Issue date: 1/24/10 Section: News and Opinion

Many of us see them at least once a day or week. They do the menial labor that many American's have decided they are above and deserve better, although in the recent economic downturn some of us have reconsidered said jobs. Not all of them, but most of them don't even speak more than a thousand words of English. My biggest problem is that they don't pay taxes. No, I'm not talking about Obama cabinet officials. I'm talking illegal immigrants. Illegals have flooded the U.S. by the amount of 12 million or more. That's close to the world population of Jews. Over 10 million immigrants have arrived since 2000 and more than half of those are guessed to be illegal.

How could such a vast amount of immigrants breached our borders? In 1924 the U.S. Border Patrol was created by Congress. Legal immigration at the time was based on a quota assigned to each nationality. In 1965, this system was replaced by one built to unite families and attract skilled labor. With this change came a shift from European immigrants to ones from Asia and Latin America. A major change to legislation came in 1986 with the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Two principles were built into this law: amnesty and enforcement. Three million immigrants were granted legal status because they had lived in the U.S. since January of 1982 or they had done ninety days of agricultural work between 1985 and 1986. A large part of the applications are said to have been fraudulent! The enforcement side of this law prohibited the hiring and harboring of illegal immigrants but the lack of proper funding hurt the ability of law enforcement as it still does today.

In 1990 the IRCA was further expanded and the amount of available visas increased by forty percent. 1996 saw another bill that sought to expand the amount of border patrol and INS agents and began construction of the border fence for San Diego. It also gave the power to local law officials to enforce immigration laws. Several smaller amnesties were passed during this time allowing the legalization of over one and half million illegal immigrants.

Half a decade later, America witnessed the destruction of two towers and the lives of three thousand citizens were claimed in the name of radical Islam. The hijackers were on expired student visas. Remember a couple statistics back where the amount of visas were increased by forty percent? And did I mention that lack of funding has pervaded the enforcement system since the very beginning? I have a feeling both of those factors played a major role in the terrorists' successful attacks. This only grabbed the attention of the Congress in 2006 and 2007 though when several different bills were drafted by both chambers but were ultimately pushed aside. It's very disturbing that Congress could so easily pass the Patriot Act which infringed upon the rights of American citizens before they would address the bigger problem of how these terrorists came to be in the United States in the first place.

Continued...

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