The solution to the problem of illegal immigration is not complicated. It can be accomplished in three easy-to-understand steps.
First, build a double-layer security fence along our entire southern border to stop the flood of illegal immigration. Fences work, which is why President Obama recently reinforced the security fence around the White House. When a border fence was installed in the San Diego sector, illegal immigration plunged by 90%.
Fences are such an obvious part of any solution that even Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Tunisia are putting them up to protect themselves from the most murderous elements of Islam.
Let’s not hear any nonsense about this being impossible. We built the Empire State Building in 17 months in the middle of the Great Depression, and threw up the Golden Gate Bridge while we were at it. We built the Hoover Dam and excavated the Panama Canal. It’s a gross insult to the American can-do spirit for anybody to say it cannot be done.
Secondly, use E-Verify for everything. E-Verify is a massive database of Social Security numbers. If someone has a legitimate Social Security card, his name and number will be in this database, and it can be checked literally in a matter of seconds.
We should use E-Verify for jobs, welfare, and education. Anyone who applies for a job must be checked for eligibility using E-Verify. Anyone applying for a taxpayer-funded welfare benefit of any kind, including food stamps and subsidized housing, must be checked for eligibility. No E-Verify, no welfare. And E-Verify also ought to be used to check eligibility for taxpayer-funded education at all levels.
Thirdly, if we do these two things, illegal aliens currently in the United States will solve another problem for us through self-repatriation. If they can’t get jobs here, can’t get welfare here, and can’t get a taxpayer-funded education here, they will return home where they can pursue all those things.
Using the money we save in welfare costs, including health care, we can establish a fund to help with the transportation costs of returning these folks and their intact families to their homelands, their neighborhoods, and their communities.
There would simply be no need to round up 11 to 30 million illegal aliens and send them home - which nobody is talking about doing anyway - because they will do that themselves. They will go where they’ve got a shot at getting jobs and welfare, and for most, that will mean returning home. Self-repatriation will solve the problem of what we do with the illegals that are already here.
And it works. Alabama, before an activist judge intruded, instituted common-sense immigration reforms, using E-Verify for jobs, welfare, and education, and it worked instantly. Classrooms emptied out virtually overnight and jobs for American workers opened up immediately. Meat-packing plants had American citizens lined up around the block for jobs which had been held by illegal aliens just days before.
So the problem of illegal immigration is eminently solvable. All we need to do is to actually enforce the laws that are on the books and use technology which is already available. What we lack is the will, not the way.
