Whew Go Arizona!

[A Black Falcon]

Illegal immigration... very difficult issue, really. There are a lot of complex factors involved that make deciding what is best really hard.

I do not support extreme measures like building giant walls on our borders. It won't really work, as people will still find a way to get in, it's hugely expensive, it looks bad, and it's environmentally destructive. The ideal way to reduce illegal immigration is for the countries people are coming from (Latin America) to improve enough that people aren't as attracted to coming to the US but think they can do things at home instead. A central part of our illegal immigration issues are things like how Mexico is in such awful shape, who wouldn't want to get out of a country as wracked by drug violence as Mexico is... or the poverty of countries south of that.

Whatever we do on the border though, people are going to come in. And that's when it gets really, really hard. People who say "zero tolerance", etc, such as Lou Dobbs -- here's what I want to know. What are you going to do, arrest Hispanic people at random hoping that some are illegals? That would be awful, and is illegal as well of course for good reasons. Enforcing immigration law on employers, that is punishing them severely if they hire illegals and actually enforcing it, is a policy that has promise, but would be expensive and intrusive and states and companies would protest strongly, so it probably wouldn't pass with many teeth. I'm not sure whether I'd oppose such a law or not, it would depend on the specifics.

Anyway, the most complex problem is what to do with illegals here. I guess the goal is to make it harder for them to get work so that they just decide to go home on their own or something, right? Because forcible evictions are NOT going to work and are a terrible idea. Kicking parents out of the country while allowing their children to stay looks horrible, and is. But on the other hand, just giving them citizenship or something doesn't really work either. For one thing anyone who actually waited in line, often for years, for the right to immigrate to the US legally would rightfully be pretty angry if people who cut in line and came in without documentation. It doesn't seem right to give people rewards for cutting like that... but we can't really punish them either, because they're people and you can't just act like they're awful people or something. There's a reason Lou Dobbs got so criticized, and the Minutemen Project broke down -- the racist implications of what they said, even when trying to keep it out of it, got to be too much of a problem (note that Hispanic is of course not a race, but a cultural group, but I don't know of a better term than "racist" for this).

Oh, and most illegals are not doing things that legal citizens want to do. This is very much true -- most aren't displacing legal workers. What is happening is that they are being exploited. Employers do not have to pay them decent wages, house them humanely, give them any benefits, and more... these things are terrible, and should not happen if there's anything we can do about it. This is why enforcement against employers seems like the best path, they are the ones hiring people so if they are dissuaded from it that would take out a lot of the problem.

Of course, they would argue that many things can't be done affordably without illegal labor, but that's a different problem, and not one that should stop the right thing from being done. As long as they're illegal, undocumented, whatever words you want to use, conditions for those workers are not going to improve, I think... and merely saying "well, it's better than what they have at home" isn't good enough. That may be true, but by our standards it's horrible and that's what matters. I'm terrible at economics though, so I really can't say anything much about this very important part of the issue. I'd need to hear the statements and opinions of more knowledgeable people about the issues before I could say anything certain about these subjects.

Of course though, just legalizing a lot of them isn't going to solve it either, which is why I said it's such a tricky problem... and even if you do what do you do with the ones that come afterwards? You can't just make anyone who makes their way into the US a legal resident. Whatever else is done people aren't just going to all leave, though, and that's why I said it's such a difficult issue. The various goals of what I'd think immigration reform should do appear to conflict, and I have no idea how to reconcile them. Somehow people need to be treated humanely, people who have lived here for many years shouldn't all have to leave, undocumented workers need to live and work in places that meet American legal standards, and more should probably be done to discourage employers from using undocumented labor... but how do we do all those things? Don't ask me.

Overall I think that the immigration reform effort from a few years ago was a pretty good one. Immigration was the one issue that President Bush was good on -- he was not in favor of isolationist, anti-Hispanic wall building, to his credit. It's too bad that his own party sabotaged the effort.

On that note, go ahead and keep hating Hispanics and treating them like they're scum... all that it's doing is continuing to drive a large and growing block of the American people into the Democratic party. The Republican Party seems to think that somehow it can win forever with a "WASPs First" policy, but it can't last forever, not with America's demographics. :)

Oh yeah, and finally, Hispanics that stay integrate into American society, as have all other groups. It takes a few generations, but by the third generation or so people are American like anyone else. The issue is just that there are so, so many first generation immigrants that a lot of people lose sight of this fact.