Agents union slams 'amnesty'

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The largest chapter of the National Border Patrol Council says an immigration proposal being debated in the Senate is "misguided" because offering foreign nationals in the country illegally a path to citizenship will result in a new influx of illegal aliens.

"President Bush and the Senate do not get it. ... The American people get it," said NBPC Local 2544, which represents about 2,600 agents in Arizona. "Shut the border down to illegal crossings, then start hammering the greedy employers who hire them. Start deporting, we repeat, deporting, the illegal aliens who are here in violation of law.

"Rewarding the lawbreakers with amnesty is not going to solve anything."

NBPC President T.J. Bonner has vigorously opposed the provisions to grant illegals a path to citizenship, widely decried as an amnesty, saying it sends a "clear message" that the United States is not serious about immigration law and will increase the number of illegal aliens.

"This is not conjecture," he said. "It happened after the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and will undoubtedly happen again."

Michael Cutler, a retired senior agent at the now-defunct U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the program that the Senate is considering to bring the estimated illegal alien population of 12 million to 20 million out of the shadows will not work.

"This approach was tried before," he said. "The immigration amnesty program of 1986 was supposed to be the best way of getting illegal aliens out of the shadows and restoring a measure of credibility to the thoroughly dysfunctional administration and enforcement of immigration laws.

"With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we now know the 1986 amnesty led to perhaps one of the largest influxes of illegal aliens into the United States."

The Immigration Policy Center (IPC), a District-based think tank dedicated to research and analysis about immigrant contributions to the U.S., yesterday said in a report that the temporary-worker provisions of the Senate bill will not respond to the demand for less-skilled workers to fill permanent jobs in high-growth industries, such as construction.

"In fact, the temporary program taking shape in the Senate would have the effect of cycling less-skilled immigrant workers in and out of the lowest rungs of the U.S. labor force without creating any longer-term investment in the workers or the industries in which they are employed," the report said.

The IPC report said the proposed temporary-worker program, which is capped at 200,000 per year, is "unlikely to accommodate" even the current level of demand for at least 340,000 new less-skilled workers every year.

Moreover, it said, because none of the workers who enters the country under the program would be permitted to stay for more than two years, it provides no net increase in the size of the U.S. labor force after the second year.

The NBPC Local 2544 called the proposed guest-worker program a "Trojan horse" that will allow millions of people to enter the United States illegally.

"Every day that President Bush and the Senate hold real border security hostage to their misguided amnesty program, thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens continue to flood into the country," it said. "We are losing this war, and it's not even close."