My evolving position on immigration

Still very much a work in progress, but here’s where I’d start if we’re talking concrete steps.

1. I would throw out all restrictions on immigration whose purpose was economic protectionism. If programmers from India can come here and do my job as well as I can, and charge my fellow Americans less money then I’m charging them, then that means I’m overcharging my fellow Americans; and to the extent that the American government uses guns and border patrol agents to keep my competitors from coming here at all, the INS is complicit in my exploitation of my fellow Americans’ needs. I would significantly expedite the immigration process for low-security-risk immigrants (into which category would fall, say, college-educated Dutchmen, or poor Mexicans, or even Kazakh Muslims, but certainly not Syrian Muslims). I would significantly increase the difficulty of immigrating from high-risk areas such as Saudi Arabia, and (as will be seen) I would impose ideological conditions (to be described in more detail later) to entry into the country.

2. I would build a fence (obviously meaning something much more significant than chain-link) along the border to put a major crimp in illegal immigration. The people who say it can’t be done have got to be joking; they are talking about a country that even with only the technology that was available half a century ago, built the interstate highway system. To say the fence can’t be built is to insult the intelligence of the people you’re talking to. We don’t have to have a 100% success rate; we just have to stop the wholesale, unimpeded flow.

3. I would start the process of amending the Constitution so that being born in the United States got you automatic citizenship only if your mother was here illegally legally [oops! thanks, Jim], and I would grandfather this exclusion to everybody who was less than 18 at the time of passage.

4. I would immediately rule that immigrants (yes, I mean legal ones) were excluded from taxes aimed at all non-essential government services (non-essential government services being defined as anything other than protection from violence and fraud), but also excluded from all non-essential government services – all transfer payments, public schools, etc. -- unless they chose to pay an out-of-pocket fee to offset the taxpayer cost. (I confess that I have an ulterior motive here: this would be treating the illegals way better than the citizens, because most government “services” are really crappy deals and crappy services that, if you have any sense, you would opt out of like a shot if given the opportunity. Thus I figure one of the consequences of excluding illegals from services – but also from the cost of services – would be to create significant pressure to give citizens the same opt-out ability, which I would absolutely love. Furthermore, it would force a clear distinction between taxes collected for essential services and those collected for non-essential services, which would also have the domestic benefit of making it obvious just what a terrible deal for the American taxpayer are most things the government does.)

5. I would rule that anybody with a record of violent criminal activity is permanently ineligible for entry into the United States, and that any foreign citizen who committed a violent crime within our borders would first serve all criminal penalties and then would be immediately and permanently deported.

6. I would announce that anybody who was caught in the United States illegally would be deported and would be ineligible for reentry for a period of five years, this provision to become effective six months from the date at which the streamlined immigration process went into effect (though there would be an appeals process for extraordinary humanitarian circumstances). There would be no amnesty of any kind, and if you were already here then you would have to go home and get back in line.

7. Entry into the United States would be contingent upon your having read, understood and sworn to abide by a short set of guiding principles considered to capture the American social compact. (For example, any Muslim wishing to enter the United States would have to forswear jihad and swear to take no action within our borders intended to establish rule of sharia; for another, you would have to swear your rejection to the tribalistic premise that special rights are possessed by certain races, particularly “la Raza.”)

8. If you were going to stay in the country for an extended period of time, you would be required to show progress in acquisition of basic competency in English.

9. Once the streamlined immigration process was in place, I would set about calmly reducing the number of illegal immigrants resident in the country by proactive catch-and-deport – no big hurry, maybe forty or fifty thousand a year.

In other words, I want a very high fence, a very big gate, and nothing that even hints at saying, “Ah, well, if you can get away with breaking our laws long enough then we’ll let you stay.” It’s a heckuva stupid country that makes it near-impossible for law-abiding persons to get in but rewards law-breaking on a grand scale.

That’ll do for a start. I am certainly open to arguments that some or all of these suggestions are ill-conceived, as the problem of illegal immigration is something to which I have only recently begun to consider seriously.