Sound public policy should trump sound bites in immigration debate

May 10, 2010

An amendment intended to ban illegal immigrants from accessing public services was proposed during our House budget deliberations during the last week of April. While it would have been politically expedient for me to vote for this amendment given the strong feelings about immigration, I voted to further study the amendment because of my concern it would not have the intended effect and would have been detrimental to my district and the Commonwealth. I am not willing to vote for bad public policy for appearance sake or to win an election.

The proposed amendment was taken almost verbatim from a similar law passed in Colorado. I took the time to read the complete text of the amendment and to research its implementation in Colorado. What I discovered was that the law ended up costing the taxpayers of Colorado millions of dollars in implementation costs and that it did not have the desired effect of saving taxpayer money. Colorado discovered that illegal immigrants rarely apply for public services because they are afraid of being discovered and deported.

During debate I asked the representative filing the amendment how much the law would cost the taxpayers to implement and he replied that he didn't know. If there is one thing that is critical during a budget debate, it is to have hard numbers for associated costs and savings. I also raised concerns on the scope of the language that seems to require a costly immigration screening for something as simple as a person entering the door of a public library. It was clear to me that the amendment had not been properly researched or vetted.

The House voted to send the amendment to study which is a polite way of telling the representative filing the amendment that more work has to be done to understand the bill's impact before it will be considered. A bill of this magnitude needs to be analyzed for implementation costs and expected savings. It needs to go through a fact-finding public hearing and legal review process. Colorado's experience shows that the bill is seriously flawed in its current form.

I talk with people every day who are fed up with partisan bickering. I was saddened, but not surprised, when my vote to send this amendment to study was trumpeted as a pro-illegal immigrant vote with little or no consideration given to my comments on the actual content of the amendment and its cost to the taxpayers. Coming up with sound bites is easy but developing sound public policy is a much more difficult and time-consuming process.