October 4, 2011

In the previous post, I mentioned reforming our legal immigration system to change it from its current state of being capricious, arbitrary, vindictive, unpredictable, and unjust to being rational, reasonable, predictable, and just.

As you can probably guess, I've been thinking about this for a very long time -- years, in fact. Here is a fairly specific outline of what I would like to see.

Goal

The primary goal of reform is henceforth to select immigrants solely on the basis of two criteria: assimilability (A) and benefit to the United States (B), not by any other criteria (such as race, country of origin, class within the country of origin, having relatives already living legally in the United States, or any other criteria currently used.

Of course, some of these other criteria will indirectly help the applicant or immigrant; for example, if he comes from an English-speaking country or a civilized country that has a reasonably good education system. But such criteria are not directly relevant: Two people who pass a Level-5 English language test get the same benefit, even if one grew up speaking English while the other just learned it from ESL software; two people who achieve the same score on an SAT-type exam receive an equal number of points, even if one graduated from a hoity-toity, private high school in Paris, while the other stayed up late in his log cabin, studying books by candlelight.

Points

Applicants seeking to immigrate to the U.S. accumulate points in these two categories, Assimilability (A) and Benefit (B), by various means (see below). When A + B exceeds a certain threshhold (with each of A and B exceeding a certain minimum), the applicant receives a renewable immigration visa.

Immigrants must earn a base level of points throughout the year to renew their visas. At a particular A + B level (with minimums), immigrants are granted permanent residency. At an even higher level, they are allowed to take the oath of citizenship. (You can toss in some time-in-country requirements, too.)

How to earn positive points

Applicants and immigrants earn positive points by improving themselves in ways that increase their assimilability or their benefit to the nation. For example, by passing periodic and increasingly stringent background checks; becoming more proficient at oral and written English; passing courses on American civics and history; serving honorably in the United States military; serving honorably in the federal, state, or local government; running a successful business; working (legally); academic study; participating in civic affairs, joining service organizations, becoming Boy or Girl Scout leaders; participating in religious activity, so long as the religious institution is not a front for terrorism, criminality, or anti-American activity; actively participating in neighborhood watch programs, neighborhood cleanup programs, and suchlike; accumulating wealth, buying a house, and so forth; getting legally married; having children, especially American citizens (but see below about not being able to care for one's own children); and by having family members living in the same household who accumulate positive points.

Negative points

Applicants and immigrants can also be hit by negative points for doing bad things, from committing petty crimes, to having to go on government assistance (including being unable to properly care for minor children), joining criminal or subversive organizations, dropping out of school, defaulting on debts or accumulating debts without a serious possibility of repayment, being discharged dishonorably or OTH by the military, and so on. (Of course, some negative behavior is serious enough to get them deported right away, with or without the privilege of return.)

Family friendly

Positive points earned by any member of a family residing together accrue to all members of that family; negative points for all adults in the family apply only to that member. Negative points given to minor children apply somewhat but not completely to the adult family members.

If the parents appear to be doing everything they can to resolve the problem, but nothing is working, there probably should be some mechanism for getting help. If the child is deemed truly incorrigible, the family should be allowed to "divorce" the child from the family for purposes of immigration: That is, his negative points will no longer drag the entire family down. (This should be rare and difficult to justify; can't divorce your kid for trivial, understandable, solvable, or temporary problems. But it should not be impossible to justify, given a child who is sufficiently vicious and parents who really have tried everything.)

Transparency and predictability

The law should also set up a public website that fully describes all of these positive and negative point-accumulating activities and accomplishments, as well as the tiers of residency and citizenship. Additionally, if an applicant or immigrant logs in with a password, he can see the current A and B point levels for all members of his family who reside in the same household.

Most important, these reforms make the system completely predictable and transparent: Every wannabe immigrant knows exactly what he must do to gain residency, permanent residency, and citizenship. Once he (or his family) achieves the required number of points, he (it) is promoted to the next tier by hard and fast rule with no subjectivity, except perhaps in the more stringent background checks. But even there, the law should specify that the purpose is not to exclude people on arbitrary or irrelevant criteria but to ensure the person is not a criminal, a terrorist, a subversive, a bum, or other obvious undesirable.

Minimum-wage laws and indentured servitude

All immigrants who have not yet obtained permanent residency, and all persons in the United States on a student visa, should be exempted from all federal and state minimum-wage laws; they can accept a job for as low a salary as they choose.

The purpose of this reform is to end the dangerous and abhorrent practice of allowing putative "guest workers" -- who have no loyalty to the United States, no intention of staying, and who do not even feel connected to the American community -- into the U.S. to do menial work; and to replace them with immigrants who have at least shown assimilability, benefit to America, and the willingness to go through the rigamarole of becoming Americans. As Mark Steyn, et al, have demonstrated, "guest workers" are an invitation to riot, violence, and creeping conquest by aggressive, anti-American ideologies, such as radical Islamism.

Applicants and immigrants who have not yet obtained permanent residency should legally be allowed to undertake temporary indentured servitude, if necessary, to immigrate to the United States or live here while accumulating points; the terms must be transparent, and the system should probably be regulated and subject to oversight at the federal and state levels. Permanent residents should not be allowed to undertake indentured servitude for immigration purposes, but can still complete their indenture if necessary.

A bit off-topic: I'm a great believer in temporary indentured servitude and would like to see it make a comeback. I think it would work well for both immigrants and American citizens, and for several purposes: for punishment and restitution for committing a crime, for people who default on their debts -- including people who need medical care but have no insurance and no other means to pay, and maybe even for purchasing a first house or condo.

That one is iffy; it depends on how important it is to promote home ownership. But I think it would be a darn sight better way to get more Americans owning homes than forcing lenders to offer people mortgages that they have no reasonable means of ever paying back.

In any event, I tried to phrase it carefully in the last section of the reform so as not to preclude temporary indentured servitude for reasons other than immigration.

And that's my immigration reform, on a nutshell.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 4, 2011, at the time of 2:43 PM | Comments (5)

October 2, 2011

No, I am not being sarcastic; I mean that quite literally: We need to discriminate between different classes of illegal alien.

Patterico has for some time pushed -- desultorily, to be sure -- a welcome policy suggestion; he calls on the feds to "deport the criminals first."

No, he's not saying that, since all illegal aliens are by definition "criminal," we should deport them all immediately; by contrast, Patterico says that there already is a subgroup, within the larger group of illegal aliens, comprising those illegals who commit crimes apart from the crime of being here illegally (and its associated crimes of document fraud and such)... and that we should focus first on deporting those who come to this country in order to live a criminal livestyle.

We should target for deportation (after they serve their sentences here) all those illegals convicted of committing burglaries, arsons, rapes, assaults, and homicides; who are found guilty of joining criminal gangs, trafficking in narcotics, and defrauding people; who are proven check kiters or pick pockets; or who commit other high crimes and misdemeanors demonstrating criminality beyond simply wanting to live and work peacefully in America.

It makes a lot of sense, and it's a perfect example of discrimination: Patterico discriminates between illegals who want to try to fit into and contribute to American society, and illegals who see America as a vast piggy bank to be looted, abused, and despoiled.

But now, after reading a pair of posts that set me fuming, I believe such discrimination must go much further. In those posts, the first by an unnamed "long-time reader" of my favorite blog and the second by my favorite blogger at that same site, I came away with the very strong impression that the two posters, who stand representative of a very influential strain of conservatism, see very little difference at all between those who come here illegally out of desperation and want only to work and raise a family -- and those who come here illegally to vandalize, thieve, and murder.

That lack of discrimination begins to shock my conscience.

Thus I hereby initiate my own program that I believe complements Patterico's pontification noted above. He says, "deport the criminals first;" I say, legalize the most innocent first.

Who are the most innocent of all illegal aliens? Those who were brought here as little children, too young even to understand what a national border is or what it means to cross without permission, let alone mature enough to consent in an informed way to illegal entry. Such innocents need a name, so let us call them "unwitting aliens," UA -- they illegally entered the U.S. without their own consent or even knowledge.

(Do you want to call it amnesty? I don't mind; I don't even care. Does anybody deserve amnesty more than a person who never even committed the crime of which he stands convicted, since he was a little kid when it happened?)

There are a great many such UAs, in raw numbers; and for nearly all of them, the United States is literally the only country they have ever known. They grew up here, went to school here, made friends and enemies here; they are completely assimilated into American society; they think of themselves as Americans; they have no recollection of having lived in Mexico or Argentina or El Salvador; and likely in quite a lot of cases, they don't even speak Spanish or Portuguese. Their parents may have falsely told them all their lives that they were born in the United States; they may even have shown the UAs a false American birth certificate.

Should we really tell these kids that they don't deserve in-state tuition, even if they have lived in one American state all their conscious life, because they're criminals? Do we want these young men and women to be forever barred from living legally in the only home they remember, the only country to which they feel loyalty, unable to establish residency anywhere in that country because of something their parents did when the UAs were still infants? Do we for God's sake want to deport these very American "illegals?" Deport them to where -- a country they cannot even remember, whose citizens speak a language the unwitting aliens might not even know?

Most American family courts, in the case of divorce, will take the ages of the children into consideration when determining custody; when a child is deemed old enough to make an informed decision, he can decide whether to live with the father, the mother, or under some joint custody plan. Certainly any adult child (over the age of eighteen) can freely decide whether to live with one of his parents or move into his own place.

I call for the same sort of program for unwitting aliens as we have for the children of divorce: If a UA's parents are discovered and ordered deported, and if the UA is deemed old enough to give informed consent, he should be allowed to freely choose which country he will live in; and we should grant him permanent residency in the United States, if that's what he chooses.

That doesn't mean his parents get to stay as well; if they're subject to deportation, they're still subject to deportation. The UA can be raised by a legally resident relative, or in the extreme case, can be made a ward of the court and sent either to a foster home or adopted out. But any good parent should want the best for his child, correct?

If a UA comes to the authorities' attention by some other means -- say by applying for university and claiming, in all innocence, the in-state tuition of the local state university -- then the same applies: He is told that he is an unwitting alien and that he must choose.

In either case, once obtaining permanent residency, he is eligible to work towards citizenship, just as would be any other legal permanent resident.

(If such a law is passed, and a reasonable period of time elapses -- time for people to understand the system -- then UAs who don't apply for residency but instead take criminal steps to conceal their alien nationality should lose their UA status; they are no longer "unwitting;" they have become co-conspirators with their parents.)

This policy suggestion is not a solution to the problem of illegal immigration; as I have argued many times (just click the category link "Immigration Immolitions" at the top of this post), the only solution is complete reform of the legal immigration system to make it predictable, rational, and just; coupled with building a physical fence or wall entirely across both our southern and northern borders, and other vigorous security procedures -- directed against those who persist in trying to climb through the window when we have already made it realistically doable for any decent, assimilable immigrant to enter openly through the door.

But legalizing the most innocent first would certainly resolve a great potential injustice in a fair and equitable way, and one that will do no harm to United States border security. We have no more to fear from an unwitting alien than we have from a legal immigrant, or even a natural-born American citizen.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 2, 2011, at the time of 6:22 PM | Comments (7)

September 28, 2011

Barack H. Obama has always been the master of zigzag:

• He sits for twenty years in the pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ; then during his first presidential campaign, he throws Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus, weeping like the Walrus and Carpenter that "this is not the Jeremiah Wright that I knew."
• As senator, he denounces the Iraq War as the wrong war; as president, he continues fighting it.
• As senator, he declares the Afghanistan War is the right war, the one we should be waging; as president, he can't wait to announce a date for withdrawal into ignominious defeat.
• Two days after inauguration, he announces with fanfare that he will shutter the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within one year; two and a half years later, it remains open and in full operation with no plans for a shutdown.
• As senator, he scoffed at the idea of raising taxes in the midst of a recession; as president, and during a recession that may well already be double-dip, he has already rammed through the biggest tax increase in history and is trying to top it with another one.

I'm not talking about grandiose plans that went awry, like ObamaCare, his environmentalist schemes, and the colossal failure of his stimulus package; by zigzag, I mean the art of being the Weathercock in Chief: major goal reversals on cue, in the wink of an eye. Obama is more than Clintonian; his presidency verges on multiple policy disorder.

And for a while he got away with it; folks cheered his "post-partisan" and "post-racial" presidency, giving him sky-high approval ratings.

But something has happened in the last year; somehow, Obama has gotten "out of phase" with the rest of the world. He zags everyone else is zigging...

• After acknowledging many of the failures of the stimulus package, this month he zigs, announcing Bride of Tax and Stimulus; but even ultra liberal Senate Democrats (like Chuck Schumer, D-NY, 95%) zag, denouncing the plan as crazed and working to derail it.
• He zags to inject American forces into the Libyan War, hoping to tap into patriotic Americans' tendency to rally behind the president great martial causes (the Civil War, World War II, the Libya kafuffle); but at that very moment, conservatives zig to denounce the engagement for lacking congressional approval and for Obama's decision to try to "lead from behind," while the Left likewise zigs to denounce the engagement due to a general rejection of and revulsion for any more wars in that region of the world.
• In a swerving effort to shore up support on his left, he zigs again, demanding a "kill and eat the rich" tax policy; but his leftist constituency zags, hitting the ceiling over his right turns on Israel and Cuba.
• Losing the Left, hence desperate to grab a chunk of the Right, particularly in Florida (which he won in 2008 but looks increasingly likely to lose next year), he zags, promising an immediate veto of the fiat PLO state. Then today, he announces as part of the same "Barack the Strongman" zag that he won't lift the embargo on Cuba until "we see positive movement" in that country. (Both are flipflops). But instead of zagging to embrace Obama's newfound conservatism, his Republican audience zigs, still screaming bloody blue murder about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell!

It's not that he's "snakebit," as some put it; he has fallen out of synch with the electorate, so that every turn he makes puts him 180° off course compared to the rest of the country, left and right. At this point, the percent of people who believe President B.O. is doing a good job and who actually look forward to reelecting him (as opposed to holding their noses and voting against the GOP) can probably be numbered on a single hand... of a three-toed sloth.

And it's only going to get worse. Like a beginner in flight school, he overcorrects and re-overcorrects, oscillating back and forth with increasing amplitude. There is only one finale to this out-of-control lobster quadrille, and it looks very like the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. "Gallopin' Gertie," when a steady wind set the bridge twisting at its resonant frequency in an almost surreal structural failure:

 

 

Keep in mind the money-shot of the bridge rockin' and rollin', as we converge on November 6th, 2012. I expect that image will more and more take on an eerie prescience.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 28, 2011, at the time of 9:32 PM | Comments (3)

September 27, 2011

And here's Peter Orszag, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack H. Obama, writing in the New Republic (clipped from the free excerpt):

To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Yuck yuck, just joking; jooooooking!

My word; those witty, witty Democrats.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2011, at the time of 6:13 PM | Comments (2)

Speaking at the Cary Rotary Club, here's North Carolina Gov. Beverly Eaves "Bev" Perdue (a liberal Democrat -- and if you didn't already know, this quotation should make it plain):

You have to have more ability from Congress, I think, to work together and to get over the partisan bickering and focus on fixing things. I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. The one good thing about Raleigh is that for so many years we worked across party lines. It's a little bit more contentious now but it's not impossible to try to do what's right in this state. You want people who don't worry about the next election.

If Gov. Perdue is worrying about the next congressional (and presidential) elections, she's got good reason!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2011, at the time of 6:02 PM | Comments (2)

"Prager University" -- which comprises radio talk-show host Dennis Prager delivering a series of four to five minute lectures on sundry interesting topics on YouTube -- has a video out on the question of whether Israel can rightly be considered an "Apartheid state."

The charge is repeatedly lobbed at the Jewish state, almost certainly in the hope that people will begin associating "Jewish" with "Apartheid," South Africa's regime of racist laws designed to prevent the black majority of South Africa from ever achieving political power or overthrowing the white majority colonial authority (and I use all those words literally, with great deliberation).

Prager's lecture is well done, though somewhat shallow; how much profundity can you pack into five minutes, forty-six seconds, including intro and outro? Here is it:

 

 

It's obvious to the point of tautology that Israel is not an Apartheid state, since it hasn't enacted any of the laws that formed the basis of South Africa's Apartheid system. The accusers are on the level of those who routinely refer to "Tea-Party Nazis." (Yep, tea partiers demand a cheaper, smaller, weaker, and less intrusive government, just like the Nazis did!)

But the more interesting question (not covered by Prager) is, Who was responsible for implementing actual Apartheid in the first place -- socialists or Capitalists?

That question is brilliantly and definitively answered in Walter Williams' seminal book, South Africa's War Against Capitalism. Not surprisingly -- else why would I bring it up? -- Williams concludes:

1. That it was the labor unions in South Africa and their socialist allies among Boer politicians that assembled the system of racial laws, and
2. That the central purpose of Apartheid was to thwart the march of Capitalism -- which was, inter alia, rapidly eroding the racial gap in South Africa between white, black, and coloured (as they called anyone not strictly European or African), in employment, wages, promotions, and even socially, among younger citizens (hence the anti-miscegenation laws within Apartheid).

The unionistas then (as now!) were enraged that the prospects of black and coloured workers were rising, since they were willing to work for less; while white laborers -- who had pitched their labor price much too high -- were plummeting, forcing them to reduce their wage demands lower and closer to black and coloured workers. Capitalism, in other words, was leveling the playing field among the races. So the South African unions and socialist politicians deliberately designed a system to set racial differences into concrete.

One of the first laws enacted in the Apartheid system was to make it a crime to pay non-white workers less than white workers. This had the effect, then as now, of eliminating the economic incentive to hire blacks and coloureds.

Earlier, they had been able to get jobs by undercutting the wages of white workers; thus racial discrimination against non-whites carried a huge price tag of increased labor costs. But with the new law requiring equal pay for equal work, racist businesses that hired only white workers suffered no increased cost whatsoever. That completely eliminated the greatest possible incentive for judging people by the content of their characters, not the "colour" of their skins: money.

And don't imagine for a moment that it was mere serendipity, the law of unintended consequences; Afrikaner politicians knew exactly what would happen when they enacted that statute. (Other South African laws, such as the Group Areas Act and the Racial Classifications Act, were more blatantly racist.)

Read the whole book, expensive though it is: Cover price was probably less than fifteen bucks when I bought my copy in 1989; today, Amazon.com is selling used copies for $67; and if you want a new one, be prepared to shell out $375! (Funnily enough, the book was published by Praeger Press -- no relation.)

I wish Dennis Prager would try to get Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Dinesh D'Souza, and other fascinating, scholarly authors to record some five-minute lectures to compliment Prager's own talks. For those who prefer audiovideo to reading a thick tome, it could form a fine introduction to a number of deep thinkers; and it could make "Prager University" something greater than just a showcase for Prager himself.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2011, at the time of 3:03 PM | Comments (0)

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