Tag Archives: immigration

An Aspect of Europe We Might Want to Emulate

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Or at least one nation of Europe….

Germany has preliminarily approved an immigrant assimilation law.

Under the draft integration law, which now goes to parliament for approval, migrants would have to fulfill certain requirements, such as taking special classes, and authorities would be entitled to decide where in the country they should live. Those who don’t comply could face sanctions.

At the same time, the integration law aims to facilitate access to the job market and to apprenticeship programs for refugees, allowing them to more quickly earn a living.

Among the requirements:

  • language training
  • education in German laws
  • education in cultural basics
  • states will be able to decide where refugees should live in their state…avoid the creation of ethnic ghetto

We already do—or used to do—a pretty good job of assimilating our immigrants.  One thing we could benefit from, though, is a mechanism to better control initial living locations, so as to mitigate our own Little [China/Italy/Syria/etc) problem and to improve assimilation.

And so to better preserve our American culture.

ICE Leadership and the Law

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The Obama administration took fire at a House hearing Thursday for releasing back into society thousands of illegal immigrants who had committed crimes on U.S. soil – including those behind more than 200 murders.
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According to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2015 “freed 19,723 criminal aliens, who had a total of 64,197 convictions among them.”

This included “8,234 violent convictions and 208 homicide convictions.”

And yet

[ICE Director Sarah] Saldana maintained she follows the law and the illegal immigrants who were released were freed only after “careful analysis.”

“I’m guessing the families here would disagree with your careful analysis,” [Senator Jason Chaffetz (R, UT)] said.

Saldana responded, “We are humans and we do fall short sometimes.”

And that makes everything all right for those murdered and for those surviving families.  Typical Progressive morality.  American citizens are just eggs for the omelet.

Grow Government

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It’s what Democrats do.  Here’s another installment, this one by Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton:

I would create the first ever Office of Immigrant Affairs.  [The office] would create a dedicated place in the White House to coordinate integration policies across the federal government and with state and local government as well.

Never mind that the private economy already is in that niche, groups like

CASA de Maryland, Refugee Council USA, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, and The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Never mind that myriad Federal agencies already involved in immigration affairs could be combined and streamlined, agencies like US Citizenship and Immigration Services; Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification; Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, its visa management facility; The National Visa Center, a private company under contract to the DoS that’s in the middle of the green card issuing process.

But that would shrink government.  Can’t have that.

A Thought on Immigration

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A couple of early warning signs for us.  One I’ve written about before (here’s one such): the demographics of Social Security.

When Social Security was instituted…there were roughly 7 workers paying into the system for every retiree and a retiree lifespan in retirement was about 6 years.

Today…the number of workers paying into the system is around 3 for each retiree, and that number is falling.  Then, each retiree is expected to live for 17+ years in retirement.

Now we’re seeing the beginnings of a regional realization of that demographic crisis.  Although this example specifically concerns the legal industry in the Midwestern rust belt, I think it’s symptomatic of the larger problem.

  1. The Great Lakes/Midwest region…will fall short of recreating the base of manufacturing activity that produced a strong upwardly mobile middle class of the kind that sustains high-level educational activity.
  2. The region’s populations are static, aging, or declining with the result that the applicant pool for law schools in the geographic area is falling.
  3. The region’s lawyer job markets are saturated to the point that there are not a significant number of new jobs being created, and the replacement market that depends on the deaths or retirement of lawyers currently in practice is slow moving.

These come against a backdrop of our national fertility rate, the average number of children born to a healthy woman over her lifetime, of around 1.9.  This is relatively high compared to most other nations, but it’s below a population replacement, the rate at which a population is maintained at its current level rate of around 2.1.

This is the beneficial effect of immigration.  Immigrants easily make up for these population shortfalls.  Immigration, for instance, will contribute to alleviating the population/labor shortage in the Midwest, and by their existence, those workers will contribute to mitigating the worker-to-retiree ratio.

Certainly, we need secure borders, and certainly, we need to allow in only those who do us economic good.  But just as certainly, if we don’t make legal immigration easy to do, if we don’t have a positive immigration rate, we won’t solve this problem.  We’ll just continue our slide.

Stem the Flow of Migrants

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That’s what the EU is trying to persuade Turkey to do according to a Wall Street Journal article.

Before I get into that, there are a couple of points of clarification that are necessary. First, there is confusion on the part of the WSJ and/or the European Union leadership regarding who it is that’s traveling. Most of the present flow consists of refugees, not migrants; although there are certainly migrants in the mix, along with terrorists.

From that, it’s easy to see the moral distinction among the three concerning their “right” of entry into any nation of the EU or into the EU generally. Terrorists have no right to do anything but die. Migrants have no moral right to enter a nation that doesn’t want them—the nation is sovereign over its own territory; sovereignty is the purpose of borders. It’s a highly useful thing, from a mutual prosperity perspective, to permit an influx (and outflow) of migrants, but that utility is purely…utilitarian. There is a moral obligation to permit entry of refugees, but that entry cannot be without limits and controls: the receiving nation must be able to set the conditions under which the refugees can enter, under which they can stay, and for how long they can stay, or else the nation will be unable to handle those refugees in anything approaching a humane manner.

Within that, then, there’s this about the EU’s pushing Turkey to impose a metaphorical, if not physical, barrier on the flow of refugees (not “migrants”) at the Turkish borders.

In a draft statement to be adopted later on Monday, the [EU] leaders are set to tell migrants that the route north of Greece is completely closed, a move that without Turkey’s help will leave huge numbers of people trapped within the already overwhelmed country.

Here’s Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel:

There is only one possible solution: make sure the Schengen borders are perfectly hermetic against uncontrolled and illegal migrant flows[.]

Sure. And do what with them? The originating situation does not permit them to go back. Where they are cannot sustain them.

What the EU is proposing (instead?) makes little sense. They want Turkey to agree to take back refugees that have already made it into continental Europe (even Metropolitan Europe, to stretch an analogy), including Greece, and the EU will accept via direct transport (no harrowing and dangerous overland treks) “registered” refugees taken straight from UN-run camps in Turkey.

This raises a couple of questions. One is the nature of that registration: on what basis is the UN registering anybody, on what basis is the UN vetting anybody who’s being registered, on what basis do we even trust the UN to make a serious attempt at vetting? The other question concerns Turkey: the take backs and the direct-from-camp transports amount to little more than swaps of one population for another. How does this help Turkey deal humanely with the existing supply of millions of refugees already within its borders? There’s no easing of stress here.

Here’s an example of that stress, in one Turkish border town. Kilis sits within kilometers of the Syrian border and so is an early stop on refugees’ travels.

Home to about 100,000 Turks before the Syrian war, Kilis is straining from the arrival of more than 125,000 Syrians. The town’s water and sewage systems are struggling to cope. Schools are filled to capacity. Although Turkey is developing plans to build more classrooms, for now many Syrian children roam the streets, stay at home, or spend their days working in shops, cafes, and factories.

It’s been downhill from there, for the local Turks, for the refugees, for the nation of Turkey.