Rather than enumerate the flaws in the elitist cheap labor agenda, the following framework outlines practical objectives to strengthen existing laws and protect American worker interests:

1. Increase work-site enforcement efforts and penalties, including stiff fines and mandatory jail time for employers (including the U.S. military) and individuals for repeated illegal hiring offenses. Without work (or job magnet), many illegals will leave (self-deport) on their own over time, and most won't attempt to come here without prospects for employment. (Effective work-site enforcement by ICE at a Georgia meat packing plant in 2006 yielded the arrest and deportation of 90 percent of the illegal workers employed at the facility. As a result, the company raised wages and improved working conditions to attract local, mostly black workers who had been displaced by illegal workers.) Lastly, allow states to augment illegal immigration work-site enforcement activities.
2. No amnesty. Do not reward people who enter or remain in the country illegally, or who commit identity fraud. The threat of identity theft places citizen's financial integrity at risk of irreparable corruption.
3. Illegals must return to their country of origin to apply for legal entrance.
4. Lower legal immigration levels from 1 million per year (1.3 million in 2006) to about 250K per year, which was the average flow of immigrants into the U.S. from 1776 though 1976, to allow the population to grow at a modest and sustainable pace. A lower migration level promotes healthy communities, where revenues can adequately service community needs for social support, education, housing, health care, transportation, energy consumption and waste disposal. Additionally, a tight labor market is the best friend workers (especially for black workers) ever had. Wages and benefits increase when employers abide by the laws of economics to compete fairly for labor.
5. Lower H-1B visas to reduce insourcing of middle-class jobs in technology, knowledge and medical occupation areas. Nursing schools are filled to the brim, yet hospitals are importing nurses from Africa and Asia. Also, many technology workers with advanced degrees are not working in their desired profession, because too many tech companies are hiring over them to reach lower salaried workers in India and China.
6. Overhaul H-2A and H-2B visas to minimize the use of so-called "guest workers." According to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, "Guest workers are usually poor people who are lured here by the promise of decent jobs. But all too often, their dreams are based on lies, their hopes shattered by the reality of a system that treats them as commodities. They're disposable workers in the global economy."
7. Promote foreign investment that values the economic security of American workers, while helping poor or labor abundant countries build responsible, sustainable economies that support their citizens where they live, so that they do not have to leave their home for better wages. This will help discourage economic policies, like those in Mexico, that rely on the remittances from its exported citizens.
8. Construct a comprehensive barrier along the border to further discourage illegal entry and, most importantly, drug trafficking.

Finally, Democrats should not throw native-born workers and legal immigrant workers overboard in order to deliver an unnecessary and undeserved "win" for Bush and his anti-labor, big-business, open-border cronies.