Last chance on immigration reform?(THE LAST WORD)

This is it. The battle that has been raging over immigration is headed down to the wire. Very soon, Congress will vote on a bill that will pretty much cast in stone our immigration policies for the foreseeable future. If we take the 20th century as an indicator, we see that revision of our immigration law only takes place about once every 20 years: the 1920s, 1940s, 1960s, 1980s. The last two immigration "reform" laws--in 1965 and 1986--have been unmitigated disasters for the United States and delirious victories for the "break down the border" lobbies, comprised of two seemingly dissimilar, but allied, forces: radical-left Hispanic groups and corporate globalists.

Those allied forces have a powerful ally in the White House and a bipartisan cast of collaborators in the House and Senate. If President Bush and his fellow break-down-the-border partners in Congress have their way, we will be locked into a repeat of the disastrous 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), but on an even greater and more damaging scale. If we allow that to happen, it is not an exaggeration to say that we could be looking at the beginning of the end of our nation. We cannot even sustain another 20 years of the status quo, let alone the drastic escalation of both legal and illegal immigration that would result from the various so-called reform proposals under consideration.

Recently, this writer stood on the U.S.-Mexico border just south of San Diego, at the port of San Ysidro, California. Actually, I was in the office of Customs Port Director James A. Hynes, located on the bridge that spans U.S. Interstate 5. Through a wall of plate glass, we had a front-row view of the endless lines of vehicles creeping into the U.S. beneath our feet. San Ysidro, directly across the border from Tijuana, is the busiest land border port in the world: approximately 65,000 cars and approximately 45,000 pedestrians enter the United States there every day.

Twenty years ago I stood in the same office with one of Director Hynes' predecessors, looking through the plate glass at the same surging phenomenon, on the eve of the historic 1986 IRCA vote. The promise then--by a coalition of Democrat and Republican politicians and their allies--was that in exchange for a one-time amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens already here, they would provide adequate resources and manpower to secure our borders against the ongoing invasion. IRCA passed. The open borders coalition got their "one-time" amnesty up front (and a couple additional amnesties thereafter), but quickly reneged on the promised border enforcement. As we had predicted, the illegal ...