US Senator Jim DeMint has sounded off with some more commone sense on the 
immigration issue again, this time in a USA Today op-ed entitled "We won't be fooled again". From the column [3]:
Check out the entire thing. In short, the heart of the problem is not illegal immigration, or a lack of laws to deal with the problem...but lack of enforcement of the laws that are on the books. What makes that so much worse is that it's no accident.We do not need the Senate immigration bill to secure the border.Congress has already passed laws authorizing border security, but the Homeland Security Department has failed to fully implement them. The administration already has the authority to build hundreds of miles of border fencing, hire and train 6,000 border patrol agents (bringing the total number of agents to 18,000), end catch and release and create a national employment verification database. Essentially, all of the security benchmarks in the current Senate bill are already law.
Unfortunately, proponents of this bill would have us believe that none of these security measures can be implemented unless we pass a bill that grants amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. In short, security is being held hostage in return for amnesty.
What's worse is that backers of this bill are hoping Americans have a short memory.
In 1986, the government was trying to figure out how to deal with a porous southern border and roughly 3million illegal aliens who resided in America as a result.
It was decided that granting amnesty was acceptable as long as the border was made secure and immigration laws on the books were enforced.
Looking back, we see that amnesty was granted, but the border was never secured.
