Letters to the Editor
-
A Bad Solution
The characterization of this bill as a solution to the problem of illegal immigration is a farce of the worst order. The opposition on the left and right is well justified. The rings of fire that long-time but illegal residents of the will have to jump through to become legal will keep them in the shadow. What is a $5,000 fine and back taxes to someone earning $20 dollars a day? The guest worker program is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course no American wants these jobs ~ look at what they pay! Who will administer this new bureaucracy?
20 years ago, we were lied into believing that our boarder would be enforced. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
This is clearly a case where the cure is worst then the disease.
-
Alex
You sound like we should exile citizens who break the law. Breaking the law is not a sane ground for denying or revoking someone's citizenship or residency else we could empty the prisons of the 2.2 million potheads tomorrow and set them adrift to Slacker Island and the Bong Hit Archipelago.
If anything the problem is not locking up people who commit crimes. The 'revolving door' in the stories that make the news. Just today a drunk driver killed a bunch of people on I-95. Turns out he had already been deported more than once. Well under the rules of Nanny State, he should have been incarcerated and 'rehabilitated' just like all the other drunks. Seems that the government deported him aka set him free with the full knowledge that he would come back do the same thing again. Whereas if we had already granted him citizenship, and arrested him and locked him up and put him on probation the odds are lower that he would have killed someone else. And where I live they charge you to partake of all those lovely services like prison, rehab, probation, etc..
Seems to me you don't have to change the laws to manage the people who cause this problem. You simply have to incorporate them into the network of rules and laws you already have.
-
Trite, marshmallow fluff
Count me in as a die hard knee jerk liberal for well over 40 years who thinks this article is s--t. Illegal is, well illegal. We teach our kids moral values that stress fair play and equity, and whoever wrote this earlier "this is not our problem as middle class taxpayers", gets my applause. I don't hire day laborers to do my lawn. I dont have a corporation that hires illegal aliens to illegally work. Want to change the debate? Fine employers $10,000 per illegal when they are caught, fine employers $5000 for every enployee that doesn't have an I9 form, and promise employers that they will be audited by the IRS for every year they are not in compliance with immigration laws. I guarantee that the corporate republican support on this will evaporate. On the bleeding heart side of the equation: put your money where your mouths are and adopt or sponsor a family. Yeah I thought not...
So in summary, there are 12 million plus here, deal with that through the employer side. Then fix the immigration system so people can actually move here, and become citizens. Know also that that is not a nice feel good quick fix, but a bucketload of administrative work, vetting, background checking and etc.
Finally, I can't think for the life of me why democrats would take even the slightest chance at this bill. Let the Repubs take it down and talk about how you voted for it. Don't give these Aholes a single talking point for 2008 except Bushs' little war. We want Congress Mr Shapiron not marshmallow fluff!!!
-
Make citizenship attainable and punish businesses that hire illegals
Our immigration policy needs to be based in the reality of people's economic motivations. For example, increased border control won't do the job (not by itself, anyway). As long as Mexican citizens can come to America and get an illegal job that pays them more than they would make at home, they will continue to do that; it's about incentives. Increased border control won't stop it any more than the war on drugs has stopped illegal drugs, because the economic incentives are just too great for people to not sell drugs, and the economic incentives are just too great not to attempt a border crossing. (And in the case of immigration, unlike drug smuggling, the only punishment a potential immigrant is really risking is that of being sent back to where they would already be anyway; in other words, there's very little chance of loss, only of gain.) Looking (like a freakonomist) at the incentives people are presented with explains their behavior. And their behavior won't change unless the incentives change. So if our goal is to stop people coming in entirely, we need to either make Mexico richer or the U.S. poorer so they have no reason to be here instead of there, or we need increased border security AND harsh punishments for attempted border-crossers -- and the punishments would have to be quite harsh in order to provide a strong enough counter-incentive to balance out a lifetime of relative prosperity. In fact, they'd have to be so harsh as to be inhumane, possibly cruel and unusual, and definitely out of proportion with the nature of the crime; this course of action should never be allowed. In other words, people are going to continue to come. I don't see any way around it. We can't change the nature of the U.S. or Mexican economy that drastically, and nor would we want to. And we don't want to live in a police state where people are beaten or shot for merely attempting to enter our country. So people will continue to come; the incentives are simply in favor of it.
My proposal:
(1) The path to citizenship should be easy for those already in the country. You shouldn't have to learn English; you shouldn't have to pass a U.S. history and goverment exam; you shouldn't have to pay a large fee. The notion of immigrants becoming citizens shouldn't be opposed as "amnesty"; it should be enouraged and should be incentivized. People born in this country don't have to learn English in order to become a citizen, and nor do they have to know anything about how our goverment works. These citizenship exams ask plenty of questions that plenty of American citizens don't know the answers to. Oh, and on loyalty oaths, they're basically just stupid and pointless because they do no good and serve no purpose; how do they prevent anyone from doing anything they were otherwise going to do? The reason for making citizenship easy is because we want all the labor done in this country to be legal, on the books, and subject to and abiding by all laws and codes relating to minimum wages, overtime pay, workplace safety, etc. It's impossible to regulate activities that are illegal; this is also used as an argument for legalizing drugs and for not outlawing abortion: if you want something to be done properly and safely, it needs to be legal, and regulated, and the regulations need to be enforced. Otherwise it thrives on the black market.
(2) Regulations about hiring undocumenteds should be strongly enforced. Businesses should be punished severely for having undocumented workers, and the workers themselves should face punishments - fines as well as deportation - for working without documents. This will discourage undocumented labor. A slap on the wrist to major corporations will not suffice; there need to be actual punishments that will hurt the company, and the regulations need to be enforced. Some of the cost of enforcement can be paid for in fines, just as we can fund IRS audits through fines on the misdeeds those audits uncover. And between the punishment for working illegally and the ease of becoming a citizen, the workers themselves will become legal citizens. As citizens, they will have no fear of being deported and will thus not fear all law enforcement and goverment agencies. This means they will have no reason not to report their employers' violations of health and safety laws or wage practices. They will in this sense be able to help enforce these regulations, just as citizen workers now function in this role. But as it stands now, workplace violations go unreported in places that hire illegal labor, because the employees can't report them without exposing themselves. Thus we will decrease the amount of cheap, off-the-books labor in this country, which will mean a higher standard of living for the immigrants themselves, and less risk of a decline in standard of living for the native Americans (for lack of a better term) who currently fear loss of job or loss of job quality (e.g., loss of salary, loss of safety regulations, etc.)
(3) As for the border, we need to do our best to make sure we don't have tons of people coming in, because once they're in, citizenship and good jobs will be easy. But we shouldn't waste billions of dollars on it, because even fences and walls can be jumped, cut, or broken. As long as the incentives are there, people will continue to come. We should still enforce our border requirements and not just let everyone in. But our border is fairly secure, and we don't want to live in East Germany or Communist China where people don't have the freedom to come and go as they please, and we don't want to spend more on border security than the (fictional) perfectly secure border would gain us.