A new immigration policy is coming to the U.S. and it isn’t floating in on an inner tube.

This week President Bush outlined plans to create new jails to make deportation a quicker process for illegal immigrants and having a “temporary worker program” that would allow immigrants to stay in the country and work at jobs “that Americans will not do.”

He insists these programs are not designed as a form of amnesty for individuals entering the country illegally.

So what is it?

This country was built on the backs of foreign laborers, many of our great-grandparents among them, and if you see any press releases involving Wal-Mart you know that the practice continues to this day.

Our government asked for the world’s tired, poor and huddled masses generations ago as a way to build the cities and networks we use in our everyday lives.

So where are those words now? What have we said for the better part of the 20th century when people poke their heads through fences and risk an ocean passage to get inside our borders?

The formation of unions to leverage employers led to pricier labor and the demand for a cheap, hardworking workforce grew.

If we had a true anti-immigration deterrent we would simply build a security fence along the Mexican border likened to the one in Israel and the West Bank.

But our contractors and managers need people to lay bricks and move soil so that our society can plant more mini-malls and gas stations.

Americans won’t take the jobs that businesses are selling because you can’t live very well on $2 per hour unless you’re off the grid and not filing a tax return.

We have no better system for detecting illegal immigrants’ movement into the states since our borders are not secure enough to keep them out.

People willing to come and break their backs aren’t being sold the American dream.

They’re the currency we use to buy it ourselves.

– Robert Lamothe is a senior biology major.