Editorial Bear

I've been slung back and forth over the Atlantic. I've been fingerprinted and mugshotted. I've waited for hours at the US embassy for a five-minute dismissal and I've waited years to finally get permission to return.

But Tina and I did our time. We waited it out. We paid the thousands of dollars required to lawyers and the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. And eventually - Oh, soooo EVENTUALLY - we got the green light to move back to the United States.

But right now, in Congress, the suits are debating some radical changes to the American Immigration System. And I don't like them ONE DAMN BIT.

It's an amnesty. There's no other way to describe it. If current legislation goes through, the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States will be granted a legitimate shot at citizenship.

And at the same time - MY GOD this annoys me - the restrictions regarding visas for family members and legitimate immigrants will be tightened.

It is the most cack-handed, backward lunacy I think of. Further proof that if the opposite of pro is con, the opposite of progress must be congress.

It upsets me for myriad reasons, but most of all because it's a slap in our face. Tina and I obeyed the rules, we respected the system and we got racked through the meat-grinder. Yet millions of immigrants, who spat in the face of the immigration system and broke the law, are being granted everything it took Tina and I years to achieve.

It's not that I hate illegal immigrants. In fact I know a few. People who slipped through the BCIS net and wound up in the wrong pile of forms. Since they're married or related to American citizens, they're getting the squeeze in this new wave of immigration reforms. That doesn't seem fair.

It's actually the workers from Mexico who really win out. These are the ones who sneaked across the border in the company of 'Coyotes,' professional Mexican people smugglers. They came to America to work in farms or factories, for a staggering ten times what they'd earn back home.

You can't argue with their motivation for smuggling themselves to America - one in seven Mexican workers now comes illegally to the United States. However you can argue with the way they act while they're here.

The fact is, it's not easy being illegal. No bank account. No driver's licence. No medical care or insurance. And for the illegal workers, if you can't get it, you don't have it. This means there are literally millions of illegal immigrants driving clapped out, undisputed cars with no insurance. They rely on free medical care (paid for at the US taxpayer's expense.) And what money they do earn, they send an average of 30% of it out of the country back to Mexico.

With 15% of Mexico's working population currently working illegally in the United States, you can imagine what a drain on America's GDP that is.

What congress have to ask themselves, before they grant this fearsome demographic permission to work in the United States, is: Will anything will change when they do?

Will the newly legal immigrants scurry out to get bank accounts and car insurance? Will they chip in for health coverage? Or will they continue the way they've been going? Because the sad fact is, on an illegal immigrant's miserable basic wages, it's a lot cheaper to stay 'illegal' than pay for all the gubbins we law abiding US residents are required to.

It's madness, pure and simple. It's just more immigration insanity shoehorned in by the Bush government. After scrapping the tolerable Immigration and Naturalization Service and replacing it with the incompetent BCIS, the reigning government is attempting to secure a legacy (a non Iraq legacy) and tidy up their immigration mess with this ridiculous legislation.

It has only one saving grace. It Just Won't Work.

You see, in order to squeeze it past the more conservative members of Congress, the laws require heads of households to return to Mexico to await their immigration paperwork. The work permits illegal immigrants will be granted are temporary, requiring a year outside of the United States before they're renewed. Basically, immigrants will be REQUIRED to leave the USA before they can get on the road to citizenship. And none of them will.

For heads of households, the problem is a simple one. Sigfrido Villalta, an illegal worker in a car wash, says: "If I have to leave the country, how will my family here exist?"

For illegal workers already in the country, leaving the United States is simply not an option. Which means this offensive, incompetent piece of legislation will flop at the first fence. If the path to citizenship involves leaving America, the majority of immigrants won't take it - which means we'll be left with as many illegal immigrants AFTER the law has been passed as we had before.

I think there's a bigger problem here, however.

Whether American troops are in Iraq rightly or wrongly, the country is in turmoil at the moment because of the actions of the US Government. If we yanked American and British troops out of the region, what would be left to fill the vacuum? Certainly not democracy.

Most likely, another fundamentalist Muslim regime. Insurgents and terrorists are already hard at work causing instability and unrest. Without American support, could the fledgling democratic government of Iraq survive?

It's doubtful - and if Darwin's theories are anything to go by, it'll be something tough, but ugly that ends up ruling the region. Can we afford to see another fundamentalist country pop up in the middle east, embittered and emboldened by America's inopportunely abandoned foreign policy?

I think both Democrats and Republicans have to think very long and very hard about their role in Iraq. Pulling out with the job half done might be far more dangerous than making the investment to help a true democracy emerge in the middle east.

But if that true democracy can be built - and that's a big if - it will be built on the bodies of young American soldiers. It's an impossible decision to make. Whether America decides to stay or go, the cost will be enormous.