Sane and Moral? Or Wishful Thinking?

I want to focus on two passages in Carl Cannon’s post at RealClearPolitics on reforming our immigration system. The first is this:

First, regarding the 11 million undocumented people already here without legal papers: It is clearly in the national interest, no matter what Trump said on the 2016 campaign trail, to incorporate these people into American life, which is what was envisioned by the 2013 Senate legislation. Perhaps this doesn’t include full citizenship rights, but it would mean they’d no longer have to live in fear and could plan for a future in their chosen country.

Is the United States their “chosen country” or are jobs in the United States their chosen jobs? I don’t think we have any means for distinguishing between the two or making that evaluation. The immigration reform of 1986 does give us a hint: only a minority of the 3.2 million eligible for U. S. citizenship under that law actually availed themselves of the opportunity.

Here’s the second passage:

As for the refugees: the government simply must adhere to U.S. law and international norms. If this means constructing huge intake centers along the border and staffing it with a massive force of trained customs agents and administrative law judges — and suitable facilities for kids — so be it. We might even want to build some of these facilities in Mexico, along that country’s southern border, which is where most of these people are coming from.

This is another example of the “roomful of money” hypothesis. We do not have a roomful of money from which we can draw at will for this or for that. Congress must appropriate money for specific purposes.

And that’s the root of the problem. Both sides of the aisle in Congress like present law just fine. They both think they’re winning and they both may be right. It’s the rest of us who are losing.

Additionally, it takes time. “Trained customs agents and administrative law judges” don’t spring forth fully grown like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It would take at least a year to implement that even if Congress had the will to do so which it doesn’t and there’s a problem now.

Also, remember that 99% figure quoted for asylum-seekers showing up at their hearings? As it turns out that that was a pilot program of just 700 families with close monitoring by individualized caseworkers. How confident can we be that generalizing that to a program several orders of magnitude larger would yield the same results?

What’s happening right now is either a deliberate Aliskyite strategy of overwhelming the system or has been impelled by some factors other than increased violence and economic distress in Central America (since that has not happened and there’s been a very large increase in the number of families from Central America presenting themselves at the border) but whatever the case it’s working. The system is overwhelmed and that calls for extraordinary measures. The extraordinary measures of family detention are better than separating families but they’re still inadequate.