A Pathway to Amnesty

National Review Online

Monday, July 21, 2025

 

Representative María Elvira Salazar (R., Fla.) is sponsoring immigration legislation, the “Dignity Act,” that has a few welcome provisions. It envisions a healthy budget for modernizing border infrastructure and funding ICE. By requiring companies to use the E-Verify system to ensure everyone hired has legal status, the legislation would immediately discourage illegal employers and laborers from seeking each other out.

 

Those provisions are, however, entirely and fatally undermined elsewhere in the bill. Taken as a whole, this latest attempt at comprehensive immigration reform is a cure worse than the disease.

 

Supporters of the Dignity Act claim that the bill does not offer amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. By that they mean it does not offer full citizenship. But the bill does offer a form of legal resident status to millions of illegal immigrants. This is the core of “amnesty”: a promise that the normal consequence of an infraction (in the context of illegal immigration, that’s deportation) will be stopped, and the object of the infraction (the ability to live and work in the U.S.) gained.

 

Passing this bill would be the first official step toward creating a permanent resident underclass with a perpetually renewable legal status that falls short of citizenship. It is the kind of arrangement — undermining free and fair competition in the labor market — that the Republican Party was founded to oppose.

 

The American republic does not want and is not fit for a racialized helot class. Such an arrangement would also be a powerful magnet for entering the country illegally. Come one, come all, and keep low for seven years, then watch as your children and children’s children live as American citizens. You yourself may qualify for future legal status, once our political class has established the precedent that “dignity” calls for nothing less.

 

Some of the bill’s enforcement mechanisms seem designed precisely to mollify restrictionists but be abandoned in practice, such as ten-year sentences for using false documents or aiding criminal crossings by acting as a spotter. (Are judges really going to dedicate limited prison space for this?) Advocates of the bill will try to highlight headline-grabbing penalty enhancements in order to give the bill the appearance of “toughness.” This is in fact an insult to the American people who do not desire the appearance of cruelty but the reality of firmness and fairness.

 

In the 20 years that Congress has been trying to make a version of “amnesty now plus enforcement some time in the future” sound like a good deal, the rest of the world has moved on. Border infrastructure is hardening almost everywhere, according to studies of satellite images and the evidence from the Border Crossings of the World dataset. This is not a surprise. The costs of emigration have gone down, and the rewards of it have become all the more apparent. Democratic publics want a system that is fair and that works for their long-term interests, and they are forcing governments to respond with measures of restriction and control.

 

Congress should read the signs of the time and reject this bill as yet another attempt to sneak mass amnesty by an American people who have been demanding law and order for decades.