The federal bureaucracy could not manage an amnesty.

A massive bureaucracy would be required to administer an amnesty program. The cost and manpower necessary to process millions of applications, screen out fraud, and carry out meaningful background checks, would likely costs tens of billions of dollars. In fact, symptomatic of the culture of irresponsibility that has gripped Washington, no amnesty proponent has ever bothered to even estimate the costs.

State and local governments are even less able to manage the costs of amnesty.

Most of the costs for an illegal alien amnesty would be borne by cash-strapped state and local governments. At a time when revenues are way down as a result of declining real estate values and rising unemployment, and social costs are rising because more people are using benefits and services, amnesty could bankrupt many states and localities. Nobody knows how many (because nobody has bothered to ask), but amnesty would inevitably result in millions of new kids crowding into public schools and millions of new medically uninsured relying on public health care. Because of the educational level and job skills of most illegal aliens, they would remain heavily subsidized even after they are brought “out of the shadows.”

Government mandated immigration must also be reduced.

Insanely, even as our economy has been shedding jobs at an alarming rate (some 750,000 so far this year), not only isn’t Washington adjusting legally mandated immigration downward, they are pushing for increases. Even as the economy was collapsing around them, the House Immigration Subcommittee approved a measure to “recapture” some 570,000 unissued green cards going back to 1992, while in the Senate Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) single-handedly prevented reauthorization of the E-Verify system in order to force the issuance of these new green cards. Instead of adding 570,000 new immigrants – on top of the million or so we are already admitting legally – at a time when our economy and labor market are contracting, the numbers should be reduced to reflect the harsh new economic realities.

The common denominator among all the factors that have led to this national (and probably global) crisis is the complete abandonment by financial institutions and the government of any sense that they have any responsibility beyond the next quarter’s profit sheet or the next election. Immigration is a prime example to the sort of self-interested policies that helped create the current situation, and which must be changed if we are ever to find our way out of this morass.