Another directive was that the Board of Education would not turn over the names of illegal immigrant children to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The third was a similar directive to city hospitals (Health and Hospitals Corporation) not to report to the INS any illegal immigrants seeking and receiving medical treatment at any of our city-operated hospitals. Every mayor succeeding me – David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg – reissued those three orders.
Nevertheless, I do not approve of assisting an illegal immigrant to hide from the INS (now reconstituted under the Department of Homeland Security as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as “ICE”) when that agency seeks to enforce the law by detaining them and sending them back to their countries. If the assistance to illegal immigrants defended by Cardinal Mahoney and church groups is humanitarian in nature – water, food, shelter – no one would quarrel with him. If it is assistance to hide from ICE, then he is simply wrong.
Having tried to lay out my position and philosophy, where do I come out on legalizing the status of 11 million illegals now in the country as the U.S. Senate legislation seeks to do? Recently, I had lunch with a good friend and one of the foremost experts on immigration law. We discussed the issue. He said that he “had once supported the position of those who said ‘send them back,’ but had changed his mind, having concluded there is no realistic way to send them back.”
I agree. We will not put 11 million people in detention and then transport them back to their countries. It is not doable. Yet I am told that Israel, with a similar problem of illegal foreign workers (but obviously not of the same scale) has managed to remove many of them. In some fashion, Israel eliminated the lengthy appeals that limit the immediate impact of a removal program.
Two weeks ago I discussed the issue on my Friday program on Bloomberg Radio, presenting the arguments on both sides. One listener said I was wrong to conclude that it was not possible to send people back and that it was a matter of supply and demand. The illegals are here to get jobs and earn money, and if the jobs were not available, as they would not be if the current law were enforced, the illegals would go home on their own.
Further, enforcing that law, said the caller, was not difficult. The way to do that would be to punish the person who hired an illegal applicant. The punishment should include escalating fines. The current law since 1986 provides for initial fines of $1,000 and up to $2,500 for a first time offense with escalating penalties for subsequent offenses, including possible criminal charges for employers demonstrating a pattern and practice of knowingly hiring illegals.
The question is, have these penalties been imposed uniformly? I doubt it. Let’s try it and even increase the penalties, if necessary. There must be a reliable database for employers to determine who is authorized to work – i.e., a better developed and protected Social Security number, eliminating the multiplicity of documents now allowed and easily falsified.
Many say that the illegals are needed for agricultural, construction and other low paying jobs. If that is the case, can’t we create a program that would allow guest workers to sign up in their countries to come here to work for one year and then go home? The contractors who bring guest workers here should be regulated and insure prevailing wages, residences and health care for the guest workers.