Why the Tea Party Movement Must Oppose Illegal Immigration and Amnesty

By Ronald W. Mortensen, (Part II of II)

Ronald W. Mortensen, PhD, is a retired career U.S. Foreign Service Officer and former Society for Human Resource Management senior executive.

The fact that American citizens suffer very real and very serious consequences including having their credit ruined, having arrest records wrongfully attached to their names, being saddled with income tax liabilities for income earned by illegal aliens under their Social Security numbers, being denied government benefits, and having their medical records compromised with potentially life-threatening consequences is unfortunate but unavoidable.

It should not come as a surprise that those on the left show unwavering support for millions of illegal aliens who have no allegiance to the United States. After all, illegal aliens are malleable and highly vulnerable. The left can, therefore, readily gain their loyalty by telling them that they are victims of racism, of racial profiling, of American imperialism, and of an unfair capitalistic system.

The progressives, liberals, social justice advocates, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce support people unlawfully in the United States. They provide them with taxpayer-funded benefits and they promise illegal aliens a path to citizenship.

For those who are working to fundamentally change America's free market system and restrict individual liberty, illegal aliens provide another means of increasing the culture of dependency that allows the left to expand its power.

Legalizing millions of illegal aliens and allowing them to bring in as many as 103 million family members over 20 years would fundamentally transform the United States socially, economically, and politically, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and greatly expand entitlement spending.

Perhaps most importantly for the left, illegal aliens and their family members have no allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and little understanding of the importance of limited government. Legalizing millions of illegal aliens is likely to provide added support for the concept of a "living Constitution" and for a greatly expanded role for government.

Taken together, all of these things make it possible for the progressives, liberals, and social justice advocates to achieve their overriding goals of radically changing the Constitution, creating a culture of dependency, vastly expanding federal power, further weakening the rule of law, diminishing individual freedom, and destroying the free market economy.

The left and the other advocates for illegal aliens try to hide what they are doing by labeling the Tea Parties and others who disagree with them as racists, nativists, restrictionists, xenophobes, and as hate groups.

Those on the left talk about compassion and yet they show no compassion for the millions of people who obey our laws and wait years to legally enter the United States or who die while waiting for their turn.

They talk about justice yet they deny justice to millions of Americans who are the victims of illegal-alien job-related identity theft by ignoring these crimes and extending amnesty to those committing job-related felonies as long as they are in the United States illegally.

They talk about racism while supporting an effectively racist illegal immigrant policy that favors one ethnic group over all other races, religions, and ethnicities.

They talk about helping the poor, while turning their backs on the poorest and most desperate people in the world.

And then they put forth a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan that rewards illegal aliens with a path to citizenship. Under the left's plan, anyone illegally in the United States would pay an insignificant $500 fine, pay a year or two of back taxes, be required to learn English, and be given total amnesty from job-related identity theft.

The left portrays their amnesty plan as compassionate and just; however, it is neither.

It would leave the millions of American citizens who are victims of illegal-alien identity theft to recover their good names and their lives without any help from the government that is supposed to protect and defend them.