A Reply to Byron York and the Gang of Eight

After reading Byron York’s Washington Examiner article on the Immigration bill (A look deep inside the Gang of Eight Bill) I have a question for our elite group of Senators who so slavishly seek to enamor the Latino vote for the 2014 election and beyond. I would only add that such pandering is unlikely to provide the result they seek. First and foremost the bill requires that illegal aliens already in the country sign up to take part in the program. Question: What is the incentive for that? Immigrants who do sign up for the program will be finger-printed, background checked, pay a fine and required to learn English. If they are collecting benefits of any kind it will end and they will have been discovered to have further violated the law by taking benefits. Considering Congress has basically conceded they will not be deported, they are in no danger, so why bother? Once an illegal immigrant has joined the program and met all the requirements to become a Restricted Provisional Immigrant (RPI) what is the incentive to continue? It could take 13 to 22 years for an immigrant to become a citizen under the program. During this time INS will issue Green (Legal Permanent Resident) Cards , to no more than 2M a year. So in essence, while these 11,000 million RPI’s are waiting for Green Cards they will be working illegally as they were before the program existed. It takes much less time through legal channels to get a Green Card and citizenship so what is the incentive for it? This bill is a no-win for illegal immigrants. They are better served by the status quo. Their situation will be worse if they sign up then if they try to become legal citizens in a variety of other ways. Everything beyond these issues in the bill is even more complex and therefore even less likely to succeed. Complete reform of the INS and a more sophisticated and streamlined method of Immigration and Naturalization is what is needed. The Gang of Eight Bill is just a Band-Aid for a broken system that cheats the taxpayers that fund it and the immigrants forced to use it.