Skip to footer

5 myths about amnesty for illegal immigrants in Senate bill

Under a bipartisan Senate immigration bill, immigrants who have come to the United States illegally are given a "path to citizenship." On close inspection, each of the following five claims about the requirements for illegal immigrants to earn amnesty are not what they seem.

3. They must pass a background check

  • By Jon Feere Op-ed contributor, May 13, 2013

History suggests that the government does not have the capacity to carefully vet those who apply for amnesty. The 1986 amnesty resulted in the rubber stamping of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent applications. It also gave legal status to an illegal immigrant who would become the ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center attack; his new status allowed him to travel freely around the world and pick up terrorist training. Certainly not all illegal immigrants are terrorists, but the government’s track record on keeping problematic individuals out of the country is not trouble-free.

Additionally, under the current Senate bill, crimes like identity theft and vandalism are not considered serious enough to deny a person amnesty, despite the fact that such crimes create real victims. In fact, two misdemeanors on an applicant’s rap sheet do not result in legal status being denied; and under the bill multiple misdemeanors could be counted as “one” strike, provided they occur on the same day. And any problematic history an illegal immigrant has in his home country is unlikely to be uncovered.

While illegal immigrants who have their amnesty applications rejected should be fast-tracked for deportation, history shows us that rejected applicants remain in the US, even if they pose a risk. Amnesties do not constitute a benefit to public safety.

3 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.