With immigration reform stalled in Congress, perhaps it is time to take a look at what Representative Tom Tancredo calls “a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation.”

The House bill Tancredo supports would make about 12 million illegal immigrants felons along with anyone who tries to assist them. While popular amongst the far right, no one has yet explained how we would manage to round up and deport all these people.

While such draconian measures will probably never be enacted, the bill represents pandering to the extreme right that characterizes the current debate on immigration reform. It seems the biggest fear among conservatives is that these workers will get amnesty and have the opportunity to become full citizens.

“Amnesty” has become the scarlet letter in Congress lately as politicians do whatever it takes to avoid its label. Even if they called it “gay marriage” the position couldn’t carry more of a stigma.

In fact, while the Senate bill allows for a 12-year process in which citizenship could be earned by illegals, it has been criticized for being too soft and “amnesty-like.” But what would be the effects of amnesty?

Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants in the 1980s and what happened? The economy boomed and the immigrants gradually were assimilated into American culture.

Popular in Europe, such programs have resulted in a disaffected and jobless immigrant youth population ripe for radicalization. A program like this won’t fix immigration.

Harvard economist George Borjas recently completed a study that suggests illegal immigration pushes wages down and that “children of Mexican immigrants don’t advance quickly.”

While this could easily be blamed on America’s disastrous public education system, I believe it is simply a reflection of the way we have gone about addressing the immigration question for years.

Thus far, the primary strategy seems to be to gradually treat Spanish-speaking immigrants with more and more contempt. Measures like the recent house bill and the vigilante justice of the “Minutemen” independently patrolling the border seem to be an attempt to make life in America really bad for the illegals. But proponents of this strategy fail to realize why Mexicans are pouring across the border: Because life in Mexico sucks and no matter how bad we treat them, there is still food here and a shot at the American dream.

Americans have grown up believing that dream can become a reality for anyone, yet when Mexicans want a shot at it, the dream suddenly becomes the exclusive property of native-born citizens.

On the other side of the issue, immigration reform has resulted in some strange bedfellows. President Bush has advocated a guest worker program – a far more moderate approach than his base would like.

Why? Because even more important than his right-wing base are the interests of big business.

The guest worker program keeps the immigrants from getting the benefits of citizenship yet still allows them to be legally exploited by businesses for minimum wage. As George Borjas asserts, “what immigration really does is redistribute wealth away from workers toward employers.”

David Card of the University of California Berkley asks, “Is the new immigration really so bad?” His findings suggest that with immigration comes increased investment and new firms which ultimately results in higher wages. “Overall, evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant,” he claims.

During the major immigration waves in the early 1900s, the U.S. needed lots of cheap labor to build stuff like the Hoover Damn.

These days, the country is pretty well built, so we tell the immigrants to take a hike. Unless you’re a Native-American, your family came here from somewhere else as well.

So let’s keep the immigration issue in perspective and have some compassion for people whose big dreams are as modest as finding work in the land of the free.

Send comments to Jon at [email protected].