Flake-Gutierrez “Amnesty” Bill Is Wrong for America (Rep. Ed Royce)

To me, pardoning lawbreakers and rewarding their crime with citizenship and jobs is amnesty. Simply because you make illegal immigrants pay fines and sit through English classes does not change the simple fact – Reps. Flake (R-Ariz.) and Gutierrez (D-Ill.) are proposing an amnesty.

In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act provided legal status for undocumented aliens already present in the country. It was passed with the promise of tougher enforcement, which was never realized. The law required illegal immigrants to wait, pay a monetary fine, and learn English. Sound familiar? It should. Black’s Law Dictionary categorizes the 1986 law as an amnesty.

Again with the Flake-Gutierrez bill we are promised “tough enforcement.” But if you actually read the bill, its provisions are mostly meaningless, toothless authorizations. It is thrown together with requirements for “tough” directions to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to implement laws we already should be enforcing.

What Reps. Flake and Gutierrez don’t discuss is the cost associated with their bill. The Heritage Foundation recently released a report titled, “The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Households to the U.S. Taxpayer” by Robert Rector. Using Rector’s numbers, the new Flake – Gutierrez guest worker program would cost $7.4 billion. Their general amnesty, or if you prefer, changing the status of illegal to legal, would cost a staggering $54.4 billion a year.

I think we all can agree that our immigration system is broken. We have tough enforcement laws on the books but they are not being enforced. Let’s fix the border security problem before we offer up yet another amnesty to people in this country illegally.