U.S. immigration policy is a joke — a bad joke that President-elect Donald Trump estimates costs our economy $113 billion per year and hurts millions, including both U.S. taxpayers and non — U.S. citizens waiting in line to come here legally.
Our next president knows we can do better. The rest of us should help him try.
I say this not just as Colorado’s former chief federal prosecutor, but as son of an Egyptian-born immigrant. My Dad, the late Edward Eid — a business owner and longtime head of the Colorado State Soccer Association — came to the United States solo on a student visa in 1957 at age 17 with just $100. He was never prouder, he often told me growing up, than the day he achieved his goal of becoming a U.S. citizen.
These days, however, the U.S. immigration system incentivizes illegal immigration over lawful entry to our country. To give just one example, a record 4.4 million foreign citizens are currently on the immigrant visa waiting list, according to the U.S. State Department. The largest category – nearly one-third – are from Mexico, and 98 percent of them are sponsored by at least one family member already living in the United States. Incredibly, the average wait-time for a Mexican citizen to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. legally is now more than 18 years. Some wait nearly twice that long.
Why wait to settle here legally when current law strongly favors illegal entry into our country?
One culprit is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (ICRA), which gave amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who had resided in the US before 1982, while relaxing federal criminal penalties for employers who knowingly hire those who arrive later. Federal prosecutors confronting large-scale hiring of illegal immigrants are typically only able to charge misdemeanors, not felonies, with marginal fines and little or no prospect of jail time. No wonder the U.S. Department of Justice frequently chooses not to investigate or prosecute such wrongdoing.
Various political favors and one-offs by the Obama Administration to political supporters have further boosted illegal immigration. Some of these end-runs around Congress-enacted immigration laws are open and notorious, such as supporting self-declared “sanctuary cities.” The term refers broadly to local jurisdictions that intentionally limit cooperation with federal authorities sworn to enforce our national immigration laws.
The U.S. Constitution delegates immigration and naturalization policy exclusively to the federal government, not state and local officials. Yet some cities still refuse to enforce our national immigration laws. The result can be tragic, as when 31-year-old Kathryn Steinle was shot in San Francisco last July by an illegal alien with seven previous felony convictions who had already been deported five times.
Some politicians try to justify defying federal immigration law by warning of mass-deportations of undocumented aliens. Congress can and should address family hardship situations as part of comprehensive immigration reform. But raising the specter of mass-deportation as an excuse not to reform the current system is irresponsible.
In truth, mass-deportations have rarely occurred since Los Angeles became the first self-proclaimed sanctuary city in 1979. Members of Congress have little stomach for splitting up families or deporting students who remain here because of the federal government’s failed policies. Recognizing this reality, President-elect Trump has proposed cutting federal funding to sanctuary cities until they follow the law. His measured and appropriate response is already drawing fire from several big city mayors such as New York’s Bill de Blasio and Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, who apparently find it easier to demonize the incoming administration than work with Congress to address it responsibly.
Other attempts to circumvent our national immigration laws are more obscure but no less detrimental to public safety. One is the Central American Minors program, which allows illegal aliens to bring in family members to our country from El Salvador and some other countries regardless of prior deportations or felony convictions. Never mind that 77,000 legal applicants from El Salvador, none of whom has been previously deported or convicted of felonies, are already waiting in line.
Meanwhile, the process for entering and residing in the United States lawfully as a permanent resident alien – a precursor for naturalized U.S. citizenship – has languished for millions of applicants. The Center for Immigration Studies reports that the United States is currently home to more foreign-born people than any other nation on earth. In 2015, 46.6 million people living here – including an estimated 11.3 million illegal aliens – were born in other countries, up from 23.3 million in 1990.
Being “a nation of immigrants,” as President John F. Kennedy put it in his book of that title published shortly after his assassination in 1963, can be a great thing and is fittingly part of our national character. It can inspire us and people from other nations, as it did my father as a teenager living in Egypt. Yet President Kennedy always insisted that immigration policy must be fair – equitable to all U.S. citizens and those from around the world seeking that treasured legal status.
That is emphatically not true today. A symptom of the prevailing political and bureaucratic dysfunction is the federal government’s willingness to tolerate what federal authorities call “criminal aliens” who offend against other illegal immigrants living here as well as U.S. citizens.
Criminal aliens inflict a disproportionate amount of damage to the rest of us. This includes other illegal aliens who otherwise abide by federal and state laws; by living off the grid, this group of victims can be even more vulnerable. In 2013 — the most recent year in which data are available — one in every four criminals sentenced to federal prison in the United States was an illegal alien who, after committing at least one felony in our country, was deported but returned illegally to commit more crimes.
According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the average criminal alien in federal custody had already been deported 3.2 times before returning to our country; one offender had been deported 73 times. The Commission, an independent judicial agency, reported in 2015 that nearly one-half of these offenders had committed at least one violent crime after reentering the US but before being apprehended.
As Colorado’s United States Attorney from 2006-09, one of my top priorities was to target criminal aliens and get them off our streets. Our office pledged to get every criminal alien incarcerated in Colorado out of county jail and into federal custody. We kept that commitment, which later became Justice Department policy. By targeting criminal aliens and making the federal government foot the bill for their incarceration and deportation, our office strengthened law enforcement cooperation while keeping many serial violent offenders away from Colorado communities.
Not surprisingly, many criminal aliens get here by illegally crossing our country’s border with Mexico. Securing that border is just plain common sense. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, of the roughly million people crossing illegally each year, half say they plan to do so again if apprehended.
The security benefits of a more extensive border security “wall” or fence along the Mexican border, beyond those portions already in place, are hardly speculative. Among many other recent international examples, when Israel finished its security fence along its Egyptian border in 2013, 36 people were caught trying to cross compared with 10,440 the year before.
A combination of physical and technology barriers make it possible to extend this same approach to more sections of the Mexican border where illicit cross-border transit and smuggling frequently occurs. The question for Congress is not whether the United States should take these steps, but how to carry them out most effectively while reforming an immigration system that is failing too many Americans and applicants for U.S. citizenship.
President-elect Trump recognizes that the federal government isn’t as serious as it must be about immigration and border security. Having successfully called out the problem and won a mandate for positive change, Trump is the best-positioned president since John F. Kennedy to achieve lasting reform of a broken system that hurts U.S. taxpayers and non-U.S. citizens alike.
Troy A. Eid is a Denver Attorney and was Colorado’s 40th United States Attorney, appointed by President George W. Bush, from 2006-09. He was the first Arab-American named to any U.S. Attorney position in American history.
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