The career politicians love to talk about having a nationwide “E-verify system” so potential employers will be able to determine who is here legally and eligible for work and who isn’t. Certainly, this will help protect the jobs for unemployed Americans. But let’s not kid ourselves. Our “leaders” must lead on this, and engage with foreign governments to stop illegal immigration, and not simply impose something on our businesses and think that some Internet verification system alone will solve the problem.
We have to cut off federal grants to sanctuary cities—those places that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement and actually abet criminal behavior—we have to end them. I repeat, we either are a nation of laws or we’re not.
We also need to do what is necessary to enforce our visa regulations. People get a visa and come here legally, and when that visa expires, many stay here illegally. If they get caught, nothing happens to them. That’s got to change. We need to have real penalties for people who overstay their visas. I am sick and tired of hearing politicians who are all talk and no action. President Obama and his people are great at sending letters and press releases, but they never seem to have any consequences for foreign governments that don’t listen to them.
Most important is ending or curtailing so-called birthright citizenship, or anchor babies. American citizenship is an extraordinary gift. Its value over a lifetime can’t be measured. So the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment has been interpreted to mean that any child born in the United States automatically is an American citizen—and that baby can be used as an anchor to keep its family here—is the single biggest magnet attracting illegal immigrants.
The Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to be used that way. The original purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, following the Civil War, was to guarantee all rights granted to citizens in the Constitution to freed slaves. No serious historian could possibly interpret any of the supporting language in the Congressional Record that the birthright citizenship was intended for anyone other than the freed slaves.
It wasn’t until 1898 that the Supreme Court ruled that, with certain specific exceptions, the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to the children of those lawfully here who gave birth on American soil. By a huge margin, Americans want to change that policy. Even Democrat Harry Reid admitted that “no sane country” would grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. It’s estimated that about 300,000 of these children are born here annually. That’s 300,000 children who are entitled to all the rights and privileges granted to American citizens because their mothers entered this country illegally by walking over the border for a day in the south or by flying in from another country under fraudulent documentation. There are businesses that specialize in making this happen! They call it “birth tourism”—pregnant foreign women travel to this country just so that they can give birth here to babies who then automatically become American citizens.
Citizenship is not a gift we can afford to keep giving away, and I will find a legal way of stopping this policy. A lot of really smart people and lawyers believe the Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to create a whole new path to citizenship. We’re going to test it every possible way. We will win in court and we will win in Congress.
I don’t want to stop legal immigration to this country. In fact, I would like to reform and increase immigration in some important ways. Our current immigration laws are upside down—they make it tough on the people we need to have here, and easy for the people we don’t want here.
This country is a magnet for many of the smartest, hardest-working people born in other countries, yet we make it difficult for these bright people who follow the laws to settle here.
It’s amazing that people who come here to earn a master’s degree and who demonstrate wonderful skills are forced to wait on a very long line when they want to stay and contribute to this country. In fact, for a lot of them, their number may never be called. Bright young kids come here from all over the world to study in our colleges. They get the best education in the world. They graduate with honors and we hand them a diploma and a plane ticket. Their mistake is that they are honest people—they follow the law. They want to stay here, but we send them back to their countries, and ultimately they use the knowledge they gained here to compete against us.
If you’re a criminal, though, or an unskilled worker, or someone escaping criminal charges in another country, you are able to sneak into our country and in many cases get some benefits and never leave. These “enforcement” policies and this backward approach to immigration have to change. Our immigration policy needs to work to make America great again.
My immigration policy is actually pretty simple. We need to make changes to our laws to make it easier for those people who can contribute to this country to come here legally while making it impossible for criminal elements and other people to get here illegally. I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellence, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident—or citizen—of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegally.
They should—and need to—go home and get in line.
And you know who agrees with me? The Mexicans, the Chinese, and all the people from other countries who want to be here legally and can’t get a visa or fit into a quota, yet see millions of people living here illegally. They don’t understand how we can undermine our own interests.
If you have laws that you don’t enforce, then you don’t have laws. This leads to lawlessness.
We can be generous and do all of this humanely. But the security and prosperity of American citizens have to come first.
Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.
4
FOREIGN POLICY: FIGHTING FOR PEACE
THE CAREER DIPLOMATS WHO got us into many foreign policy messes say I have no experience in foreign policy. They think that successful diplomacy requires years of experience and an understanding of all the nuances that have to be carefully considered before reaching a conclusion. Only then do these pinstriped bureaucrats consider taking action.
Look at the state of the world right now. It’s a terrible mess, and that’s putting it kindly.
There has never been a more dangerous time. The so-called insiders within the Washington ruling class are the people who got us into this trouble. So why should we continue to pay attention to them?
Some of these so-called “experts” are trying to scare people by saying that my approach would make the world more dangerous.
More dangerous? More dangerous than what? More dangerous than where we are now?