Here’s a simple way to stop illegal-alien flow

By JAY AMBROSE

SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Propose even the simplest, most commonsense means of beginning to enforce our laws on illegal aliens, and you are in for it.

People will accuse you of cruelties beyond mention, as they are now doing in regard to President Bush. Not so long ago, he had a plan in mind that would have found ways to have most illegals secure legal residence and even, eventually, citizenship, but is lately talking about tougher enforcement of existing laws and the revision of some.

One of his ideas is to hold businesses accountable when told by the Social Security Administration that something’s amiss with a worker’s Social Security number.

Mismatched numbers

As of now, Social Security administrators tell businesses they had darn well better not take any mismatches of numbers and people they have hired as evidence that someone is in the country illegally.

“This letter,” they formulaically say in pointing out discrepancies, “does not imply that you or your employee intentionally provided incorrect information about the employee’s name or Social Security number. It is not a basis, in and of itself, for you to take any adverse action against the employee, such as laying off, suspending, firing or discriminating against the individual.”

Good enough, say employers, who then forget the whole thing, perhaps because they are exploiting the workers to their own economic advantage, or maybe because they are worried more about accusations of discrimination than prosecutions of hiring illegals. Enter the administration, which figures that there’s a way of holding the employers accountable while also being fair to employees who have simply made some kind of a mistake, such as getting a digit wrong in writing the Social Security number down.

The idea, which is on its way to becoming a set of new regulations, is to give the employee 90 days after notification of the problem to square things with the federal government. If the person can’t, termination of employment must follow.

So here come the worriers, who tell us that such regulations will give us endless innocent victims who are here legally and just won’t be able to defend themselves from abuses either intentional or unintentional. And let’s grant at least this much: There has never been a law or regulation in the history of humanity that carried a guarantee of absolute justice in the way it was executed. Let’s then observe that there are all kinds of possible safeguards here, and that the logistics are scarcely mind-boggling. The government can make the idea work with nary a mistake that cannot be quickly rectified.

The real issue is that some people don’t want to do anything about the 11 million or 12 million illegal aliens who will soon enough be 13 million or 14 million, and then 15 million and on and on. Their view is that the aliens are taking important jobs no native-born Americans will take, splendidly serving the economy, bailing us out of our entitlement mess and gradually becoming assimilated to the point where future generations will be members of the middle class. All that undoes such calculations are the facts.

Legal residents

What gets ignored, for starters, is that legal residents constitute three-fourths of all the people employed in the main job categories in which illegals find work. There are some jobs Americans won’t take at current pay levels, but not vast numbers of them, and the truth demonstrated by scholarly research is that the illegals are taking work from some of our least advantaged groups. The illegal aliens aren’t serving the economy, but are bringing increased poverty our way, and they cost taxpayers far more than they contribute in taxes. The thought that they help finance entitlement programs forgets that they take more tax money than they give. Assimilation is pretty much undetectable. Generation after generation stays poor.

The illegal aliens themselves are victims of this system, and if you went through all kinds of hoops to make them legal, you would only attract still more millions of illegals who would soon be victims, too. The best solution is to demagnetize the force that attracts them here, all the jobs they get, and you can begin to do that with a simple change in what the Social Security Administration tells employers about mismatched Social Security numbers, a good idea, not a cruel one.

X Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.