Fixing America’s broken southern border and deeply flawed immigration system is often framed as a stark choice between doing nothing or accepting a massive, sweeping complicated bill that works at cross-purposes to its stated goals.
The U.S. immigration and border security system is often called broken and failed, prompting calls for comprehensive, complex legislation that provides amnesty to millions of unlawful immigrants and would supposedly fix the problem. Exhibit one is the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 744). The act ignores most of the major effective immigration laws on the books, substitutes amnesty as a cure-all, and provides so-called solutions to non-existent problems, making the real problems even worse.
The House Republican leadership recently released its “Standards for Immigration Reform,” which amount to little more than a repackaging of the flawed and harmful Senate bill.