Mr. Proft and Mr. Schakowsky Agree: De Facto Amnesty for Illegals

It was a wild Sunday on WLS talk radio. I put on the Sony Walkman to drown out the ambient noise in Legion Park while trying to read Alvah Simon's riveting account of his solo adventures in the Arctic.

But the banter on both Tom Roeser's "Political Shootout" and on Dan Proft's virgin solo foray into radio talk turned to Arizona and the illegal alien question.

I didn't get much reading done.

What was most disturbing was an identical assertion made by extreme leftist, Bob Creamer (Cong. Jan Schakowsky's convicted felon husband) and ostensible conservative, Proft.

They both repeatedly and quite casually said, "There is no way we are going to be able to deport the 11 million illegal aliens already here."

This is the new shibboleth being propounded by both leftists who lust after a new lumpenproletariat voting bloc and Chamber of Commerce types who crave their next cheap labor fix.

But it's not true.

We can deport substantial numbers of the illegal alien squatters and can effect self deportation of most of the rest.

I'm not talking about draconian measures like President Eisenhower's "Operation Wetback" which rounded up illegals en masse and bused them back home.

But serious enforcement of existing law (including ongoing deportation) and comprehensive removal of employment and social service possibilities could readily effect removal of those who have effectively ignored our sovereign laws.

When the magnets which attract and keep illegal populations here disappear many will self-deport.

This has happened before in our history. During the darkest days of the Great Depression, tens of thousands of persons who had recently legally immigrated to the USA, faced with bleak job prospects and minimal government assistance, simply packed up and headed home.

According to the political scientist Leuchtenburg, during the dark depression years of 1930-31, the numbers of recent immigrants boarding ships for a return to Europe averaged 5,000 a month.

3,000 American immigrants actually even took up the Soviet Russian government's offer of jobs and resettlement in the workers' utopia. Seems they had full employment in the gulag state.

We have no reason to believe that self-deportation would not correspondingly occur today if all incentives to stay were eliminated. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argue that as many as 50 percent of illegals would leave voluntarily if the government were to initiate an aggressive deportation policy.

When conservative Proft and leftist, Creamer, blithely assert that deportation is impossible, they are simply paving the way for yet another mass amnesty by asserting the impracticality of any alternative.

Amnesty as with the word amnesia is from the classical Greek word for 'forget.'

Either way you cut it, if you believe that deportation is impractical as with Proft or undesirable as with Creamer, you are advocating an amnesty -- that we just forget that they came illegally.

Proft may envision some scheme whereby the illegal invaders may have to pay a tax and perhaps, pretend to learn English. And Creamer may just want to legalize them all and register them to vote tomorrow, but by conceding the inevitability of their continued presence -- by refusing to consider serious enforcement and removal of incentives to stay -- they're both advocating amnesty. They're both telling us to just forget about the fact that our laws have been broken wholesale and our borders and sovereignty as a nation trampeled.

A vote on amnesty for illegal aliens is unlikely in this, an election year. The American people are overwhelmingly against it.

But if it's somehow rammed through in the future, it could well have the most societally disruptive and disasterous consequences to have been experienced in this country since the period 1861-65.