Impacts of Illegal Immigration: Traffic Accidents: "A review of State Police auto accident reports for 2002 through 2004 for that area of the Eastern Shore also revealed that of the 179 accidents involving Hispanic laborers: 75% of the drivers had no auto insurance. Nearly all of the vehicles driven by migrants were registered to other drivers. 93% of the vehicles had false out-of-state tags. "
The United States has rules and policies that govern how a citizen of another country may enter this country, how and how long they can stay, whether they can work, and whether and how they can become citizens. Those are the rules of the land, and they are as essential to our security and the peaceful enjoyment of our national home, as locks are to our individual houses.
Tell me something. If you came home or awoke in the night to find an unexpected, uninvited, unkown person in your home, would you make him a sandwich or fill him with buckshot? We know instinctively that a person who violates the sanctity of your home, unbidden, is up to no good. Why do we think that people who break into our country ("but the door wasn't locked!") came here, without exception, to be model citizens?
Does it come as any surprise that many (though not most) people who violate and disrespect immigration rules, also violate and disrespect other laws and social conventions? The truth is, there is less incentive for an illegal alien to obey our laws. They are more likely to be deported than jailed. They already live in the shadows. They already have a hard time finding good jobs. They are already pariahs in our society. A black mark on their record means little when their records only exist in the shadows.
Their identities are fungible, since they have not been through any official procedure to validate identity. If an employer knowingly hires illegals, how likely is it for the employer to check references or in any way determine that today's identity is not the same as yesterday's identity? If an illegal is "just a fruit picker", does it matter to the employer that he is Juan Carlos today, Carlos Juan yesterday? The article I linked to yesterday quoted the police chief as saying ""We get calls from all over the country from people saying: 'I've never worked at a chicken plant and I've never been to Delaware, and the IRS tells me I owe taxes for working there.'" If an illegal immigrant puts a black mark on one stolen identity, how much harder is it to steal a new identity? The immigrant simply moves on, changes his name, gets a new apartment, and blends back into the shadows.
It is tremendously unfair to American citizens to have illegal aliens able to circumvent laws and procedures that we have to obey. Allowing illegal aliens to violate numerous laws - immigration laws, driver licensing, insurance, taxes, etc. - is the ultimate insult to legal citizens. Amnesty could help prevent the identity shifting, provided that strong controls are used to validate a single identity, but it won't change the mindset of ignoring and disrespecting our laws that brought a person into a country illegally in the first place. Yes, most illegal immigrants are honest, upstanding citizens, but the moment they decided to stay in this country illegally, they drew their line in the sand just a little bit past the "I always obey the law" mark. And the criminals who moved here illegally - and send back home for their family and friends - do you imagine they've come to "the richest country in the world" to retire from crime, or to enjoy a richer harvest?
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