Dubya's Ignoring the Solutions to Illegal Immigration

This Immigration thing continues to confound the Senate (which could be a good thing because they are doing little else.) The President showed up to lunch with (R) Senators for the first time in five years, to plead, beg, wheedle, and probably throw money around--just to have a "legacy."

It would be a lot better if the President and his sock-puppet Mickey (the Gnome) Chertoff would simply utilize existing systems and law, no?

...a secret weapon in immigration law enforcement seems to have escaped the notice of George W. Bush and his administration, along with our entire Senate and House of Representatives. It is a program that already exists in a fully-operational state, but that remains entirely unutilized by any of our immigration enforcement agencies. It’s called the Employment Eligibility Verification Basic Pilot Program.

It did NOT "escape the notice" of the President. He has another agenda entirely, as do the Senators on both sides of the aisle.

The program allows employers to check their employees’ and potential employees’ identification documents against federal databases online to ensure that the employee or applicant has legal status and is eligible for employment. The program is currently available in all 50 states, and is ready for use. The only problem with the program is that no one is using it, because it isn’t mandatory. Only about 1% of employers participate. By expanding the program and making it mandatory, employers would be virtually unable to “unknowingly” hire illegal workers, and would be subject to the fines and possible jail time already established by current immigration law.

Which means that there would be an extra step in the hiring process. And of course, it would be administered to ALL potential and existing employees, because there are NO American employers who would....ah....violate FLSA, right? Or pay cash-under-the-table, right??

Another key reason why Basic Pilot is such an important tool is another illegal immigration secret that nobody ever told you: not everyone in the country illegally is Pedro the Catholic lettuce picker from Mexico. About 40% of people in the country illegally never sneaked across a border. They came on legal temporary visas and then simply overstayed them

It is also true that the IRS has a file jammed to the hilt with "invalid" SSAN's from a small group of employers--well over 50,000 of them from one Illinois firm alone--on which SS taxes were withheld, but for whom there is no legitimate SSAN holder.