"No legal line to United States citizenship"for aliens as touted by GWB and Sean Hannity

"Non-preference" (open) immigration to the United States was ended in 1965 with immigration law proposed by JFK before his assassination and implemented by LBJ. Since 1965 an alien can only immigrate to the US if the alien has an "immediate relative" in the US or a "skill we need." (An additional small number of aliens are admitted to the US each year as refugees or diversity lottery winners.)

An immediate relative is the mother, father, sister, brother, or spouse of a United States citizen or the spouse or child of a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) alien. A "skill we need" is skill certified by the Department of Labor as not being readily available in defined places by defined employers in the US. An example would be a nurse in Burlington, Vermont. Unskilled labor such as farm field workers is not considered a "skill we need."

This means that there is "no legal line to US citizenship" that an alien inside or outside the US can get on to become a US citizen, or even an LPR.

Of the 6.2 billion people in the world outside the US it is safe to say that "non-preference" (open) immigration would result in at least a billion immigrants to the US. This would be more than 3 times the present US population of about 300 million.

Right now the only "preference" for immigration to the US is walking (or running) across the US/Mexico border. Aliens from Africa, The Middle East, South America, India, China, Europe, Russia, and elsewhere cannot just get on a plane and upon arrival at a US airport simply walk (or run) past Immigration Inspectors into the US. This is true even if these illegal immigrants are "good people, who would pay their taxes, and would do work that Americans don't want to do."

The difficult to accept answer to illegal immigration is that there must be a penalty for violation of immigration law just as there is a penalty for robbing a bank of $5,000. The penalty must be arrest, detention, and removal from the US of the illegal alien who has "stolen" something more valuable than $5,000, namely, the precious opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America.

Norman Henry, guest contributor