Dan Stein Legal Quotations

But there is not much hope for Americans in blue-collar work being able to hold their jobs if the guest worker proposal is adopted. Concerned citizens will not have much hope that today's illegal workers will leave the country after being given six-year work permits, and they will simply have to hope that there is still a middle class in a few years. President Bush also talked about 'stronger immigration enforcement and border protection,' and we might hope that after decades of broken promises that this time he really means it, but the record does not justify much hope.

Millions of American workers, in all sectors of the labor market, have seen their jobs and wages undercut by the phenomenon of mass illegal immigration.

Overcrowded, multilingual, schools will not become manageable because the kids are suddenly the children of guest workers, instead of illegal aliens. Millions of unskilled laborers will not magically become high-earning taxpayers because they have work visas. State budget crises will not be alleviated, housing will not become more affordable, traffic will not become less congested, and middle class jobs will not become more plentiful if we give everyone who is here, or who wants to come here, a piece of paper that says they're legal.

In other words, the illegal aliens will get about 95 percent of what they want immediately and simply have to wait several years for the rest, but President Bush, Senators McCain and Kennedy, and others want us to believe that this is not amnesty.

Rather than creating conditions that allow American workers to fill jobs at higher wages, what the president is proposing merely converts low wage illegal aliens into low wage workers with visas. Our economy would have to adapt if the influx of cheap foreign labor is ended, but that is an adjustment strongly desired by a majority of Americans, whether native-born or foreign-born. The concept that our economy must be served by a permanent under-class of foreign guest workers is reprehensible and unacceptable.

The conditions that led to the original designation of TPS for these Central Americans were not such that persons could not return home in the first place, and there clearly is no such justification now several years later. Further, it is an insult to the American public to use the TPS process to give legal work status to persons who entered the US illegally as is the case with most of the Central Americans benefiting from the administration's action. It is absurd to believe that these persons who entered the US illegally are going to voluntarily return to their home country once their work permits are no longer valid.

America's humanitarian concern for foreign victims of natural disasters or civil strife is being abused by President Bush when he extends legal status to foreigners in the US when there is no reason that they could not go home safely.