Yesterday, on a party-line 23-to-15 vote, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee approved legislation sponsored by its chair, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), billed as cracking down on illegal immigration. According to Jacob Sullum, reporting at Reason “Hit and Run” (Dec. 8), the bill as brought up in committee:
would impose a three-year mandatory minimum sentence on anyone who, with an expectation of financial gain, “assists, encourages, directs, or induces” two or more foreigners to illegally reside in the U.S. The penalty rises to five years if the encouragement leads to a crime punishable by more than a year in prison. Families Against Mandatory Minimums notes that “the five-year mandatory minimum will nearly always apply because the bill would also increase the maximum penalty for illegal entry to a year and a day and provides mandatory minimum penalties of one to 10 years for those who reenter the country following deportation.”
It appears from the bill’s text (PDF) that the prohibition on “encouraging” or “assisting” illegals to remain in this country is by no means meant to reach only persons who engage in organized long-distance smuggling of aliens; the requisite “expectation of financial gain” from the continued presence of an alien couple might consist (or so it appears) of reaping the benefit of employing one member of the couple in, say, a housekeeping, gardening or home-repair capacity (Judiciary press release, Washington Post).
7 Comments
crazy… something stalin would of approved.
Excellent, at last a means to get tough against people employing or otherwise helping illegal aliens (including “special interest” groups helping them and politicians giving them free housing and healthcare).
Lacking the time or training to wade through 160+ pages of legal talk, I will comment based on the post.
If the bill makes it a crime to KNOWINGLY assist illegal aliens, I don’t see a major problem with the idea. I do have a problem with mandatory minimum sentences in most cases and have one here as well.
And if the law’s phrasing uses the increase in the penalty for illegal entry to reduce the cases that qualify for the 3 year minimum to a null set, the authors should be run out of office for deliberate deceit or incompetence.
I’m not to crazy about minimum sentences but I must say this sounds like a step in the right direction. I just had a customer in the office that’s a journeyman with 20 years experience. He lost his job to a mexican that was willing to work for next to nothing. He is having trouble finding a new job because the shops are full of mexicans. I haven’t been active in the construction business in 10 years so I don’t know first hand but this guy tells me that here in the southeast the construction trades are being taken over by illegal workers. They are not all “doing jobs that Americans won’t take” as some have claimed. I do know that a new natural gas pipeline was recently run down 50 miles of highway that I drive often and that 95 percent of the workers I saw on that project were mexicans. I’m just guessing but I’ll bet most of them were illegals.
A rare case of disagreement – your headline is not quite honest. “encouraging them to stay for financial gain” just doesn’t sound as good, eh?
In my opinion, the “for financial gain” part is actually not strict enough, but it’s certainly there in that law, making it so common-sense that I just don’t see the problem (except perhaps for the mandatory minimum, which some people object to always, in principle).
Blawg Review #36
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Well, are there any illegals who don’t stay for financial purposes (mainly if not exclusively)?
Some may come over for educating their kids, but that’s really a financial purpose as it means a higher income for those kids in the future đŸ˜‰