The New York Times has penned an editorial pushing their agenda of long-term amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Try and follow along. It’s difficult, but here we go. Their editorial board wrote:
The takeaway is clear. While it has become politically expedient to malign and scapegoat immigrants, Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers across the country recognize that finding a way to excise them systematically from payrolls would have a crippling effect on several industries. The only long-term solution to this conundrum is returning to the bipartisan consensus that enabled the 1986 bill. This would require giving millions of undocumented immigrants the ability to earn citizenship, then developing a uniform system to verify employment eligibility, and more rigorously prosecuting employers who evade it.
Barring that form of comprehensive reform, American taxpayers will continue bankrolling an expensive, heartless crackdown on immigrants for years on end. Meanwhile, employers will continue to quietly reap the benefits of immigrant labor while looking the other way.
Attempting to make their point and appeal to the right, they cited President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty legislation, which allowed the legalization for 2.7 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
They also argued that because E-Verify isn’t widely used to track employers who hire (or from hiring) illegal immigrants, President Trump should forgo his campaign promises and go for amnesty:
American employers continue to assume relatively little risk by hiring undocumented immigrants to perform menial, backbreaking work, often for little pay. Meanwhile, as Mr. Trump’s deportation crackdown accelerates, families are being ripped apart, and communities of hard-working immigrants with deep roots in this country are gripped by fear and uncertainty. As long as employers remain off the hook, a border wall and an expanded dragnet can only make temporary dents in the flows of undocumented immigrants.
Naturally, the editors neglected to mention that, in order to absorb the cost of around 11 million illegal immigrants, it would cost the taxpayers around $2.6 trillion, according to an estimate in 2007 from the Heritage Foundation.
