Category Archives: immigration

On Being More Like Europe

Posted on by
Reply

Or at least more like British Europe.  Here is one area in which we could learn and from which we would profit by copying.

The Telegraph had this last weekend.  From their brief article about Great Britain’s Immigration Exam, their citizenship test, it’s clear that the Brits are going back to expecting prospective citizens to know what it is that is British culture and going away from politically correct froo-froo.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has torn up the 2007 edition’s section on New Labour, swept away guides to immigrants’ rights and put a new focus on what it means to be British.

The Life in the UK handbook, described by the Home Office as “essential reading” for migrants sitting the new test from March, will focus on British values, culture and history, as well as the success of Olympic heroes at London 2012.

Out go politically correct sections on how to complain about being arrested and “mundane information about water meters”, and in come “the events and people who have helped make Britain a great place to live”, ministers said.

Our schools would do well to make this adjustment, also.  (Take the sample test, too.  It’s fun.)

An Immigration Plan

Posted on by
1

House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA) said last week that the Republicans were (finally) ready to take up the question of immigration reform.  President Obama has said (again) that he wants immigration reform to come on the heels of answering the fiscal cliff and tax reform deficiencies.

Immigration reform is a subject on which the Republicans, and we conservatives, have been lagging for too long.  If Boehner and Cantor, et al., are serious, it’s also important that the House take the initiative, and quit bleating about the necessity for the President to lead.  The House led on budgeting, spending, Medicare, and so on for the last two years, and it got them overwhelmingly reelected, even though Progressive obstinacy and partisanship in the Senate and the White House ultimately scotched those efforts.

The best way to seize the initiative after all these years of lagging is to come with a complete proposal—not just vague platitudes and half-formed ideas.  The proposal need not, indeed should not be, cast in concrete, but a complete reform package proposal—one that is well thought out and actually addresses all aspects of immigration (not just the tear-jerking, feel-good bits about “the children”)—will do two critical things.  For one thing, it will take us a long way down the path toward finally fixing this problem.  For the other, it will leave the Democrats either to work with the Republicans to adjust the Republican reform plan or to put forward their own and make them look as though they’re just blowing off another Republican idea for no better reason than that it’s Republican.

I’ve offered one such proposal.  It’s a three-legged stool, and like a stool, all three legs must be implemented together, not one or two at a time.  Those three legs are securing, tightly, our borders; making it easy to cross those borders legally, and finally dealing with the existing population of illegal aliens.  Both Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D, IL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) have good ideas that can serve as seeds for that third leg.

Certainly, any one of those legs will take courage and initiative to get done; doing all three together will require even more courage and initiative.  It’s time for conservatives and for Republicans to step up and show that courage and initiative.

Yet Another Thought on Immigration

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal has another article on immigration, entitled, tellingly enough, “Washington’s New Twist on Human Sacrifice.”  The sacrifice?  Sending away foreign students who’ve graduated from our colleges and universities, rather than making it easy for them to stay.  And maybe naturalize.

The WSJ, among other things, provided a list of immigration bills that have failed passage:

  • Stopping Trained in America PhDs from Leaving the Economy Act
  • Advanced Degree Visa Bill
  • Startup Act
  • Immigration Driving Entrepreneurship in America Act
  • Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes Act

And the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Jobs Act, proposed this year by Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX), which treatment in Congress was typical.  This bill would have granted visas to graduates from qualifying universities in the hard sciences instead of the current program, a lottery for a limited numbers of visas, with the limits based on national origin. As Congressman Smith said,

Unfortunately, the Democrats voted today [20 Sep 12] to send the best and brightest foreign graduates back home to work for our global competitors.

And there’s this, a bit ago, from Steve Jobs on conversations he and a group of Silicon Valley execs he’d put together had with Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama:

The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done.  It infuriates me.

What’s up with all this obstruction?  Do we want immigration and immigrants, or do we not?  Progressives oppose school/education reform, and they oppose steps to welcome trained, talented, intelligent folks from other countries into our nation.  What’s up with that?

If Progressives put as much energy into doing things as they do to blocking them, we’d be a whole lot better off today, three years after the “end” of the Panic of 2008.

More Dishonesty

Posted on by
Reply

Fox News is reporting another example of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s politically motivated distortions.

Recall that Obama, after seeing Congress explicitly reject his DREAM Act, implemented it anyway via an Executive Order in which young illegal immigrants, meeting certain criteria and paying the requisite fees for a special visa, are allowed to stay in the US on temporary work permits.  In a recent interview with the Denver Post, Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney had this to say on the matter:

The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid.  I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased[.]

Naturally, Obama objected, insisting remarkably that this represented a Romney flip-flop on immigration.  Speaking through his Director of Hispanic Press, Gabriela Domenzain, Obama had this:

Romney’s latest immigration pivot raises more questions than it answers.  He still has not said whether he would continue the Administration’s policy that provides a temporary reprieve from deportation for young people who were brought here through no fault of their own[.]

And then he acknowledged that Romney’s latest remark was entirely consistent with his already established position.  Speaking again through Domenzain, he added this:

We know he called the DREAM Act a “handout” and that he promised to veto it.  Nothing he has said since contradicts this and we should continue to take him at his word.

Indeed.  Romney has had a consistent position on immigration from the jump.  What he said in the Post interview was that, unlike Obama, Romney declines to use the children of illegal immigrants (or any children, come to that) as pawns for personal political gain.

Some Immigration Musings

Posted on by
1

Former Governor, Ambassador, and Republican Presidential Candidate Jon Huntsman had some thoughts on immigration in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.  His heart is in the right place, but his thoughts are incomplete and naïve.

Huntsman rightly points out the importance of immigrants to our nation’s economy and to our freshness of thought.  He also rightly reviews past mistakes we’ve made vis-à-vis immigration—the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement, the 1924 Immigration Act, among others.

But he offers nothing concrete in the way of a solution beyond the usual “need to improve our visa system” and “need to recruit immigrants.”  But he does add this:

Such initiatives won’t only bring talent here—they will allow us to deny it to our competitors.

Sure.  Immigrants are pieces of meat, or tools to be used to our advantage and against other nations in a zero sum game.

Cue Bill the Cat.  This drivel is of a piece with the Progressive claptrap that says all blacks must be Democrats or they’re traitors to their race, that gays must be Liberals, or they’re self-hating…whatever.

No.  We should be welcoming immigrants because they’re human beings who want to make something better of their lives and their families’ lives and they have something to offer our nation—not because they have something to offer.

Note, though, that the visa games Huntsman rightly decries do need to stop; this is an important component to real immigration reform.  But there’s far more to this than just putting paid to some visa quota nonsense.  We need to make it much easier for folks who want to come here to do so easily.  The delays in getting visas need to be eliminated.  The visa system needs to be simplified: there really only needs to be three kinds of visas: residency, visitor, and business.  And I’m not convinced three categories really are necessary.  All categories should offer a path to citizenship, but that decision should be take-able by the immigrant (or resident alien, if he just wants to live here) at any time, or never, without impacting his visa.

It needs to be far easier physically to cross our borders, too.  Entry stations should be far more closely spaced, and not at all limited to urban areas.  This, just incidentally, will severely hamper human trafficking as the mules (and worse) will find their services needed far less.

But legal entry into our country is only one leg of the stool of immigration reform.  Sitting opposite that easy entry is a need to tightly secure our borders.  There really are folks who want to enter under the radar because their hearts are not pure and their goals are nefarious: drug traffickers and terrorists come to mind.  Accordingly, it ought to be hard to enter without a visa and at any place other than a check point.  This will require improvements and expansion in border patrols, surveillance equipment, and so on—and not just at the borders, but in depth.

And the third leg.  What do we do about the illegal aliens that are present?  Justice—to Americans, to aliens who have entered legally (maybe especially to them, since they’ve grunted through our Byzantine entry mazes and still got in legally), to existing immigrants—demands that the illegal aliens not be given a pass.  Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D, IL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) both have partial solutions that are worth building on in this area.

Most importantly, and making reform harder to do, all three legs of this reform must be done together.  No one of these is sufficient, and if less than all are done, the imbalance will just blow up the effort.