The Immigration Bill

I won’t bother doing a detailed analysis of the immigration reform bill. You can get that elsewhere. Honestly, I despair of any kind of meaningful reform in the current environment of radicalization and polarization. There’s a sizeable portion of the American people (split between Democrats and Republicans) for whom nothing less than open borders and “residency = citizenship” is acceptable. There’s another sizeable portion, mostly Republicans, for whom anything less than closing the borders and ejecting illegals is unacceptable. Is there room for compromise in either of those positions?

I also wonder whether it’s possible even to discuss immigration meaningfully in an atmosphere of political correctness. We don’t have an immigration problem in this country. We have a Mexican immigration and border control problem. That’s not prejudice—it’s a statement of fact. We have something like 500,000 people entering the country illegally every year and most of them enter via our southern border.

The reason for this is pretty clear, too: wages are higher in the U. S. than in Mexico and, frankly, the visa quotas for Mexico are unrealistically low.

In my ideal world immigration reform would include equal measures of dramatic increases in the numbers of work visas issued to Mexicans, serious reforms to encourage economic growth in Mexico, and serious enforcement of U. S. immigration law both on the border and in the workplace with bounties playing a substantial role. That probably wouldn’t make anybody but me happy.

I think that’s a lot of what’s wrong with most proposals. Let’s try a thought experiment. Forget about picking apart the bill that’s on the table. Rather than doing that or trying to craft the immigration bill that would make you happy, think about the bill that you would find minimally acceptable but that would satisfy people who disagree with you. Wrangling about the extreme positions will only leave the status quo in place and that’s not working.