A Solution to America's Immigration problem

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

                                    Emma Lazarus

I guess this had to happen, someday.  These stirring words, that for years summarized America’s attitude towards immigrants, even to the point of having the last few lines etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty, don’t mean the same thing anymore.

Not that they ever did, of course.  What they meant at the time was, “Hey, Europe”, or “Hey, China!”  “We see you’re getting kinda crowded over there, and it’s causing some problems for ya.  Well, we got the opposite problem here, so maybe we can help out some.  We got a lot of wide open spaces that we are in the process of expropriating from the ignorant savages who lived here when we showed up, and we need cheap labor, lots of it.  We’ll take anyone you have that wants to go.  We’ll treat ‘em like shit, of course, but they’ll have a better chance to make it here than they ever would back home, so send em on over, we’ll take ‘em.”  And on that basis, we populated the West and spread from Sea to Shining Sea.  The potato famine in Ireland alone brought millions.

Now, however, the descendants of those huddled masses are starting to wake up and look around and realize there are no more wide open spaces in America, anymore, at least not where anyone wants to live.  Now, the problem is how we can slam the door on all the huddled masses, they’re starting to cost us real money!

Of course, if you have money, immigration laws and quotas mean nothing to you.  I think the current price is around $250k and you can waltz in here any time you like and do whatever you can get away with, just like the rest of us.  And of course they’re handing out Green Cards right and left if you are the type of skilled worker that America can’t seem to produce in sufficient quantities these days, and some Microsoft spinoff wants you.  We supply the whole world with football players; doctors and engineers we have to import.  But the huddled masses, especially the illegal ones, they’re becoming a problem.

If you look at family histories of former immigrants, you will see the same story of hard work, education and diligence leading to greater and greater success as the children grew up here and became Americans.  Sure, you will find lots of stories of those who lost their way to crime and drugs, and they died in our factories and sawmills in droves, but the survivors have made this a better country in many ways.  So it’s easy to conclude that those immigrants, especially the illegal ones who have risked the most and taken the most difficult path to get here, are really the ones we need the most, not only for them but for their children’s children, and that they should not be sent away in chains for making the effort, but rewarded for their success. 

The underlying question in any person’s decision to emigrate to a foreign country is why is it worth the effort?  Why would someone leave the only home they’ve known to come to America?  Either things are real bad at home, or things are that much better here.  It probably doesn’t matter, since they show up every night at the border whatever the reason.  So how to we get them to stop?  Here’s one idea:

Accept the fact that physically coming to America is the goal for all the illegal immigrants, the reward they seek.  So, here’s how you fix the problem.  First, you interview each person you catch, in their language.  You want to know why they made the effort to get here, and why they were willing to leave home.  Then you make them this offer:

We’d like you back some day, maybe, as a legal immigrant, so here’s what we’re gonna do.  We’re gonna send you home on the bus, back to the town you grew up in, and we’re gonna pay you so much a month to stay there until we call you.  It might be the rest of your life, so stay busy.

This achieves two things, it repatriates the immigrant, and they go away happy.  The small amount of money it would cost to keep them home is less than what we are now spending to keep them out, when you look at all the related costs to society, both financial and political.  We can keep track of them individually as well, and, when we need a particular skill, say, picking fruit or crunching algorithms, we know who to call.  It also eliminates the drain of valuable individuals from those countries, and leaves them home to stay involved in their own communities.

You would set up the payment system to only pay them in person, and in that town, and toss in any other restrictions you’d need to keep the local sharks at bay.  Of course, if the reason they fled was violence, you’d want to work with the local government to solve that problem, and part of the deal would be that they would talk to the police.  One way or another, it is in our best interests as a country to keep people in other countries away and happy with us when we don’t want them here.  There’s less likelihood that they will show up with guns some day.  Anyone who thinks that can’t happen is an ostrich on a beach.

So think about the idea of America as a vast fountain of wealth for people all over the world.  All they have to do to get it is successfully run a gauntlet to get here, a gauntlet that will be carefully designed to spot the highly skilled individuals, weed out the criminals, keep families together, and provide American companies the help they need when American citizens are unable or unwilling to provide it.

We already have a budget for this operation.  It’s called Foreign Aid, and we give billions of dollars out every year in cash and in weaponry to individuals in every country.  The difference is that the individuals to whom we currently give the money are the ones who are running the country, and not necessarily the ones it would most benefit.  So every time we set up an account for a successful émigré from, say, Somalia, we simply deduct that amount from the aid to that country.  We just cut out the middlemen and go right to the source.  And, of course, we’re giving cash, not tools with which to go out and kill someone, so we feel better about it, too.

Think of all the money we save in our current immigration process, as we eliminate Green Cards and quotas and all the related bureaucratic nonsense and reduce it down to the same question for everyone.  You want to come to America?  No, problem, run the gauntlet like everyone else, and we’ll see how you do.  No exemptions for wealth, or poverty, you have to show that you’re tough and resourceful and willing to work for it, and then if we need you, we’ll call you.  Thanks for trying.

It would be fair, because you could design fairness into the gauntlet, and apply the same standards to everyone.  It would be effective, because you would always know who to call when a given company needed help and couldn’t find it.  It would be economical when we compare all those payments with the amounts we currently spend on welfare, child care, medical care, foreign aid and border patrols, not to mention a huge part of the State department.  It wouldn't surprise me that we save a pile of money in the process.  Think about how hard it will be to call for death to America when many of your parishioners are getting a check from the Great Satan each month.  You could eliminate the Border Patrol and the fence, because you could have a gauntlet in a room at every American embassy in the world.  There would be no reason to come to the border any more.  Just the reality show income alone in all countries would make “The Running Man” seem like an afterthought.

For some of you, I know an outside context solution like this raises several red flags, chiefly among which is the Biblical admonition that “from the sweat of your brow you shall earn your bread”, from which directly springs the concepts that “they don’t deserve it”, or “they didn't earn it”, or “I don’t want to pay for it”.  The point is, you are already paying for it, over and over again, and all your other objections are irrelevant.  This proposal is based on nothing but a practical solution to a financial problem in this country:  How do we keep out unwanted immigrants at the lowest possible cost and in such a way as to keep them favorable to us, even when they can’t get in the country?  If your objections boil down to “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep the bastards out, no matter what it costs”, just be up front about it, and maybe spend a little time thinking about how the future looks when we do it your way.  Who knows, maybe my way might start to sound pretty reasonable if you think about it.

And maybe we ought to change that sign on the statue.  :-{)}