With each passing day it becomes more clear that none of the loud voices we're hearing on the topic of immigration know enough to offer any real solutions.
- Exhibit A: All the marchers Monday who carried "Bush Step Down" signs, or other anti-Bush propaganda. Either they don't know Bush is the one who proposed the Guest Worker program they support in the first place, or they have a different agenda entirely, and the press doesn't know.
- Exhibit B: Laura Ingraham & all our local A.M. talkers here are up in arms about the Hastert/Frist "cave-in", by which being in the U.S. illegally will be considered a misdemeanor, rather than a felony as first proposed. However, as someone in Frist's office called in to our local guy to explain (after he'd dedicated his entire show to ranting about this as far as I can tell), that's to utterly misunderstand the situation. First, it has always been a misdemeanor to come here illegally, and that aspect of the law has never been in question. At issue is what to do with people who arrive legally but then become illegal by overstaying their visas. The original provision proposed making that a felony, but this was a mistake because a person charged with a felony is entitled to a jury trial and a court-appointed lawyer. All you Conservatives complaining about resource drain might just want to think about the effect trying so many people by jury might have on our Court system.
- Exhibit C: What is with the argument that "we can't possibly deport 12 million people?" Duh, but you don't have to. You only have to have a few very public prosecutions of employers who hire illegal immigrants and a few very public deportations. Enough to make people realize the law once again has teeth.
- Exhibit D:Where is the evidence that the preponderance of immigrants --legal or illegal-- is low-skilled? Or that they remain low-skilled once they come here? Undoubtedly many are. But the actual illegal immigrants I have known in my life were all highly educated, cultured people in their countries of origin, to wit: a physicist, two doctors, and a businessman. They were working as a maintenance man, waiters and a bus-boy respectively because they didn't yet speak English. In my single days, my friends and I used to frequent a Mexican restaurant/bar on Capitol Hill where it drove me crazy to see how all the super-important "in-the-know" Hill staffers treated the waiters on the assumption that anyone in a humble job must be a lesser person. Little did they know in many cases the restaurant staff was better educated than most of the customers. Everyone seems to make the assumption that numerous immigrants will be a drain on our system because they'll come here and camp out at the lower end of the economic spectrum, bringing their parasite families with them. I think there's every reason to think instead that people who are restless, courageous and entrepreneurial enough to leave everything for a shot at a better life can become great contributors to our country. Even if they arrive here ignorant and unskilled, a person with that much determination isn't likely to remain that way. In the four cases I'm aware of, all four are now here legally, fluent in English, and working as a Physics teacher, a restaurant manager, a doctor and a businessman, respectively. As Bush said at the Catholic Prayer Breakfast the other day (and it's a much better argument than the implication that his opponents are racists), our country has frequently been invigorated and renewed by immigrants.
The problem is: the welfare state is as corrupting of this new blood as it is of all the rest of us. Here's a great post about that: Who Shall Be An American Citizen? And continuing my "assimilation" mantra, here's an excellent Remedy post that doesn't yet offer a solution, but at least is beginning to ask the right questions (it also makes the important point that when you fail to enforce your own laws for decades at a time, it's a little rich to start being offended that other people follow your cue). I'm not sure what the answer is, but I know what I want, and I suspect I'm not alone. It ought to be possible to secure our border from terrorists, gang members and criminals and have a very generous, simple legal immigration process that puts people on the path to being Americans rather than hyphenated-Americans. In the meanwhile, I'd settle for some honest reporting on the matter so we could all think the question through.
Finally, a border-crossing story. My alma mater, the University of Dallas (founded by Cistercian immigrants escaping from Hungary), has a campus in Rome. A legendary tale from the mid- 80s, I think, involved a few students who climbed the Vatican Wall (The Vatican city-state's border is protected by a wall!). They were arrested and charged with the felony crime of "invading a foreign country." The charges were later dropped. There's a UD grad mildly limping around Washington from the sorry job the Italians did setting the broken leg he incurred during this misadventure. This was a grand story when I first heard it told, but the details have faded from memory.
