Again, Ed Stein has excellent commentary to go along with his excellent comic:
Despite the annoying fact that the Federal government has been unable to craft a coherent immigration policy, it simply isn’t up to the states to design their own. there’s this little constitutional problem, which is that the Federal government is solely responsible for immigration policy. Thus, the Attorney General was quite correct in suing Arizona on constitutional grounds. I have some sympathy for the state of Arizona; fully half of illegal border crossings occur there, and Arizona bears the brunt of our national failure to deal with the issue. That said, their solution is wrong on so many grounds I won’t even go into it here.
What ties us in knots nationally is a disconnect between rhetoric and reality. When we reduce the issues to jingoistic sound bites, we get nowhere. I love “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” To which I reply, “What part of illegal is illegal immigration? Illegal like mass murder, or illegal like a parking ticket? We do tend to treat those two differently. Then there’s the “amnesty” word, the one that brings the whole debate to a halt. Look, we are simply not going to deport 11 million, or 15 or 17, or whatever the number is, folks who at one time entered the country illegally. Not possible, so eliminate that as an option. Letting those who have been here for a long time, worked, kept out of trouble, paid taxes, have a path to citizenship seems appropriate to me, but the opponents can’t get the amnesty word out of their heads. A proposal is now being floated to allow a sort of limbo instead–a permanent green card allowing them to live here, but never become citizens. What a terrible idea! Remember the riots in Paris a few years ago? Permanent workers from other countries unable to fully participate in French life because they could never become citizens. Is that what we want?
Then again, even that appalling idea is better than what arizona came up with.
One Comment
This is an intense subject and ½ the people will be against it no matter which side I’m on so I’ll lay out my position and my solution. Most every nation has a annual quota of legal immigrants that may come to the US. Mexico has the highest # of visas for legal immigration of the Latin countries. When Reagan tried amnesty in the 80’s without securing the border it resulted in a tidal wave of illegal’s coming here hoping there would be another amnesty within a few years. My wife of 17 years came with that first wave. The majority of illegals come here for the American dream and to build a better life. The same is true for all the legal immigrants who sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific.
So, do we open the border completely with no restrictions on who may come and the numbers that may come, or do we stick with the quota system? The argument on wide open is that we’ll go from 300 million to a billion in 5 yrs, overwhelming our infrastructure and resources. The argument for continuing the quota is we can manage the growth of the nation so we don’t overwhelm our resources.
When we make that decision, the rest follows more easily. Choice 1 we start planning the building of schools, building on and paving park lands, drilling for more oil, building hospitals, and figuring out how to double/triple the size of cities and supply them with water, electricity, gas and food. Choice 2 we secure the border first, and then figure out a humane way to deal with illegal’s here, that does not encourage future illegal immigration. Concerning securing the border it’s not that we can’t it’s that we won’t .
How wrong am I, any other thoughts?