HEIDI TOTH - Daily Herald | Posted: Monday, May 22, 2006 11:00 pm
It is not the job of businesses to enforce U.S. immigration laws.
But that shouldn't make them immune from the consequences of breaking those laws.
Those are just a couple of pieces of the complex immigration puzzle that U.S. Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, discussed Monday in a forum that focused almost entirely on immigration.
"It's a very, very emotional issue," he said. "For business it's not emotional, but it's huge."
While the emotions remained under control, a number of people in the audience expressed their concerns with the immigration policies in place and being discussed. A couple questioned if a fence would keep people out, since the only place it's really worked is North Korea -- but the fence was just a backup for the bullets. Increasing Border Patrol agents at the border could help, but that would only increase the manpower marginally along the 1,951-mile long border between the United States and Mexico. And neither option would stop those people from coming into the United States from its southern neighbor.
"People come in container shiploads all the time," Cannon said in response to his wife's question about patrolling the coasts. "If people want to come here, they're going to come here."
The key, he said, isn't blindly giving citizenship to everyone already in the country, but to allow the economy to grow naturally and grant citizenship, legal permanent resident and temporary worker status at a rate the economy can support.
Both the Senate's lenient bill and the House's harsh bill will be watered down by the time the resolution is passed by both houses, he said. His prediction was that the plan would include a fence along parts of the border, more Border Patrol officers, tools for businesses to check their employees, more stringent fines for mistakes or inaccuracies on employer forms and more internal law enforcement, so when a sheriff's office or police department picks up someone who has violated immigration laws, the federal government can take over.
"The real key to this happening is enforcement," Cannon said.
Another key for Provo Mayor Lewis Billings was recognizing how widespread and serious an issue immigration had become. A local business owner had come to the city after the big immigration marches in Salt Lake City and said he'd been told he needed to close in support of the demonstration and allow his employees to attend "or there would be retaliation."
"I just see things thing ratcheting up, and I think the people want something now," he said, adding that that something probably wasn't miles of chain link or barbed wire across the border. "I don't think just building fences solves the unauthorized conveyance of people into the United States."
Immigration has become a hot-button issue in Cannon's campaign; he has been under fire for being perceived as soft on immigrants. He attributed that to a lack of understanding among his critics, in which he included Republican opponent John Jacobs, of the complexity of the issues at hand.
"What we're doing technologically is massive," he said. "It just seems to me that we're missing the focus of what we ought to be."
Also discussed briefly was the possibility of losing Republican control of the House in the November elections -- "it's a pretty scary thing" -- and what would happen in Iraq if the next president is a Democrat, namely Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
Possible health care plans, federal money for Provo projects, the nuclear capabilities of Korea and Iran and the possibility of nuclear waste in Utah and bomb testing in Nevada all got a couple of minutes. Cannon said he thought the proposal to store nuclear waste on the Goshute Indian Reservation was dead, but the bomb testing in Nevada was going forward. He also reluctantly discussed a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.
"It seems stupid to go back in and build your home in an area you know is going to be a problem in the future," said Steve Densley, president of the Provo-Orem Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored the forum. "It just doesn't seem smart to spend our dollars, and I can't figure out why we're so committed."
All that Cannon would say is that the government is looking at the effects of Katrina and the different ways to handle such a crisis in the future.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.