Speech #980210494

This was the fear that caused suspicion and finally. outright exclusion to be directed against Orientals who had come into the West to help build the great transcontinental railroads. It was this fear that drove the Mormons out of Illinois and into their own world of Utah. It was this fear that resulted in the school of thought that came to be known as social Darwinism. which concludednot surprisinglythat people who most closely resembled the dominant social groups of the day were superior to all othersthe Italians who were then crowding into America. and the Slavs who were then becoming immigrants in large numbers. It was this fear of the different. this xenophobia. that led to the use of racial classes. the preference system. establishing immigration limits and quotas. Justified by the social Darwinists. this was the system that allowed many immigrant visas for people who came from England and other lands thought to be peopled with superior human stock but virtually none for anyone who came from the Orient. any part of the Orient. Indeed. the first restrictions on immigration were enacted for the same basic reasons that we are here todaythe fear that our country could not absorb more people. and the desire to prevent different cultures from some imaginary takeover of all that was held good and proper. The first purpose of the Immigration Act of 1965 was to eliminate the old racist preference system. and to replace it with a system that seemed less discriminatory. But because the new. 1965 system was based on giving preference to individuals who happened already to have relatives here. the effect was to preserve the same old quotas. That socalled reform then made it absolutely certain that immigration would not change the face of this land by imposing. for the first time ever. a quota on immigration from this hemisphere. This was no accident. immigration from Latin America was beginning by 1965 to grow to large numbers. and the idea was to shut the gates. to be certain that immigration did not get out of hand. And so it was that a large country like Mexico was given an immigration quota no different from Icelands. The 1965 Immigration Act created fresh new problems. because its principal effect was to make legal entry all but impossible for Latin Americans who did not have very close relatives already in the United States. Today. the waiting list for immigrant visas in Mexico is backlogged by 314.000 names. Under the SimpsonMazzoli Act. about 40.000 a year could be admittedthe backlog would never grow smaller. What SimpsonMazzoli does is to continue the greatest error of the 1965 lawit continues to make legal entry all but impossible for citizens of Mexico who cannot claim first or second preference status. It therefore makes inevitable the continued largescale entry of people without documents. These immigrants have precious little choice. if they want to come to this countryand they desperately dothen they have no realistic choice but to come here illegally. The bill attempts to solve this by taking away employment opportunitessetting up penalties for those who knowingly employ undocumented workers. But the bill does not require all employers in all cases to check documents of prospective employees. nor does it prescribe a standard document that all applicants would have to present. Instead. it requires only those employers who have been warned by the Immigration Service to check documents and keep records. and even then it does not provide for a standard. uniform document. Thus. the bill creates a system that will not discourage those who routinely hire illegal aliens. Those employers know how limited the resources of the Immigration Service are. how unlikely it is that they will be detected. And they also know that the SimpsonMazzoli Act imposes only the mildest of penalties for all but the most flagrant violators. So those who routinely use undocumented workers will not in the least be discouraged by the enactment of this bll. But those who are looking for some excuse to discriminate against anyone who happens to have a foreign look. are handed the perfect excuse. They will be able to say. "Sorry. but I dont think your birth certificate is real." They will be able to discriminate at will. and with the perfect excuse that they are merely trying to be lawabiding.