Immigration

This Monday, a Los Angeles court will decide whether Jonathan Martinez, 10, who illegally arrived in the US two years ago, will be deported to El Salvador, or allowed to stay with his legal mother in California. Martinez left El Salvador at the age of eight when the aunt he was staying with was hospitalized. Since then, she has left El Salvador and Martinez’s mother contends that he has no one in that country with whom to stay. While his mother has been living and working in Los Angeles legally for several years, a loophole in current immigration law does not allow her to apply for her son’s permanence.

This loophole represents an unfortunate but common example in America’s poorly constructed immigration laws, which are in desperate need of complete revamping. These laws should reflect a strong commitment to the Rule of Law, or the idea that the Law applies equally to everyone, but also give authorities the ability to take in to consideration extenuating circumstances.

Martinez’s case is one of extenuating circumstance. Here we have a ten year old boy (who has more courage than most full grown men in coming so far), whose family has essentially abandoned him and whom if returned to El Salvador would have no home to go to. To send this child back to El Salvador would be terrible judgment on behalf of the court and echo the American tragedy of Elian Gonzalez.

But this issue must be put in the larger context of America’s immigration woes. While massive amounts of illegal immigrants pour over the border every day, the two houses of Congress have failed to reconcile their different bills in defiance of American will and interest. America requires a comprehensive immigration plan that provides a guest worker program and stringent enforcement of our borders. To ignore the need for these is to ignore any far reaching solution to this issue. Radicals on both sides of the aisle provide a disservice to our country when they only support one or the other.

While law and order conservatives oppose any guest worker program, they fail to realize the need for workers who do the jobs that most American citizens won’t. The argument that immigrants steal American jobs is a false one. The current unemployment rate is approximately 4.7%. Any reasonable economist will tell you that this number is as good as zero.

While open border liberals will support nothing but amnesty and bi-lingual education, they fail to realize the need to seriously patrol and enforce our borders. Terrorists, criminals and drug dealers are not stupid. If they can get in to our country via unguarded border rather than through security ridden airports and other legal ports of entry, they will do so. Stringent enforcement of our borders is necessary to protect our homeland.

Of course immigration is a significantly larger and more complex topic whose intricacies can not be dealt with in such a small space, but the Los Angeles court which will be deciding on Martinez’s case on Monday have the opportunity to make a statement: America recognizes the illegality of your being here, but America also has a heart. By allowing this courageous boy to stay in America, the court would also make the statement that America understands what it did to Elian Gonzalez was wrong, and it won’t do it again.