Immigration 4

So who do I blame for this wretched immigration mess?
It is usually not appropriate to blame the individual for playing the system. This would apply especially to the IIUW (= illegal immigrant-undocumented worker). These folks are just trying to get ahead and they are in fact victims of the system. But the employer who sees his competitors getting an advantage by hiring IIUWs and also sees the government doing almost nothing about it is also a victim of the system. Eventually the real enforcement has to focus on the employer who hires IIUWs and require that he pay a heavy penalty. But until the government gets serious, the employer is trapped in a system that is dysfunctional because those in authority are not meeting their obligations.

The people who created the system and those who do not enforce it deserve the blame. This is another example of how we sometimes deal badly with the following dilemma: some people want this law and some people don’t. To please one group we will pass the law and to please the other group we will not enforce the law. That is not compromise. That is a grotesque betrayal of the rule of law. Then you follow that with several presidents who think that whether or not they enforce the law is a bargaining chip in some political game. To paraphrase a participant in this blog: If you have millions of people in your country without legal status who are working contrary to the laws of the country, then can you seriously claim that you are a nation of laws?

I believe that any country has an absolute legal right to limit immigration into that country. The fact that at some times in the past we did not limit immigration into the US has absolutely nothing to do with it. We did it one way then and we can do it another way now. It is our choice.

I would continue the current high level of legal immigration into the US. I would prefer that it favor people from countries which are currently underrepresented here: that would be Asians.

I support a zero level of illegal immigration.

If we need workers (and apparently we do), then we should create a very broad visa program to regulate the influx of workers and make them legal.

One more thing and then I’ll stop on immigration.

All of the above is about our legal right to control residence in our country. However, there is also a moral dimension to this question. If you have to bring in people from outside of your country, then, in some sense, your country does not have enough people in it. That is the justification for allowing more immigration. I don’t think it is morally right to bring people in on work visa and then just pay them for their work and feel like you have done them justice. The longer a person works here legally, the greater is their moral claim to access to citizenship, if they want it. The work visa program should include a structure for dealing with this.

I want to be clear that I do not think that the last paragraph is a proper approach to the 12 million IIUWs who are here now. They worked here illegally therefore their claim is significantly weaker. However, they are here illegally, in part, because we don’t have our act together. Therefore they do have some claim. That claim should be resolved in a way that is consistent with the work visa program but not until after the long-term solution to immigration is in place.