Tag Archives: immigration

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.

Some Immigration Musings

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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.

Yet More Thoughts on Immigration

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I want to comment a bit about one leg of our immigration policy, that of what to do about the illegal aliens currently present in the US.

Roberto Suro has a recent piece in The Washington Post that bears on this; although he talks primarily about a second leg of our immigration policy, one that also must be solved: how we let aliens into our country (an immigrant is someone who intends to settle permanently, so I’ll stick to aliens in this post).  All three legs (entry, border security, the existing population of illegal aliens and immigrants), though, must be handled together, or the totality of our immigration policy will continue to be the failure that it is today.

Suro noted,

Along with the many [immigrants] looking to make a permanent home in the United States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make some money and then go home.   Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 million people arrived while about 2 million departed.  About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, for example, eventually returned to Italy for good.

Today, we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide newcomers into two categories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in the making, or brand them as aliens fit for deportation.

And

To start, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving in the gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges.

…

If we accept that there are spaces between legal and illegal, then options multiply.

The second part, though, is simply wrong.  There can be no gray area between legal and illegal; that would only perpetuate the limbo in which the illegal aliens currently exist.  Instead, we need to broaden what constitutes legal, and make it easier for these folks to comply.

Who are these folks living this shadow existence?  They are crop pickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, home health-care aides and particle physicists.  These folks are active participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work, money, and ideas; they wish to come and go as opportunity calls them. They manage to have—they often are forced to have—a job in one country and a family in another.  Thus, they are forced to straddle—or avoid—the laws of multiple jurisdiction, with particular emphasis in this context US law on the part of the worker.

Nevertheless, we need them in the US being productive while they’re here, and it’s unnecessary to force them to choose to be here permanently, or to lie about their intent to be here permanently as a precondition for being here legally at all in order to achieve that.

Thus, I propose the following for the current population of illegal aliens.  I’ve proposed a general idea elsewhere, and Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D, IL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) have ideas that bear on this.

We should issue a “green card lite” for those who come and go at a relatively high rate—migrant workers, for instance, but not exclusively.  Such a card would be good for an extended number of years, allowing the holders to cross the border multiple times as their (seasonal, perhaps) work requires, without having to go through the entry bureaucracy—or risk coyote depravations—each time they want to reenter.  The folks who are here already and want such a card, though, must provide documentation to support their claimed work history.

Additionally, in support of that documentation requirement, I suggest a one year amnesty for employers of (potentially, from their perspective; I assume the good intentions of the vast majority of employers) immigrants, illegal or legal, so those employers can provide their documentation supporting the (illegal) immigrant’s application without fear of government reprisal.

Moreover, a regular green card, for those who aver a longer duration/steadier residency should be far more easily requestable and far more quickly issued, with a similar requirement for work history documentation from those who are already here and want to come out of the shadows.  The employer amnesty should be extended to employers of this group for the same reason.

Note, though, that I’m not proposing amnesty for the illegal aliens themselves.  As many have suggested, these must pay a penalty, variously including a fine and/or a requirement to leave the country and then to reenter legally.  I believe that both penalties should be applied.  The fine, though, must be sized to the illegal alien’s ability to pay, and it must be large enough to sting but not so large as to be an impenetrable barrier.  The requirement to leave the country and return, though, I hold can be satisfied by traveling to the nearest consulate in the US, paying their fine, and applying for their green card from within that consulate.

On the other hand, those who’ve used falsified or stolen documentation (e.g., a false or stolen social security number) to facilitate their getting hired must pay a sterner penalty.  These must leave the US voluntarily for some period of years before applying for a green card (lite), and they must apply as though they have no work history to claim (they’d a first-time immigrant, now).  Failure to leave voluntarily should result in deportation, never to be allowed back in.

Finally, notice that there is nothing in this that presupposes the now legal immigrants wanting to become citizens.  Nor need there be.  As demonstrated by those immigration statistics at the beginning, when folks are in our country openly and freely, our country sells itself.

Let’s not forget, though, the other two legs of our immigration problem.  We also need to look at the difficulties we inflict on those who want to enter our country for legitimate purposes—to settle here, for instance, or to “make some money and then go home.”  And we also need to get serious about securing our borders so that we do a better job of filtering out the ones who come here with nefarious purposes so that only those who want to come here to settle and contribute, perhaps (but not necessarily) to become citizens, or to be here for a time and then go home, can do so.

A Grievous Supreme Court Error

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The Supreme Court has ruled unfavorably on Arizona’s SB1070, with which it attempted to secure its border with Mexico and the safety of Arizona citizens (the ruling, with the dissents, can be read here).  Sort of letting stand a provision that required Arizona police to check the immigration status of those they suspect may be in the country illegally (the Court sent this back to the lower court for further argument), they struck the rest of the law making it a crime for immigrants to look for work without work permits (never mind that Federal law requires the permits), to not carry their immigration papers (never mind that Federal law requires legal aliens to carry these papers), and let police arrest those whom they suspect committed crimes for which they could be deported.

Justice Scalia, in his dissent (to, apparently, a 5-3 decision, with Justice Kagan having recused herself), had the right of it:

Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty — not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.

As did Justice Thomas, for a different, narrower, reason:

I agree with Justice Scalia that federal immigration law does not preempt any of the challenged provisions of SB 1070. I reach that conclusion, however, for the simple reason that there is no conflict between the ‘ordinary meaning’ of the relevant federal laws and that of the four provisions of Arizona law at issue here.

And Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority has revealed an appalling mindset for an American judge:

Some discretionary decisions involve policy choices that bear on this Nation’s international relations.

This is a domestic law, and a domestic concern. Foreign opinion has no bearing. But this Progressive administration gave their view of American sovereignty when it encouraged 11 foreign nations to join the suit at the Appellate level.

We badly need an election, so this error can be corrected legislatively.  Oh, wait….