We must be very careful to find a way to build on the momentum generated during the massive anti-amnesty protests that shut down the Bush-Kennedy amnesty legislation in Congress last summer.

The American public must be prevented from being lulled to sleep by tough sounding, but ultimately ineffective congressional legislation regarding border security and illegal immigration.

For example, there is a new bill that is receiving widespread support from anti-illegal immigration organizations. This bill, H.R. 4088, known as the Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007 (SAVE Act of 2007), was introduced in the House by Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) on November 6. Two companion bills were introduced in the Senate on November 15. Although this bill sounds good by providing for increased numbers of border patrol agents, better surveillance technology, better employee verification, and better interior immigration enforcement, there has already been some harsh criticism from Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, regarding this bill’s connections with the Real ID Act, among other things.

Nonetheless, the bigger problem with H.R. 4088 is that it is based on tweaking our existing immigration laws in a way that makes it appear that Congress is working hard to solve the illegal immigration problem. The real problem, however, is that Congress has allowed the executive branch to refuse to enforce our existing immigration laws for the past couple decades. How will this change if Congress passes a new immigration law that simply fine tunes our current immigration laws?

Instead, Congress must earn our confidence in their stated intention of tackling the illegal immigration crisis by including in their bills the following four essential measures in addition to the necessary steps of physically securing the border, enforcing visa rules, verifying citizenship status for employment, ending welfare for illegal immigrants, etc:

1. End birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants in the U.S., thereby eliminating one of the primary incentives for illegal immigration into the U.S.;
2. Block the North American Union (NAU) by defunding and dismantling the Security and Prosperity Partnership and all other government programs that are being used in the process of creating an open borders NAU merger of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada (a good start in this direction would be congressional passage of H.C.R. 40);
3. Repeal NAFTA, the legal platform upon which the open borders NAU merger process is being developed (a good start in this direction would be congressional passage of H.C.R. 22); and
4. Establish a moratorium on the consideration of any legislation regarding amnesty (legalization of status in any form) for illegal immigrants and temporary worker (or guest worker) programs until both the President and Congress can certify that illegal immigration has been brought under control for several consecutive years. (Click here for H.R. 946, introduced in the House in 2003 for a similar purpose.)

Until Congress includes the four provisions outlined above in their attempts to control illegal immigration, we must continue to warn the American public against congressional attempts to lull them to sleep by halfway measures.

Click here to send Congress a message along the lines of this article.