And Now for the Main Event - U.S. Citizens vs. Illegal Immigrants

The argument supporting illegal immigration and the guest-worker/amnesty plan can be boiled down to two ideas:

1) The U.S. economy has created so many new jobs that there aren't enough U.S. citizens to fill them. Therefore, we need to "import" workers.

2) Many of the jobs illegal immigrants take are jobs that "regular Americans" (a.k.a. U.S. citizens) don't want to do.

I'm not going to analyze the validity of either of these ideas. I'll do that in another post. Let's assume for now that both ideas are true.

I would like to offer this scenario for discussion:

Right now, the economy is doing well and the impact of illegal immigration on the job market is not widely felt.

But what happens when (or if, for all you perpetual optimists) the U.S. economy declines?

When the jobs start disappearing, will the illegal immigrants return quietly to their home countries?

I doubt it.

If things go south and jobs disappear, we U.S. citizens will have to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs.

The official estimate says that there are 11 million illegals in our country. I would guess that is low. Unofficial estimates run as high as 20-30 million.

Either way, that's a lot of non-citizens and a lot of potential job competition.

It's easy to make policy when things are going well. The natural tendency is to assume things will continue to go well. Then conditions invariably deteriorate.

We have let this problem go on for much too long. It's grown to the point where it's become extremely difficult to find a solution. But we need to take action now, and that doesn't include amnesty.

Let's protect our borders. Let's control immigration into the United States. And finally, let's put some value, meaning, and privilege back into the title: U.S. citizen.