There are horror stories, both fact and fiction, revealing problems facing undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. No doubt many are subject to blackmail and others forced into prostitution or sweat shops to pay for their trip across the border. Law enforcement contends that fear of deportation prevents many from assisting in solving neighborhood crimes. Moreover, farmers have complained for years that deporting illegal immigrants affects their ability to get food to market. Recently, it has been argued that children of illegal immigrants should not be punished for the crimes of their parents.
This word "undocumented immigrant" - what does that mean? The Webster dictionary describes an immigrant as someone who comes to a country with the intent to take up permanent residence, and undocumented means he did not fill out any papers to get here. An "Alien," on the other hand, is a foreign born resident who has not been naturalized and is still a subject or citizen of a foreign country; accordingly, we might conclude an undocumented immigrant is really a nice way of saying "illegal alien".
If we travel to a foreign country, it is certain someone will eventually check to see if we are carrying a passport and visa. We know that failure to produce documentation will probably lead to confinement in a foreign jail. Accordingly, we expect foreigners to respect our laws the same as they would expect us to respect theirs.
The so-called "Trust Act," AB 1081, introduced by Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Assemblyman, has three Co-authors in the State Senate and eight co-authors in the State Assembly which includes a couple of local boys Bill Monning and Luis Alejo. This bill, passed by both house of the State Legislature, currently awaits Governor Jerry Brown's signature later this month. Incredibly, the thrust of this legislation encourages local authorities to ignore an agreement with the Obama administration allowing federal immigration agents to review fingerprints under the "Secure Communities program" in order to track down and pick up every deportable immigrant arrested by local police. Instead, it is proposed that, after paying fines or resolving some sort of "minor" offense, a perpetrator should be turned loose without waiting for any sort of review by federal immigration authorities.
We can conclude, therefore, that it would be o.k. to continue violating our country's immigration laws so long as these illegal aliens refrain from killing someone, or otherwise engaging in a major felony. Instead of encouraging local law enforcement to ignore immigration laws, one might hope these brilliant Legislators would work with Federal Legislators to revise existing Federal Guest Worker laws to solve the growing problems of illegal immigration which has become a national disgrace.
The Washington Post published an article by Krissan Williams (June 27, 2007) concerning Jeffrey West an American who lives in Texas but runs an office in Monterrey, Mexico. For $160 he will do all the visa paper work required by the Federal Guest Worker Program "H-2A" for those foreign persons who wish to work in the United States. At that time he was maintaining a secure data base of more than 20,000 Mexican men and women who were/are working in the U.S.
The up side is all these workers are documented and legal in accordance to provisions of the U.S. Immigration laws. The down side is that H-2A requires employers to provide living accommodations and transportation for those workers who are unable to return each day to Mexico. Some might recall the H-2A "Bracero" program of the 1960's in which thousands of field hands worked in California. But the restrictions of this particular program simply will not work for many of California's undocumented workers particularly those who have lived here for years and have raised a family in their own home. Even so, there are other guest worker programs on the books. The H-1B visa and L-1 visa programs have documented one million guest workers in the U.S. and that was in 2007.
I hasten to add that encouraging law enforcement to ignore the fact someone resides here in violation of our country's immigration laws merely because he did not commit a "major" crime is not a solution to anything.