Category Archives: immigration

A Thought on $3.7 Billion

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President Barack Obama thinks it’ll take $3.7 billion to handle the explosive flood of unaccompanied children pouring over our border as a result of his decision not to enforce our existing immigration laws. Obama wants the money to plus up existing border security, illegal alien housing in the border area and elsewhere, dealing with the health problems these children are unavoidably bringing with them, transportation, handling legal matters, and so on.

Assuming the money should be spent (a position I don’t endorse, but stay with me), I have a thought on how the money should be allocated. I’d pass a $3.7 billion appropriation that allocates the money in this way:

  • $3.5 billion as block grants to go directly to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the border states most affected, for use in plussing up existing border security, illegal alien housing in the border area, dealing with the health problems these children are unavoidably bringing with them, and so on. Notice that this money does not through Federal hands; it completely bypasses the Feds and goes directly to the states.
  • $0.2 billion allocated 80:20 between the states (the 80) and the Federal government for the express purpose of handling transportation back to the children’s home country. This is a generous sum of money, and it gives the states the wherewithal to transport the children, if the Feds are too reluctant to do so.

Notice that there’s not a dime for “handling legal matters.” There aren’t any; existing law makes clear that these children are eligible for immediate transport to their country of origin. To those who cry these children are running from gangs and violence: there has been no surge in any of that in the last few months; the gangs and violence have been extant for years. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the children’s plight today; it does mean claimed urgency is wholly a cynical political ploy by the Left.

These children and others like them should, indeed, get the benefit of American help and largesse—as part of a proper reform of our immigration system.

The EU, Immigration, and National Sovereignty

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Germany can’t require the spouses of Turkish immigrants to show a basic knowledge of the German language before granting them visas, the European Union’s top court ruled on Thursday, overturning a condition aimed at preventing forced marriages and at promoting integration.

Foreigners, after all, shouldn’t be expected to assimilate into the culture and country to which they emigrate; they should continue to live apart from their new community, leading in the aggregate to the fractionation of their new “country.”

There are complications in this particular case (there always are when law is involved), but that’s the thrust of this ruling. The court went on:

A new restriction might be permitted if it were justified by an overriding public interest, and didn’t “go beyond what is necessary in order to attain it,” the court said.

However, Germany’s language requirement didn’t meet those conditions, the court said.

Because assimilation and integration into the host society, the host and sovereign nation, isn’t an overriding public interest. But then, the EU doesn’t want its constituent members to be unified and sovereign countries, anyway—fractionation facilitates the current push for political union of the European Union into one nation by weakening government’s ability to resist the push.

Another Thought on Immigration

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Gordon Crovitz, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, pointed out some statistics.

The Congressional Budget Office last year estimated that legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants would boost federal revenues by $48 billion over 10 years while costing $23 billion in public services. Adding more skilled workers would bring in $100 billion over a decade, mostly from increased income taxes.

In addition to this, I add (and reiterate) immigrants start more businesses than Americans who’ve been here for two or three or more generations. Those businesses employ people, and more so than “just” immediate family members.

There’s also the demographic question: the Unites States has only just returned to a birth rate that even barely replaces our death rate. We need immigration for continued population growth; we don’t want to face the population implosion risk from aging that Russia, the People’s Republic of China, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and lots of other nations are facing. When Social Security was enacted, there were seven workers to contribute to the SS payments for every retiree, and that retiree had a retired life expectancy of some five to seven years. Today there are three workers per retiree, and that retiree has a retired life expectancy of nearly fifteen years. If we don’t intend to change the structure of Social Security, we need immigration.

Federal Immigration Hypocrisy

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[Cateret, NJ, Mayor Daniel] Reiman said yesterday that although he assured officials from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services that the prayer would be nondenominational, the agency declined to allow the prayer.

“They refused to budge on that.”

And, on refusing to allow any prayer at all, Reiman had no choice but to not allow the Federal ceremony to use city facilities.

Ironically, the whole thing came to a head just a day after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Town of Greece v Galloway that it was entirely appropriate that a local government open a ceremony with a prayer.

A spokeswoman for the federal agency, Katie Tichacek Kaplan, told The Associated Press that the agency has a long-standing policy to ensure that naturalization ceremonies are “conducted in a meaningful manner which is welcoming and inclusive and excludes political, commercial and religious statements.”

Never mind that this is a time to welcome our new citizens into our heritage—into their new nation’s heritage—as a Judeo-Christian nation, into our society with its Judeo-Christian underpinnings, into our culture, the benefits of which are what drew these immigrants in the first place and which encouraged them to take the five-year march toward citizenship. That’s the true meaning of the manner of welcome.

It’s not a time to encourage fractionation of our culture by discouraging their assimilation.

Reiman added

The irony is it’s in the Pledge [of Allegiance] and it’s in the oath [of citizenship]. It didn’t really make sense. They acknowledge that prayer is part of many, many services.

Here is the oath of citizenship that newly naturalized immigrants take on achieving citizenship [emphasis added]:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

And here is that nasty Pledge of Allegiance (which too many circles are trying to purge from our schools and public ceremonies, and too many others have simply allowed to lapse) [emphasis added]:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

But the Feds don’t want even a nondenominational prayer uttered at a ceremony celebrating the naturalization of new American citizens.

Hmm….

Byzantine Visas

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In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier in the week, Martin Lawler and Margaret Stock wrote about dysfunctional and too low limits on H-1B visas for skilled, educated foreign workers. While on the right track, though, they missed some points.

Some claim there is no shortage of science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) workers, and that US companies hire foreign employees to be “indentured workers” who can be paid low wages. In 2012, David North of the Center for Immigration Studies said, “It is well known that many H-1B workers are, in effect, indentured by employers who had filed to obtain green cards for them—they are nominally free to leave, but it can be hard to keep your resident alien application alive after leaving the employer who set it in motion.”

Lawler and Stock correctly point out the fatuousness of this erroneous claim, but they miss a larger point. Say, arguendo, that North is right. There are two solutions to this, and neither include North’s view of how such foreign workers should be treated. Lawler and Stock addressed the foolishness of the (low) quota for H-1Bs. The other solution is to cut out the nonsense on the green cards: decouple them from visas. Either the green card applicant is suitable, or he is not. His STEM education is only one criterion, and it needn’t be a critical one.

And, in support of the above correction, Lawler and Stock note that

[t]he Labor Department must certify, through a formal process, that H-1B wages are appropriate. Public notices of the jobs, including the wages, must be posted at the work site. The notices must contain specific information about filing a complaint challenging the wage and working conditions. Once the certification is issued, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services conducts a thorough review of the entire case, including details about the employer, employees and positions.

But this misses a larger point, too. Government has no business entering the premises of a private enterprise and dictating to that enterprise who it may hire, at what pay rate, or (within very broad limits) under what conditions.

Full stop.

Labor price should be as competitive as any other good or service price.