U.S. Border Control

Under Bush, the federal government basically abandoned immigration enforcement, so why should we believe him now?

June 19, 2006

One of the many, many glaring weaknesses in the White House's campaign to adopt "comprehensive" immigration "reform" is that there is no reason to believe that the Bush administration will follow through on the enforcement half of the Senate bill. A Washington Post story shows in stark fashion that enforcement is wholly discretionary, and that under Bush, the federal government basically abandoned enforcement -- until it became politically necessary to show some enthusiasm for the task:

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three. ...
"The claims of this administration and its commitment to interior enforcement of immigration laws are laughable," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that favors tougher workplace enforcement, among other measures. "The administration only discovered immigration enforcement over the past few months, five years into its existence, and only then because they realized that a pro-enforcement pose was necessary to get their amnesty plan approved."
Even Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, which supports immigrant rights, agrees that enforcement has been "woefully tiny."

"Why should the public believe it, because the government hasn't done it before?" Kelley asked.
Amen. The argument always has been out there that immigration is an issue on which Bush has a lot of credibility, because he's not pursuing "reform" as a wedge issue or because it's politically expedient, but because it's a cause he ardently believes in. That makes sense.

But if you look at the issue from another perspective, Bush has no credibility at all -- because he's already made plain that if he had his way, illegal immigration would be as readily tolerated as speeding.