Last chance on immigration reform?

This is it. The battle that has been raging over immigration is headed down to the wire. Very soon, Congress will vote on a bill that will pretty much cast in stone our immigration policies for the foreseeable future. If we take the 20th century as an indicator, we see that revision of our immigration law only takes place about once every 20 years: the 1920s, 1940s, 1960s, 1980s. The last two immigration "reform" laws--in 1965 and 1986--have been unmitigated disasters for the United States and delirious victories for the "break down the border" lobbies, comprised of two seemingly dissimilar, but allied, forces: radical-left Hispanic groups and corporate globalists.

Those allied forces have a powerful ally in the White House and a bipartisan cast of collaborators in the House and Senate. If President Bush and his fellow break-down-the-border partners in Congress have their way, we will be locked into a repeat of the disastrous 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), but on an even greater and more damaging scale. If we allow that to happen, it is not an exaggeration to say that we could be looking at the beginning of the end of our nation. We cannot even sustain another 20 years of the status quo, let alone the drastic escalation of both legal and illegal immigration that would result from the various so-called reform proposals under consideration.

Recently, this writer stood on the U.S.-Mexico border just south of San Diego, at the port of San Ysidro, California. Actually, I was in the office of Customs Port Director James A. Hynes, located on the bridge that spans U.S. Interstate 5. Through a wall of plate glass, we had a front-row view of the endless lines of vehicles creeping into the U.S. beneath our feet. San Ysidro, directly across the border from Tijuana, is the busiest land border port in the world: approximately 65,000 cars and approximately 45,000 pedestrians enter the United States there every day.

Twenty years ago I stood in the same office with one of Director Hynes' predecessors, looking through the plate glass at the same surging phenomenon, on the eve of the historic 1986 IRCA vote. The promise then--by a coalition of Democrat and Republican politicians and their allies--was that in exchange for a one-time amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens already here, they would provide adequate resources and manpower to secure our borders against the ongoing invasion. IRCA passed. The open borders coalition got their "one-time" amnesty up front (and a couple additional amnesties thereafter), but quickly reneged on the promised border enforcement. As we had predicted, the illegal immigration crisis not only continued, but escalated.

In 1994, President Clinton and a bipartisan coalition in Congress were pushing for NAFTA (the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement). They promised better border security and insisted that, if NAFTA were approved, the northward migration would dramatically decline. NAFTA was enacted, but the alien invasion continued.

To secure NAFTA, the Clinton administration had to pretend it was serious about border control. Clinton, Janet Reno, and other Clinton flunkies made numerous photo-op trips to the border, posed with Border Patrol agents, and blathered about security. To convince the doubtful, they went further, launching Operation Gatekeeper in the San Diego sector, which includes the Port of San Ysidro. The sector was being overrun, literally, and Gatekeeper provided some desperately needed resources: new fences, lighting along the border fence, new Border Patrol vehicles, radios, electronic sensors, night vision scopes, and increased manpower.

A number of additional enhancements have been employed since Gatekeeper was launched, but the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has never been given anywhere near the resources necessary to do its job--just enough to provide a false image of security. Hundreds of thousands of illegals still get through the tightened San Diego sector, coming over, under, or around the fences. Many come right through the ports of entry.

After visiting with Director Hynes, I took a camera crew down on the pavement to walk amongst the 24 lanes of northbound traffic with the CBP agents and canine units performing primary inspections. We were on the ground but a few minutes when agents pulled over an SUV for secondary inspection. It was packed with seven illegal aliens. Last year CBP officers at the Port of San Ysidro arrested over 1,100 fugitive felons, seized over 140,000 pounds of narcotics, and apprehended 60,000 individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally. Nationally, CBP agents arrested 1.2 million people illegally entering the country.

"We do the best we can with the resources we have, but we know that we miss a lot," Director Hynes said. "It's a matter of numbers." And the numbers will get far worse if the White House and Congress enact any of the competing amnesty/guest-worker proposals under consideration. After the mass demonstrations by illegal aliens in Los Angeles and other cities on March 25, radical New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz triumphantly declared: "The sleeping Latino giant has finally awakened." If ever there was a time for the sleeping American giant to awaken, it is now.