Healthcare: The Mean-ing Of America and President Obama’s Right thing To Do

President Obama’s speech to National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on June 22nd offered few surprises as he hollered about the “right thing” to do. While it was interesting to see the usually unruffled President use a scolding voice to attack Republicans for thwarting adoption of the Dream Act it was also ridiculous to listen to him talk about the illegal immigrant “young” people as the hope of our country and rightfully entitled to exclusion from immigration laws since they’re here through “no fault of their own” as justification for his Executive Order.

These young people may have not been lawbreakers through choice in their years of minority but as adults, they are lawbreakers. Similarly to adult children who are held responsible for their own illegal conduct, the fact that their parents are lawbreakers doesn’t mean that as adults they should get a pass on breaking the law.

Many of the articles and interviews have discussed undocumented young people driving without licenses. Surely they knew they were breaking the law. Many young people have described using fake IDs, again certainly aware they were breaking the law. Are these derivative crimes also OK simply because the illegal immigrants didn’t get caught? Are their employers also relieved of responsibility for hiring illegal immigrants?

In healthcare this “through no fault of their own” standard has enormous implications for saving families money. Children with inherited disease of any variety certainly got that disease through no fault of their own, should they not be exempt from ever facing higher premiums simply because they were born to parents with a specific disease? Yet under the Affordable Care Act these children will face the cost of higher premiums throughout their adult lives.

People who began smoking as children, frequently with parental acknowledgment and permission or those who learned bad eating habits that have made them heavy from childhood, are they suffering through “no fault of their own” simply because they continue the undesirable behavior into adulthood? Should they never be penalized for smoking or being heavy since arguably their initial exposure was through “no fault of their own”?

The President’s Executive Order, far from being the “Right thing to Do,” is a wrong thing he did. He criticized the Republicans for using legitimate although questionable process to block passage of the “Dream Act” while justifying his own use of legitimate although questionable process to get around current immigration law.

Is it not unfair age discrimination to give this pass to young people without providing it to any illegal immigrant? Is that not ageism especially since there is no established standard of proof being provided for how the young person illegally entered the country? What about 16-year-olds who arrive and claim they’ve been here five years with family members or acquaintances already in the US, does that qualify as “through no fault of their own”?

And what of the children born to young women during their period of amnesty? Will such children become automatic US citizens who then allow their lawbreaking parents a permanent means of avoiding immigration law because keeping families together is also “the right thing to do”? Will the law also apply to fathers named on birth certificates or will young illegal immigrant males be discriminated against based on gender?

In healthcare, will these new citizens be eligible for federal programs for children though their parents are not US citizens because their parents worked their way around immigration law and rendered them citizens?

Mitt Romney and the Republicans have done little better on this front with their carving out of exceptions for application of our immigration laws.

Yet one must ask in this age of credit reports, background checks, electronic medical records and bank accounts often exposing individuals to unintended publication or misreporting of personal information why is that neither states nor the Federal government have uniformly required E-verify by all employers or provide for hefty fines against those employers? That seems to be about politics and money and not “the right thing to do.”

The truth is that there’s been little money accumulated by our government in enforcing our immigration laws including the expense to government for prosecuting illegal immigration to the desired goal of deportation.

Enforcement and strengthening of fines on employers failing to use E-verify would help solve this problem. These fines should include the costs of deporting individuals in addition to their punitive portion. Illegal immigrants are not surviving here without multiple scams going on in multiple places and chief among them is in employment.

(E-verify has met many challenges based on claims of invasion of privacy, mistakes, and claims that the program is difficult to use. Yet US citizens face these same pitfalls when they are exposed to credit reports, electronic medical records and even online bank accounts. Currently medical identity theft is resulting in individuals being referred to different facilities for treatment because their credit check at a hospital comes up with negative marks. It is more likely that it is the nature of the objectors to E-verify who are significant including builder associations. Currently E-verify is voluntary in many states and not law at all in others.)

Instead of arguing that illegal immigrants do jobs that other Americans would not do which is absurd and unproven since there is little documentation concerning the offering of jobs to legal citizens versus illegal citizens. It’s time to get real and acknowledge that E-verify’s failure to catch on is primarily because it would expose employers that are knowingly employing illegal immigrants. After all, how else could they assert that no US citizen would take a job unless they could determine whether job applicants are citizens or not?

We should support strengthening laws against employers who do not perform due diligence in verifying their employees. An effective fine system that brings in revenue would support government efforts in enforcing immigration laws because it would be profitable for the government.

Republicans hesitate to enforce immigration laws against employers because they fear losing votes from big business. Democrats avoid enforcing immigration laws because they fear losing the votes of populations with large numbers of illegal immigrants.

In an age where every citizen is told that they’ll have to endure some financial setback because we’re in a terrible economic crisis, affording illegal immigrants the opportunity to step into a system that they likely have not contributed to in taxes and other citizen obligations because it’s the right thing to do is not persuasive. Today the mean-ing of America requires careful allocation of limited resources and neither Mitt Romney’s insistence on rewarding the rich or President Obama’s belligerent pursuit of his own priorities at taxpayer expense makes the grade.