Tag Archives: immigration

It’s Onerous to Become a Citizen?

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Dan Siciliano, a Stanford Law School professor, thinks so.

People think it’s automatic, short and easy.  [In reality] the pathway to citizenship is onerous.

Here are the requirements for becoming a citizen:

  • the immigrants must a $680 fee
  • pass an oral exam
  • present five years’ worth of tax returns
  • submit to a background check for things such as criminal convictions.
  • pass an interview with an immigration officer who tests their ability to speak, read and write English

Yeah, that’s onerous.  The fee serves as a (light) screen against the indigent.  Current immigration law makes it illegal to allow in those who will be burdens on our society, who can’t earn a living.  The five years of having paid income taxes provides current, empirical evidence of the immigrant’s ability to earn his own way and to contribute to his new community.

Any nation has the right to keep out other nations’ criminals—that’s what the background check does.

It’s a hard concept, but English is the language of the United States.  Not Spanish, or French, or Arabic, or Farsi, or….  Businesses are foolish to stand on ceremony and demand their customers speak only English.  But the preservation of American society and culture—that which made us a great nation—demands that political speech be done in English.

On Being More Like Europe

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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

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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

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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

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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.