Senator Larry Craig
07/29/2005

Have you ever tried to watch television or read a book with one eye closed? It's not easy, is it? It's even more challenging to drive a car or play a sport with one eye shut.

We all understand that there's a good reason human beings are born with two eyes. So-called “binocular” vision allows us to see objects from two different angles simultaneously, thus enabling people to distinguish certain features and rough distances to objects. We can see with one eye, but our sight is much more effective when we use both.

The same idea applies to solving America's complex immigration challenges. In order to truly address the situation, a two or even three-pronged effort will be much more effective.

However, some anti-immigration groups continue to push for what can only be described as an enforcement-only approach to our immigration problems. They advocate sealing off our southern border and rounding up and deporting those who have arrived in the United States illegally.

First, “sealing our borders” is a slogan, not a realistic possibility for a country with 88,600 miles of tidal shoreline and 7,458 miles of land borders, much of it remote. While we must get control of our borders, this is a one-dimensional solution to a “3-D” problem.

Even as we have increased border enforcement, net illegal immigration is estimated at 400,000-500,000 a year, and some say it is rising.  Finding 10 million persons and flushing them out of homes, schools, churches and work places would require door-to-door searches of practically all American homes and intolerable intrusions on American citizens' civil liberties. We fought the American Revolution in part to prevent such interference.

Our nation's immigration system and laws are broken. A policy that focuses exclusively on more enforcement isn't enough. However, a blanket amnesty is not the answer either. That has been tried, and it has failed.

We must provide incentives for those already here to come forward and be identified, and we must reform our broken laws to allow for a supply of a legal workforce to take jobs Americans either cannot or will not take.

When American agriculture briefly had a widely-used, legal guest worker program in the 1950s, illegal immigration plummeted by 95 percent.  That old “Bracero” program was not perfect in some respects, but the fact is that it proved to be effective in more than one way.

Recognizing this, the full Senate voted 53 to 45 in April to proceed to full and fair consideration of my bipartisan AgJOBS legislation – the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act.  That was a procedural vote, but I am confident that when we have a vote on the merits of the bill itself, even more Senators will support AgJOBS.

AgJOBS is focused only on American agriculture – that sector of the economy most profoundly dependent upon undocumented workers and most vulnerable to shortages of legal workers. It is not a comprehensive solution.

AgJOBS provides a part of that “other angle” to solving the immigration problem that I mentioned above. Enforcement is important, but we also need to reform our immigration laws and establish a viable guest worker program. AgJOBS is an important first step in that process.

It is the federal government's responsibility to protect the American people through a strong national defense and effective homeland security. Strengthening the country's borders is part of that mission. In the last year, as a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, I've helped add 1,500 Border Patrol Agents.

Let's not forget that in current times threats against the national security are latent. Immigration as a whole or any possible reforms could be delayed or halted by a terrorist infiltrating the country through Mexico.

Immigration is an issue with more than one dimension.  If we are to effectively solve the challenges we face in this arena, we're going to have to use both our eyes and look at it from more than one angle.