Sham stances on illegal immigration.

ITEM: The San Francisco Chronicle for September 13 reported: "With pivotal midterm elections just two months away, Republicans and Democrats vied to show they are tougher than the other party when it comes to illegal immigration."

ITEM: The Washington Post for September 9 reported: "Congress will not address major immigration revisions before the Nov. 7 election, the Senate's top Republican said yesterday, but he and his allies hope to limit political damage to their party by telling voters they have poured millions of dollars into one component of the controversy: tightening the border with Mexico."

ITEM: In an op-ed column in the Washington Times for September 10, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge wrote that most illegal immigrants "work hard at jobs that many Americans prefer not to do." He added that the United States has a "shrinking number of workers, especially at the lower end of the economy. Entire industries in a growing number of urban and rural areas depend on large illegal populations. Existing law allows only a fraction of these workers to enter the country legally.... Thus, border enforcement will continue to fail so long as we refuse to allow willing workers a chance to work legally for a willing employer."

CORRECTION: Rhetoric notwithstanding, the two major parties and the White House have not effectively dealt with a pet peeve of the electorate: illegal immigration. Virtually every poll reveals that Americans want nothing to do with amnesty for illegals, by any name, but do want their borders to be secure. Whether belatedly throwing some money at a few enforcement measures will be sufficient for the GOP to disguise its poor record remains to be seen. Facing resistance, the White House has, for now, pulled back from its counterproductive efforts to legalize millions of "guest workers."

Inaction is more likely to hurt the Republicans' national electoral efforts than the Democrats' since the GOP is in power. Though many Republican legislators in the House supported a bill to make illegal immigration a federal crime, they were stymied by Senate Republicans (as well as Democrats) who would grant legal status to most of the illegal immigrants in the United States (estimated variously between 12 million and 20 million). The price tag for the Senate bill, concluded the Congressional Budget Office, would be a whopping $127 billion.

Rather than running on their own political stances, many Democratic leaders have tried to shift the blame to the Republicans, pointing out how the federal government in recent years has paid less attention to those employing illegals than during the Clinton administration. And that is true: enforcement operations at work sites were slashed by 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1999 and 2003; prosecutions for hiring illegals fell from 182 in 1999 to just four in 2003.

Yet, consider what the Democratic leaders want: the would-be Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has an almost unmatched record for pandering to border-jumpers. As the Washington Times put it: "Few politicians can match Mrs. Pelosi's fervor on behalf of illegals. During an October 2003 visit to Mexico, she denounced federal raids on Wal-Mart stores which employed them as a form of 'terror.' The following year, after a new Mobile Patrol Group under the auspices of the Border Patrol arrested 450 illegals in a series of raids in California, Mrs. Pelosi and fellow Democratic members of Congress protested and the patrol group was disbanded."

In short, neither major party has a record to be proud of concerning illegal immigration. The assertion above by Tom Ridge, which echoes President Bush, that willing illegals must be allowed to become "legal" because native Americans won't do some types of work is one that is widely employed. It is far from the truth. Patrick Buchanan, in his new book State of Emergency, calls this propaganda tactic the "Myth of the Indispensable Alien." Buchanan notes:

   According to John Hostettler and
   Lamar Smith, the chairman and ex-chairman
   of the House Judiciary Subcommittee
   on Immigration, Border
   Security and Claims, the economic
   argument for illegal aliens falls flat
   on close inspection. In December
   2005, they wrote: "Some claim that
   illegal immigrants are doing jobs that
   Americans will not do. But when an
   illegal immigrant finds a job here, that
   does not mean that no American will
   take that job. In fact, 79 percent of all
   service workers are native-born, as
   are 68 percent of all workers in jobs
   requiring no more than a high-school
   education."

The argument that the economy would falter without illegal immigrants has been repeatedly shown to be faulty. During the 1960s, recalled Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, California farmers testified that "braceros," the "guest workers" of the day, were "absolutely essential to the survival of the tomato industry." However, said Krikorian, "that labor program was ended anyway, and illegal immigrants did not immediately pick up the slack--so the farmers concluded that their investment in lobbying hadn't paid off, and instead they invested in harvest machinery. The result: a quadrupling of production over the following 30 years, and a drop in the post-inflation retail price of tomato products."

To be sure, many of those among the tidal wave of poorly educated illegals are willing to work, but that is not the pertinent point. A nation that has lost control over who crosses its border is no longer sovereign. Moreover, strictly in terms of dollars and cents, the cost of illegals--because of their overall drain on the welfare state--more than offsets their alleged economic benefits. An analysis by the Heritage Foundation of the 10 million who would get amnesty under this year's Senate bill concluded that more than half of those are high-school dropouts who would each cost the taxpayers $85,000 over their lifetimes.

As the election approaches, the politicians are running from their unpopular positions. In the House, for example, more than 20 House Democrats have reversed themselves on the issue of building a border fence, including a number of congressmen facing difficult races. Because its record has been abysmal, the Bush administration has been making token efforts at law enforcement. "This year," notes the New York Times, "the Department of Homeland Security sharply increased the number of workplace raids, making 245 criminal arrests of employers, up from 25 in 2002. Some 2,700 immigrant workers were caught up in those operations, and most were deported, officials said."

Politicians yearn for short-term voter memory. After the election, one can be sure the amnesty proponents will resurface. We will again be told that just one amnesty (or another euphemistic term) will fix the problem. But when lawbreaking is rewarded, there will be more of it. That is just what happened in 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act enacted an amnesty for approximately 2.7 million "undocumented workers." Not surprisingly, during the next two decades, the number of illegals grew at least fivefold.