Immigration 'Reforms'? Real Reform Is As Simple As 1-2-3-4

Synopsis

1. Secure the borders.
2. Quit politicizing immigration and illegal immigration.
3. Turn off the magnet to illegal immigration.
4. Put an end to “anchor babies.”

Introduction

As an immigrant and a naturalized U.S. citizen myself, with several generations of U.S. citizens in my extended family tree and none left in Europe, I am writing to express my most vehement protest against the proposed “reforms” in our immigration laws that are being announced at the present time, whether they come from the president or Congress.

No, I don’t want to hear any talk about a “path to citizenship,” certainly not with respect to people who have flaunted our laws and abused our good nature and hospitality by coming here and settling here illegally, no matter where they came from and why they came. Or worse, actually believing, and acting accordingly, that they are legitimately engaged in “reconquista.” Sorry, no French, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and dozens and dozens of other nationalities ever came to our shores in the name of any “reconquista.” Reconquista is an act of war, not a claim to a path to U.S. citizenship. None of these other nationalities had ever engaged in ethnic cleansing of entire towns and counties, as hispanics are now being reported to be doing by means of gang violence, gang warfare and domestic terrorism in the Los Angeles area.

My immediate family had to wait almost three years to get all the paperwork done before we were allowed to rejoin our families here in the U.S. as legal immigrants and permanent residents with green cards. We had to have a sponsor who guaranteed to the U.S. Government that we’d have a place to live, my father would have a job, that the kids would enroll in school, and that in no way would we ever become a burden to the state, needing help from the social welfare services. During those three years we went through repeated investigations and security checks by U.S. government and U.S. intelligence agencies, and we were required to provide monthly “proof of moral character” from the police department of our host country where we were waiting for our U.S. immigration visas. And even then it took a personal appeal to the U.S. Ambassador to that country, from me and my brother in our early teens, to get the process completed.

After all that, I still had to wait a bit over five years to convert my green card to a certificate of naturalization, and again it took a clean record and help from my college professors and ROTC instructors to get that done.

So no, the last thing I want to hear is a president, whose own claim to constitutional eligibility for his office is based on an amateurishly forged birth certificate, lecturing ME about the righteousness of providing 11 million illegals a path to U.S. citizenship. Let them wait their turn behind all the legal applicants, if they even get a turn, given that they are here illegally and therefore do not have a clean “moral” or legal record.

Do you really want to solve the problem of illegal immigration? It’s as simple as 1-2-3. OK, a hup-2-3-4.

Real Reform

1. Our borders are porous. Terrorists are running human and military contraband across our unsecured borders. Step number one is to secure the borders in a manner sufficient to make sure that no terrorists and weaponry or other equipment gets through. If it takes stationing the National Guard on the border to do it, well, do it. Call out the militia, but do it.

We went through this before. We were supposed to secure the borders in 1986, when the same charlatans who are pushing this blatant trickery now had duped a decent human being and a good natured, good hearted, well-meaning President, Ronald Reagan, and simply broke their word and the law — the very law they wanted — in doing so. Been there, done that. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. No, thank you.

2. Quit politicizing immigration and illegal immigration. It was race baiters who have turned it into a permanently unsolved problem, a political football, because it served and is still serving their purposes in domestic politics. We used to have an immigration policy based on family reunification, and not much else, because we recognized that the country is filling up and we did not really want to become as crowded as some other parts of the world. But, most of us having come from Europe, in the 1960s the “wise men” of one political party declared that family reunification was racist and unfair to other races. They never explained their reasoning, and never accounted for the fact that we never shut the door to refugees and families from other races. But they opened the floodgates, and the demographic projections are that our children will be the minority in our own country.

3. Turn off the magnet to illegal immigration. Yes, here in the West the southern border was always open and people freely traveled back and forth for centuries. My neighbor in Utah spent a few months here and a few months in Mexico every year. Others I worked with or worked for my contractor worked here for years at a time and went home occasionally. Nobody minded, nobody cared. It’s a free country. But the ebb and flow of the back and forth trickle became massive one-way flood, it hit us like a tsunami after the amnesty of 1986, ending up in the underground economy and on welfare. The burden of unreimbursed expenses for legally mandated care has bankrupted countless numbers of hospitals, and the welfare load is bankrupting countless numbers of counties and states, if not the federal government itself. The political problem is that when some people see a guaranteed source of votes, a guaranteed new source of union dues, and a guaranteed reliable source of cheap household and unskilled labor, then nobody has any interest in stopping it, and all are eager to pretend that there is no way to stop it.

Except that there is. Make U.S. citizenship an absolute requirement for welfare. Remember, immigrants used to be required to have a sponsor; green card holders have no business asking government for help. Make U.S. citizenship or a green card a requirement to hold a job and to get a driver’s license. It did use to be that way, before the flood. Put the e-verify system fully in place and punish employers who skip it. We have all kinds of record keeping requirements with all sorts of ways to cross check information, this should not be hard to implement beyond just wanting to. It’s easy to prove one’s legal status; just show a passport or a green card. In my entire working career, employers had always asked me for proof of eligibility to work here, and for more intrusive information whenever the job called for a security clearance.

They say illegal immigration has actually slowed or stopped, and even reversed, as the Obama economy has sunk deeper into depression. Maybe so, and if that’s so, then it just proves that Romney’s much maligned and ridiculed “self-deportation” really does work. Of course it does. People needing a job go where the jobs are, and when you have language and cultural barriers against you, which you really don’t want to overcome anyway, it’s not unreasonable to go back home when jobs dry up here.

4. Equally importantly, put an end to “anchor babies.” If the requirement to be a natural born American is good enough for the President to hold office, then it is good enough for everybody. This is not even an issue or a question in other countries, which are nation-states based on common linguistic, cultural and generic characteristics. My father was born in France to decades-long residents and businessmen in Paris, but the French never gave him recognition as a French citizen. It is an issue here in the U.S. because Americans come from everywhere else in the world and we do not have national or ethnic standards to define who is an American. The least we can do is say is the obvious, that you are an American if you are born here to American parents. Not to foreign parents. Not to illegals.

Analysis and Comments

But this is such a cold-hearted, racist position… Is it, really? Try, as an American, to demand that another country let you settle there permanently and give you citizenship on the same terms that foreigners and some Americans demand that we bestow American citizenship on others. Aren’t we supposed to be just like them? Aren’t we supposed to deny American exceptionalism, to deny that there is something special and unique about being American? Well, yes, according to the politically correct crowd we are supposed to deny all that, and to be ashamed of that, especially when it comes to having to admit that what makes America special is the philosophical foundation of our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — all of which are threatened with extinction when we flood the country with people from cultures that don’t even know and never bother to learn what the hell we are talking about, but they sure have no problem demanding that we adapt to them, that we accommodate them, their languages, cultures and religions, here in our country. The last thing they want is to assimilate and become part of the melting pot.

Oh, I know, it’s so cute to go into China town or Korea town or Little Italy or Little Havana or little whatever else, and see signs and hear banter in all sorts of strange languages. San Francisco’s Mission District in the 1980s used to be a United Nations hodge podge mix of peoples from all over. The City had restaurants from two hundred different nationalities — I counted them in the phone book. Del Amo shopping center in Torrance, for a long time the biggest in the nation, was a model of “diversity” with its literally world-wide mix of peoples crowding its malls in the 1990s, none being the clear majority. But just ten years later, the public address announcements in the Sears store was made in Spanish only. The diversity was gone, the ethnic mix was gone, reduced to a very small fraction of shoppers like flotsam on foreign seas.

The experience is not so cute when for miles and miles on end the melting pot has been ethnically cleansed, and when you go back to visit the town where you grew up, you realize you became a despised foreigner in your own country, taking your life in your hands just for being there.

These are not the people who are here on H1-B visas. These are the ones who, even if they go to school here, they don’t even finish high school. It is not in their culture to value education as we do, to see education as the key to upward mobility. In their culture teens are supposed to get a paying job to help support the family. And as often as not, to join a gang. They come from a culture that sees society as a two layer cake of peons and upper class, and they see themselves as peons now and forever. Statistically speaking, of course. That is why the rhetoric of class envy and class warfare works on them, that is why the Democrats are using that rhetoric, and that is why the Democrats want to put these people on the path to vote (legally).

So, sure, there is something very, very wrong. But nothing being proposed today in Congress or on the president’s perpetual campaign trail even pretends to be intended to solve it. Demagoguery is so much simpler than 1-2-3-4.

What To Do?

Write to these hypocrites to try again. Write to them at all levels, federal, state and local. Tell them that you want real reform, a simple four-step reform, not another sham, not a repeat of 1986.