A new, moral approach to immigation to the United States could best be tagged “Jessica’s Law.”
As with the similarly named law aimed at sex offenders, this is targeted at those who discriminate against aliens.
Jessica Coloti is a 21-year-old in Atlanta. She is an illegal immigrant. Her parents brought her with them when she was 11 and settled down. Jessica went to school, learned English, studied and did well. She graduated from high school and enrolled in Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta where she is now two semesters from graduation.
Jessica was arrested in March on a minor traffic offense. She couldn’t show a driver’s license because she isn’t a citizen and couldn’t qualify for one. She now faces felony charges of giving the sheriff a wrong address. She may be deported.
Whoa! Who could dream up a more shocking miscarriage of justice?
“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” she said at a news conference after being released from jail on a $2,500 bond. “I was treated like a criminal. Like a threat to the nation.”
Jessica is exactly the type of immigrant our nation needs. She melded into U.S. society, showed academic excellence and is just months away from becoming a productive university graduate. Yet our laws would punish her harshly for a crime her parents committed a decade ago: The crime of coming to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and for Jessica.
This nation of immigrants has forgetten its history; turned its back on its heritage.
As Sen. John McCain of Arizona learned to understand before today’s hate-poisoned politics corrupted him, our current immigration law not only doesn’t work, it is amoral at best and immoral much of the time.
There are between 11 million and 12 million undocumented aliens living in the U.S. No one pretends it would be possible to bring them all before immigration courts or to deport them if they were found “guilty.” They have jobs, own or rent homes, spend what they don’t send back to impoverished families in their native countries in American places of business. Because it would be an economic disaster to disqualify them from employment — but play into the hands of political extremists to deal with all of those millions in some realistic way — Congress contents itself with talking about the problem every so often and then moving on to safer ground.
In the meantime, Jessica gets hammered for being a self-disciplined bright young woman who wants nothing more than to become a citizen of the nation her family has tried to make its own.
THERE ARE literally millions who, like Jessica, live on the edge, not knowing when they may have their lives devastated by imprisonment or deportation or both.
We must do better. President George W. Bush wanted to do better and asked for reforms that would provide a path to citizenship for illegals already in our country, some for decades. Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. McCain backed a bill to accomplish that goal.
Then hate and anger took over and the recession fertilized anti-immigrant fury.
We should let Jessica become the antidote.
Immigration reform should start with carefully managed amnesty for those who have been in the U.S. for years, have paid taxes, stayed out of jail, bought homes, educated their children, become everything but citizens.
Realistic quotas based on the ability of the nation to employ new workers and absorb new families should be established. Temporary worker programs don’t work because there is no effective, humane way to require them to return to their home countries when the jobs they were hired to do are completed.
Border security should be improved. Laws against the employment of undocumented workers should be vigorously enforced and the nation’s employment tax system should be used to identify illegals. Meaningful punishment of employers who violate the immigration laws is the quickest, most effective way to stop the flow of illegals into the nation — no jobs equals no immigrants.
With Jessica in mind, we should move toward an immigration policy that honors our own immigrant forefathers before they haunt us into decency.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
