True Immigration Reform in the 21st Century United States:
The recent attempts to exile many hardworking Americans is reprehensible. It makes no economic or historical sense. The immigrants who were willing to brave great danger to enter our country are amongst our great land's hardest workers. They follow the same tradition of every immigrant group who came here. These immigrants built this country, and our continued flow of immigrants continue to help build it.
Let's face it, it's simple xenophobia that has motivated these exile efforts. The same people who are afraid of anyone who doesn't speak English, in the exact same fashion they do. Their xenophobia has lead them time and again to attempted the same task, to ignore two of the longest peaceful borders in the world and try to turn the United States into an island.
If you look at the history of the western United States you'll be reminded that a Spanish speaking culture long predates the appearance of English speaking settlers. Those Spanish speaking landowners who were already in the West were guaranteed their rights when California became a state. Those rights were largely ignored, and their lands were taken by legislative fiat. Now people are attempting to isolate the members of that same culture from their families, further stripping these people of their rights.
Fortunately, it is a near impossible task to divide a culture in two. You can't separate the Southwest United States from Mexico anymore then you could separate East and West Germany. If some people try to build a new Berlin Wall it will eventually be torn down. Meanwhile, any effort to exile these people will fail, and only result in more hardship.
If you want to prevent illegal immigration there is a very simple way, you allow those people who wish to enter the United States a legal method to do so. They wish to enter this country because of powerful economic forces. No true capitalist would consider banning a willing hardworking immigrant.
We do need to control immigration, but it is impossible to throttle it as tightly as we have tried. The answer is not to continue trying to choke an irresistible economic tide. We have been trying to deal with the incredibly high demand for entrance into our great country by reducing the supply. By strictly limiting the number of people we legally admit to the country we have only encouraged illegal immigration. That cannot work, it is an attempt to ignore the market forces behind immigration, to our detriment.
We need real immigration reform. We need to thoroughly screen all who wish to immigrate, but we need to accept all immigrants who sincerely wish to become loyal, hardworking American citizens.
We have seen the results of the alternative. If you deny a legal means of immigration you lose all control over the process.
Immigration is an economic issue, you can never ignore the economic aspect of an economic issue. Economic solutions simply work best. The way you handle a situation with high demand for a product is to sell that product at a high price. Problem solved.
Our product is living and work in the United States. We have reduced the supply of the high end product, citezenship, to a tiny level. We could sell United States citizenship for top dollar, balance the budget, and only get motivated workers in the process.
Instead currently we sell a little more of a lower end product, green cards. Not nearly enough to meet the demand either. We could sell green cards for $1000 per year and solve the immigration product instantaneously.
Instead we try to cut off the supply level to a tiny fraction of the demand level. The problem is the demand is entirely too high. The remaining consumers are forced to take the next best alternative. Entering the United States without the invitation of the government. Instead they take the invitation of employers, family members, or anyone else who is willing to help them obtain their product, living and working in the U.S.
Black markets are easily created and easily eliminated (by selling instead in a controlled market). If at all possible, you should avoid creating a black market.
This is a bit of tangent, but I believe communism failed because tried to regulate goods in ways it could not. We are trying to regulate immigration in ways we cannot.
We could make the price very high. Many other countries have tried this, where they did guest worker programs, or allow immigrants legal work at high tax rates for no services. That would be preferable for both sides compared to the current status, and it is more preferable then any attempts to make war on my our neighbors grandmothers.
I am not very familiar with the immigration problems in Europe, but I submit the problem there is they do not grant immigrants a full oppurtunity to bring their culture, and to enter the culture of their new home. If the result of immigration is permanent secondary citizenship, well, you have a civil rights problem. If your basic culture rejects immigrants, well that isn't American culture anyway so it's relavent to this discussion :)
I know some of us wish we could speak to everyone in the world. However you cannot ask everyone to speak your language. Language is phenomenally difficult for most adults to learn. It is a simple thing to teach a language to a child, and an impossible thing to turn an adult into a native speaker of another tongue. In fact if the languages are sufficiently dissimilar, the two speakers won't even be able to distinguish some of basic sounds of the language.
So let the foreign immigrant keep and teach his language. Do not try to separate a children from the language of his father or her mother.
Instead educate. Teach them every basic skill and aspect of your culture you choose. Do everything you can to keep every human being in school as long as you can, then let them create on their own.
All immigrants want to learn the secrets of success in their new country. They came to be a part of that success. They will try damn hard to achieve, and they will teach their children to strive just as hard.
Remember, the American Dream has always been an immigrant dream.
-Brother Rail Gun of The Short Path
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