Who Left the Door Open?

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The impact of the below-market wage earners tends to fall hardest on unskilled workers at the bottom of the wage pyramid. "Any sizable increase in the number of immigrants will inevitably lower wages for some American workers," says George Borjas, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Borjas calculates that all immigration, by increasing the labor supply from 1980 to 2000, "reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700, or roughly 4%." Borjas says African Americans and native-born Hispanics pay the steepest price because they are more often in direct competition with immigrants for jobs.

Why Alien Criminals Are at Large in the U.S.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of having 15 million illegals at large in society is Congress's failure to insist that federal agencies separate those who pose a threat from those who don't. The open borders, for example, allow illegals to come into the country, commit crimes and return home with little fear of arrest or punishment.

From Oct. 1, 2003, until July 20, 2004, the border patrol's Tucson sector stopped 9,051 persons crossing into the country illegally who had criminal records in the U.S., meaning they committed crimes here, returned to Mexico, then were trying to re-enter the country. Among them: 378 with active warrants for their arrest. In one week, said border-patrol spokeswoman Andrea Zortman, there were two with outstanding "warrants for homicide."

And those were just the illegals the border patrol determined had arrest records. Most go undetected. Reason: the border patrol's electronic fingerprint-identification system, which allows officers to determine how many times an alien has been caught sneaking into the U.S., has only a limited amount of criminal-background data. The FBI maintains a separate electronic fingerprint-identification system that covers everyone ever charged with a crime. In true bureaucratic fashion, the two computer systems do not talk to each other. In the 1990s, the two agencies were directed to integrate their systems. They are still working at it. The most optimistic completion date is 2008. Until then, illegals picked up at the border may have any number of criminal charges pending, but the arresting officers will never know and will allow the intruders to return home.

In any event, the numbers suggest that tens of thousands of criminals, quite possibly hundreds of thousands, treat the southern border as a revolving door to crimes of opportunity. The situation is so out of control that of the 400,000 illegal aliens who have been ordered to be deported, 80,000 have criminal records--and the agency in charge, the Homeland Security Department, does not have a clue as to the whereabouts of any of them, criminal or noncriminal, including those from countries that support terrorism.