- Building a big fence isn't going to stop illegal immigration, any more than the Berlin Wall stopped people from fleeing to the West. As long as there is opportunity and money on OUR side of the border, and much less opportunity on THEIR side of the border, they're going to come, just like they found ways over, under, and through the Berlin Wall.
- Enforcing the law is going to be spotty at best and won't solve the problem.
- Enacting still more laws isn't going to fix the problem if we aren't enforcing existing laws now.
- We had a program that worked prior to Lyndon Johnson, it was called the Bracero program. People from Mexico could come up, work during the agricultural season and go home. LBJ basically said, if they went home, they couldn't come back. This was the beginning of our 'illegal immegration' problem. Just as stupid as putting up the Berlin Wall.
Now, in light of history both here and in Eastern Germany, what solution do you think will actually fix the problem? You can't obviously punish every employer that hires 'illegal immegrants' We'd need a Federal Pennitentiary the size of New York State. We need to understand that for the same reasons our ancestors came here, so do they, for the most part. As long as Mexico refuses to work with us to provide more opportunity on their side of the border so their citizens see at least as much opportunity on their side as ours, the border could be solid concrete a mile thick and 100 miles high and it wouldn't fix the problem.
Why don't we raise the quota? Why is it so artificially low in the first place? Just because we don't want no dirty unwashed Mexicans up here? (Shades of Jim Crow.) Whether or not we allow 10 millions to immigrate, they will come anyway as long as there are better opportunities for them here than the pocket lint earnings they can make in a large part of Mexico. Keeping the quota down is about as useful as bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon.
Many of them want to do as our forefathers have done, grab a chunk of the American Dream. Most of our ancestors eventually got a chance to walk proudly. Tis true, it took a lot longer in some cases that it should have, and we still haven't quite got to Martin Luther King's dream of basing our judgement of others on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.
We should move toward making them legal in some way that rewards them for legally entering the United States and working through the system. Learning to speak English and become a part of the mainstream. Today I know a lot of legal immigrants that are doing and have done just that. We need to think this out, instead of punishing people because more of them are here than we would necessarily like.
We also tend to forget a lot of our ancestors prior to Ellis Island basically just got here. There were no quotas and until after the Civil War, few restrictions. My French Canadian ancestors just crossed the St Claire River. They had no 'papers' and nobody probably even cared that they crossed. Many of them lived quiet lives in their little villages among others of their kind, farmed their lands and lived their lives pretty much as they had done in the old country. I am not even sure if my great-great-grandfather, despite living here 47 years, ever actually forswore his Canadian citizenship and acutally became an American. Where they lived was the important thing.
And that dirty, unwashed thing. Seems to me I remember hearing about various other groups over the centuries being 'dirty' and 'unwashed'. I seem to remember in my childhood hearing some still talking about Italians and Poles that way down in my old neighborhood. I have my sneaking suspicions there was a time the Irish and the Germans were also considered nasty old foreigners.
We've been trying to 'patch' this problem since Reagan. We need to sit back, have a real discussion, and come up with a workable solution, not just a bunch of buzzwords from the Left or the Right.
Right now, people are profiting from the misery of 'illegal' immegrants that can't take better jobs or improve themselves. They're basically trapped. If they were 'legal', they could work up the job chain like we did. They would have an incentive to learn Engli$h. and improve their lot much as the legal immigrants do. I suspect it would also have effects on certain types of crime.
We can't grant them all mass amnesty. We've already tried that, and the problem just keeps growing. We need to look at this picture in an entirely new way. Tell the politicians to keep their buzzwords out. Lets decide what will really work, because what we've got now ISN'T working, nor are any of the various proposals on the table. Most of them make about as much sense as trying to piss upstream against Niagra Falls.
What really saddens me is that 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt, many of the Central and South American countries are still pretty badly off compared to the US and Canada. I suspect if there were better opportunities south of the Border, 'illegal' immigration would be much less of an issue. But then again, untill WW2, outside of the large cities, the South was probably closer to a third-world country here. I've seen some of the places and heard some of the stories.
Charles the Curmudgeon.