Reform Skeptics
We Have Been Lied to Before
By Daniel Muniz

The biggest reason why so many people are skeptical of immigration reform is because it has never worked.

We have been lied to and it is as simple as that. All that we have gotten in the past are empty promises from smiling politicians who assured us that this nation would establish secure borders that would put a screeching halt to illegal immigration while deporting the millions of violators who are already here. Unfortunately, all of those assurances have turned out to be nothing more than broken promises.

That is exactly what happened in 1986 when similar legislation was enacted. Just about every illegal alien at that time became a citizen but absolutely nothing was done to prevent another 12 million illegal immigrants from entering the country and gaining long term employment.

In other words, we were lied to and you cannot get anymore blatant than that.

The current ideas for enforcing the border sound dynamite on paper but they should have been implemented back in 1986. Unfortunately, securing our border has never been a priority even after the traumatic events of 9-11. In the meantime, there have been lots of promises to build 700 miles of fences but where is that fence? It is not finished and there are not any plans yet to fulfill that broken promise.

Right now there are millions of illegal aliens who have legitimate looking but bogus identification that allows them to continue to maintain employment in this country. We do not have a rigid system already in place to identify and prosecute the millions of illegal immigrants who engage in identity theft for the purpose of securing a job.

There are plenty of promises of harsh punishments to be meted out to employers who hire illegal immigrants but it hasn’t happened yet and it probably will never happen because we don’t have the proper infrastructure to identify the millions of people who are fraudulently using someone else’s social security number for their employment.

All that we are getting right now is another promise to enforce the laws that are already on the books. This country got that same promise back in 1986 and what has it accomplished?

But more to the point, we have elements in both political parties that want the massive influx of illegal aliens to continue. Republicans want them as a source of cheap labor and Democrats see them as a means of eventually swelling their ranks with new voters. Either way, both parties want to exploit this issue for their own gains and both parties would be thrilled with another colossal failure like the one that happened in 1986.

The bottom line is that there is a lot of greed and manipulation that has gone on for decades and it will not immediately end. And perhaps that is the very basis for the skepticism and the resistance to these kinds of compromises. We have been lied to before and we have been given promises that our politicians knew that they couldn’t keep. And now we are getting those very same promises again.

So are the proponents of an immigration compromise truly sincere in their desire to fix our border problems or are they just lying scheming rats? Is this simply another promise that these politicians know that they cannot keep?

And will labor intensive industries all of sudden going to stop demanding their cheap labor? Absolutely not and that is the big hole in any kind of compromise.

This country is not being invaded by illegal aliens because they were invited to come here by the employers who want cheap labor. As long as there are tens of thousands of employers who continue to clamor for this kind of labor, this problem will not end.

Yes, the current legislation truly represents the largest investment in border security but it is still a drop in the bucket compared to what really needs to be done. We need a massive overhaul of several governmental agencies which includes a mandate to actually identify and prosecute violators. But more importantly, we need to have leadership that is determined that such a legislation will succeed instead of the lying scheming rats who are secretly hoping that all of this will eventually fail.

There are millions of Americans who do not trust our politicians on this issue and rightly so. We have been lied to before and this immigration compromise is nothing more than another ruse to deceptively reenact another failure like that of 1986.

If all these enforcement ideas are so wonderful, why not implement them right now (like actually finish that 700 mile fence) and start enforcing the laws that are already on the books. Action speaks louder than words but for the past 20 years, all we have gotten are broken promises.

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