay in taxes. Are American taxpayers so unburdened that we want to actually bring in even more people to carry on their backs?