Sean Hannity and John Boehner both say they now want to tackle immigration reform.
Cool beans. Welcome to the club lads.
What should this reform look like?
1. an easy path to citizenship for current "illegals"
2. all college diplomas earned by foreigners come with a green card stapled to them
3. a massive (triple? quadruple?) increase in the amount of visas for skilled workers
4. make the process for getting green cards and becoming citizens faster and cheaper
5. a gradually increasing flow of "unskilled" immigrants from around the world
What am I missing? Tell me in the comments.
It would be awesome if a side benefit of Mittens' drubbing was real reform. But, I am not holding my breath.
19 comments:
I endorse #2, but I'm worried if implemented a bunch of colleges will give out more diplomas. Which will lead to more regulation/bureaucracy.
Imagine if a kid fails your class he gets deported, but if he passes he stays. As a pro-immigrant kind of guy I'd be more likely to nudge up his grade, which isn't right to do as a teacher.
I will endorse all of the five points, despite the valid reservations expressed by Warren. (Warren: follow your conscience, in all things.)
First thing to add is to codify in law the current "policy" of giving immunity from deportation for people brought here as children.
Next up a green card for anyone who can show he has lived here two years -- peacefully and honestly. Notice not "legally" -- Even with exceptions for "traveling without Papers" there are too many laws about personal, non-violent behavior. Yes that gets complicated, but we have to start on it.
eliminate minimum wage
I'm actually a bit cautious on the idea of opening the floodgates. On one hand, I agree with the mid-term economic benefits. But I'd feel a lot better about the long-term consequences if the US was still a Republic.
How about straight-up auctioning off visas?
I'd be happy if people would just quit demonizing the brown skinned.
It's pretty simple: make it hard to come here illegally, and make it easy to come here legally. Set the criteria for what kind of people we want, and open it up for lots of them to be quickly, cheaply processed in.
And Tom:
Don't give incentives to BREAK the law! Goodness, awarding the green card for sneaking in and staying here for two years will encourage people to...uhhh....sneak in. What sane society passes a law that specifically provides a huge reward for breaking that country's laws?!
re: Warren and #2,
I would also worry about the college/department pressuring professors to give passing grades to marginal students for exactly this reason. Maybe that's unfounded, but turning every graduation requirement into (part of) a citizenship test is absolutely going to have some unintended consequences.
Heather McDonald's article in National Review from the other day about why Hispanics love the Democratic Party (because they like free stuff and Democrats are the party of free stuff) is bad news for any fans of smaller government, conservative or libertarian.
As such, I find myself unenthusiastic about any of the items on that list. In an ideal world, liberal immigration would be a no-brainer, but unless you're enthusiastic about your state government coming to resemble California's....
No male over the age of 15 from a muslim country, or male identified as a muslim should be allowed to enter the country. Any already here should be escorted out.
I like #2 and #4, but I'll bet Hannity is thinking something detestable.
How about making English the nation's official language to avoid a take over of the civil service a la Canada? That would ease some objections to increased immigration.
(And, yes, I realize the irony using a French term in regard to Canadiens).
Open the floodgates, someone has to pay for our social security when I retire.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Pelsmin, in feudal England, they "rewarded" escaped serfs who managed to avoid (re)capture for a year and a day. It was a sort of backhanded way to recognize that slavery was bad.
You don't understand my plan to "reward" immigrants who are productive members of society because you have not yet grasped that it is both morally wrong and economically counterproductive to demand "prior permission" before people can travel.
I'm sure Jeff R. didn't mean to say that we should ban brown people because of our expectations about their politics, but it could be read that way. If you cannot mitigate a bad law because of the effect of other bad law, you are just stuck.
Barbara Howe, a Libertarian, just completed a run for governor of NC. She got greater support from the Hispanic demographic than from any other. How does that fit your stereotype?
Tom,
Escaping from slavery is not on a par with entering a country illegally. It may not be immoral to try to come here w/o following the rules, but it's illegal, and we need to enforce the law. I've never heard a credible view that the US could simply open its borders to all comers while maintaining civil society.
And equating sovereignty over a country's borders with demanding "prior permission" before travel is absurd. I think I'll let myself into your house, have a couple of your beers and see what's on the flatscreen. It's morally wrong and economically counterproductive to require prior permission to travel into your apartment. Well, economically counterproductive to me.
1. if it comes with a felony conviction and not allow to vote or hold government position and be on the bottom of the list for government benefits (welfare and medicare).
2. only if they pay a reparation tax of 1% to African Americans and 1% to Native Americans
3. see 2
4. see 2 also
5. see 1 and 2
and add the reparation tax to 1 also
After a number of states had begun to enact their own immigration laws, the federal government recognized the need for a uniform set of immigration rules applied across the country. The adoption of this federal responsibility was followed by an immigration law passed by U.S. Congress in 1882 that gave the office of the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to monitor immigration and naturalization.
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