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Santa Barbara, Calif. – Walking the sandy beachfront in this ultra-affluent city, I chanced upon two Hispanic men rummaging through the trash. Startled at the sight, I stared momentarily. One of them yelled at me, “You look now, but in 50 years we will own all this!” Given the tsunami of illegal immigration and the prolific Hispanic birthrate, I responded, “I believe you will.”

US Census statistics suggest the scavenging man was right. California, now about 37 percent Latino, is expected to be majority Hispanic by 2042. A quarter of all Americans will probably be Latino in 40 years. This trend has worrisome aspects. Imagine a huge, growing Hispanic underclass in America with a grudge, a burning sense of having been victimized by the “gringos.” I witnessed this grudge up close a few years ago at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. Hispanic students challenged me, claiming any restriction of illegal immigration across the US southern border with Mexico is a violation of Latinos’ human rights.

Me: “Would you try to reenter Spain without a passport?

Students: “Of course not.”

Me: “What about France, or Britain?”

Students: “No.”

Yet many of these illegal Latino immigrants suffer the illusion they are divinely entitled to colonize the US and not just the states bordering Mexico, but Chicago and the East Coast as well. Some Hispanics talk openly of a reconquista, an effort to reclaim the American Southwest that once belonged to Mexico. Historically, this concept is wide of the mark. Most Hispanic ancestors of immigrants owned no land. Their forebears were serfs of the Roman Catholic Church, once the largest landholder in Latin America and the world. Other ancestors labored as landless peons for Spanish colonial landlords who were later relieved of their lands by 19th-century Anglo-Americans.

Historical entitlement is but one of the myths surrounding illegal Hispanic immigration. Gringos have their own fables, such as ultimate assimilation into a greater English-speaking society.

Professor Lawrence Harrison of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., notes that “In California, fourth- and fifth-generation Mexican immigrants are still speaking only Spanish and resisting assimilation.” He says there are serious cultural barriers to the old melting-pot concept. “Words like compromise and dissent, crucial concepts to American democracy, have radically different meanings in Spanish.” Dissent, for example, translates into “heresy.”

Most alarming, today’s influx of poor Latin American immigrants comes from countries less than congenial to democracy, a law-based society, or public education. Many experts look with alarm on the fact that, unlike earlier European and Asian immigrants, the tsunami from the south too often undervalues educating children because many Hispanic parents resent the idea that their children will have more education than they have. In 2000, only 25 percent of working-age male Mexican immigrants had graduated high school, a sad fact that contributes to an increasingly volatile underclass.

Limited legal Latino immigration greatly enriches the United States. I’ve personally seen how Hispanic Americans bring tremendous loyalty and leadership qualities to our armed forces

But it is morally shameful to expect taxpayers to fund free education and medical care for lawbreakers so that the wealthiest Americans – restaurant owners, ranchers, agribusiness owners, and construction companies – can hire cheap labor regardless of the national consequences.

It is ever the wealthy sticking it to the poor. With so many Americans losing their homes and unable to find jobs, it is outrageous to say Hispanics still take jobs no one else will do.Congress, which generally represents the wealthy, should begin by imposing huge fines on affluent Americans who hire illegals. Start with the millionaires in my neighborhood, who don’t mow their own lawns or baby-sit their children and instead hire immigrants who are almost certainly illegal.

Businessmen are bonkers if they think opening US borders to allow the free flow of uneducated labor will make America competitive with a burgeoning Chinese economy. Naive American liberals need to stop trilling over Emma Lazarus’s “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses….” World population was 1.5 billion when she penned those lines. It now approaches 7 billion. America is not a dumping ground for the rest of the world’s surplus population.

Committing national suicide is not without precedent. The Dutch are rapidly losing their country. Before long, its largest cities will belong to Muslim immigrants. What then becomes of the liberal tradition of Erasmus and traditional Dutch tolerance? Illegal immigration may ultimately be more threatening to the character and values of the US than any threat from radical Islamists. It’s not about tribe; it’s about the law.

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awmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain. Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past. The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

"It's the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. "If you say they can't get a job when they come here, you'll stop it."

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens.

"It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people's privacy," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We're also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification."

Mr. Graham says he respects those concerns but disagrees. "We've all got Social Security cards," he said. "They're just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That's all I'm saying."

U.S. employers now have the option of using an online system called E-Verify to check whether potential employees are in the U.S. legally. Many Republicans have pressed to make the system mandatory. But others, including Mr. Schumer, complain that the existing system is ineffective.

Last year, White House aides said they expected to push immigration legislation in 2010. But with health care and unemployment dominating his attention, the president has given little indication the issue is a priority.

Rather, Mr. Obama has said he wanted to see bipartisan support in Congress first. So far, Mr. Graham is the only Republican to voice interest publicly, and he wants at least one other GOP co-sponsor to launch the effort.

An immigration overhaul has long proven a complicated political task. The Latino community is pressing for action and will be angry if it is put off again. But many Americans oppose any measure that resembles amnesty for people who came here illegally. Under the legislation envisioned by Messrs. Graham and Schumer, the estimated 10.8 million people living illegally in the U.S. would be offered a path to citizenship, though they would have to register, pay taxes, pay a fine and wait in line. A guest-worker program would let a set number of new foreigners come to the U.S. legally to work.

Most European countries require citizens and foreigners to carry ID cards. The U.K. had been a holdout, but in the early 2000s it considered national cards as a way to stop identify fraud, protect against terrorism and help stop illegal foreign workers. Amid worries about the cost and complaints that the cards infringe on personal privacy, the government said it would make them voluntary for British citizens. They are required for foreign workers and students, and so far about 130,000 cards have been issued.

Mr. Schumer first suggested a biometric-based employer-verification system last summer. Since then, the idea has gained currency and is now a centerpiece of the legislation being developed, aides said.

A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said. The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't have a position on the proposal, but it is concerned that employers would find it expensive and complicated to properly check the biometrics. Mr. Schumer said employers would be able to buy a scanner to check the IDs for as much as $800. Small employers, he said, could take their applicants to a government office to like the Department of Motor Vehicles and have their hands scanned there.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Just going to toss in: Controlling immigration might be one of those things that "big government" can do that no other entity can.

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Originally posted by rue:
Now that I think about it ... the Social Security Administration already knows if there are several people on the same ID. It shouldn't take a genius to track down the employers who have failed to vet the numbers and fine them BIG TIME.

So, why not ?

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Originally posted by rue:
I'm not saying give private info to private parties or even enforcement.

I'm saying that the SSA should give out EMPLOYER info to enforcement if EMPLOYERS are hiring illegal aliens. After all, EMPLOYERS can access the SSA database to see if the SS numbers are valid. If there are multiple people contributing to the SSA under one number then SOMEBODY has hired them without checking - or without caring that the number is invalid. Find out who. Go after them.

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Silence is consent.

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posted by Rue-

I'm just pointing out that there is a brick-simple easy-to-administer solution to this that nobody seems interested in voicing. And I'm also pointing out the reason why.

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Originally posted by rue:

And the reason why people are talking about better, more improved IDs is b/c no one wants to make the EMPLOYERS accountable for hiring illegals under invalid SSA numbers. Because that would be going after businesses and we can't have that.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

Bah, streamline the immigration process.

"Hi, welcome to america, here's your W4!"

And then let those bastards at the IRS do something other than nitpick us for a while, given how ruthlessly efficient those assholes are.

Trust me, if they hadda pay the same hellspawned, life eatin taxes we did, they'd go runnin back over the border in a hurry.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Well, it SHOULD be a pretty easy database search to have SSA do...

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Originally posted by Niki2:
I'm again stuck in the middle. I despise people who smuggle immigrants across the border, but more because of what those immigrants suffer than anything else.

I think the problem is too big to go after, even if employers wanted to do (which of course they don't). Given how many illegals there are in the country, it's an impossible task to find them all, which makes it a near-impossible task to find all their employers, in my opinion.

I don't like the idea of a national ID, I see to much chance of misuse. I'd like another answer, but I don't see one...and enforcing our borders is something I don't see as possible, either--it's too many miles with too few people to enforce it.

So I have no answers to postulate. Just that I hate it, but I don't hate the people themselves.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Rue, I think Geezer addressed that already, in that SSA & IRS simply *WILL NOT* allow data to be used by other agencies if it might possibly someday somehow be used to track down actual real people.

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Originally posted by rue:

I don't think we should, nor will we ever, find all employers - especially not individuals who hire nannies or 'casual help' off the local parking lot. But there are enough large employers - corporations - who hire illegals by the dozens if not hundreds that could be prosecuted. They are large construction companies, agriculture, garment manufacturers, chicken producers, janitorial and housekeeping companies etc. These are viable targets for enforcement.

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Rue-

May I point out just briefly that the regulations you THINK are so detrimental have somehow kept most of Europe out of the economic quagmire the US has deeply sunk itself into

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you know, all the huge banks, investment companies and insurances that went belly-up just a few short months ago ... or maybe you forgot about them ?

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It's not regulations that cause the problem Einstein. How 'bout you do a little thinking and come back when you have a clue ?

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