I hereby propose the following way to reform U.S. immigration law:
All would-be immigrants must pass a background check or investigation of some sort to reduce the chance that they are major criminals or are associated with terrorists. People with minor criminal activity in their past might be allowed to immigrate, decided on a case-by-case basis.
All would-be immigrants must know at least 200 words in English.
Everyone who meets these two requirements is automatically allowed to immigrate.
Get serious about patrolling the border. Any attempt to illegally immigrate shall be punished with 5 years in prison, followed by automatic deportation.
Already happens that way. Everyone who legally applies to immigrate to the US has gets a background check.
How are you going to verify that? Is there a set 200 words they must know? What does ‘know’ actually mean? Can them just reciting off 200 words they memorized count as enough? Or do they have to be able to have a conversation with a native speaker? What if they only know 195? Would they be rejected on that alone? Seems kind of silly to me honestly. Most of the people who immigrate here legally DO know at least a little English already. You have to, to traverse that cesspool that is known as US Government paperwork.
That seems really counterproductive. So if someone is poor, with no work skills and no way to support themselves, but able to speak a bit of English and not a criminal, we should let them in? I think you really don’t understand the current immigration process as it stands now. The two major factors in getting here legally (in the simplest terms) are criminal history and money. You HAVE to be able to prove that you (or someone else) is able to financially support you once you get here and you won’t become a burden on the state. They take this VERY seriously. So much so, that if someone immigrates here legally and ends up on public assistance, the American who sponsored them (ie, legally agreed to be a financial backer more or less), could be on the hook for repaying the government for that immigrant’s expenses.
Sounds good in theory but not in practice. The border is immense and it’s been proven time and time again, if they want to get through, they will find a way. And that’s the key point. They WANT to get through. Instead of concentrating on making it harder to get into the country, we need to make it much less appealing. The main focus, in my opinion, is to crack down on the companies and (and to a smaller extent) private citizens who knowingly employ illegal immigrants. The consequences should be severe enough that no business is going to risk hiring illegal workers, even with the benefit of lower wages. Once the jobs are gone, the incentive to come here will drastically decrease.
And prison time? Aren’t our prisons crowded enough as is without throwing in every single illegal immigrant into them? On top of that, the effect such a stint in prison would have on a normal, overall good person, can be severe. Yes, send them back to their home country if caught, but don’t completely fuck up their lives in the process. More likely than not, their lives weren’t the best in the first place, which is why America seemed so appealing.
I’m with AngelSoft on this one, five years in prison for crossing an imaginary line to seek employment and a better life is monstrous *and *impractical, given the state of the U.S. prison system.
I do agree that reform and liberalization is needed, though.
Well, under the OP’s system, the only people with a reason to illegally cross the border would be people that can’t pass a background check (or I guess, people too lazy to memorize a list of 200 English words for some reason).
#1 we already do. However, since we don’t really make any effort at tracking who is here legally or illegally, it’s a moot point. People just come in illegally or overstay visas and bypass the background check.
#2 is silly. Anyone can memorize two hundred words. Learn to count to two hundred. That would take about an hour to do.
#3 is crazy. If we let in basically anyone our entire civilization would break down under the strain of the hundreds of millions of people who would come in.
#4 isn’t a bad thought, but it would be more effective to stop the things attracting them in the first place. Put in place a mandatory system to check immigration status before being hired. Fine and jail the employers as well as the employees who work illegally. If there aren’t relatively high paying jobs to attract illegals they will stop coming in such large numbers.
Which still doesn’t make it right to imprison them for five years.
Unless you meant that the numbers would be fairly small, thus not burdening the prison system. That’s hard to know with certainty, but even a few thousand would be an unnecessary burden on an already overcrowded prison system.
[QUOTE=Debaser] #3 is crazy. If we let in basically anyone our entire civilization would break down under the strain of the hundreds of millions of people who would come in.
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Nobody wants to emigrate to a country that is “breaking down under strain”. So it sounds like a problem that will solve itself.
But seriously, would you like to amend your argument so that it doesn’t also support banning childbirth? Because we indeed let “anyone in” our country who enters it through a vaginal canal, and hundreds of millions have already done so, to our advantage. Those people, in addition to Americans who have crossed borders to get here, have gone on to create unimaginable wealth and prosperity for our country so forgive me if I don’t believe your assertion that treating people with respect and equality will be our downfall.
Humans who live and work in America are Americans. And humans who want to be Americans should be allowed to, unless they are fleeing criminals or carrying contagious disease. Regardless of what language they speak.
I don’t think I can add anything to #1-3 except that I have to bank 2100GBP to emigrate to the UK and that’s assuming I can even get one of the limited number of work visas they issue.
For number 4, although it will never be perfect there are a few things you can do to improve the situation.
Rewrite the 14th Amendment to take away “anchor babies”.
Use the military to patrol the border. A couple drones with IR sensors could definately help out on patrols.
Don’t imprison illegal immigrants. An illegal immigrant does not have the right to be sent back to their own country. I believe their home country has to take them back (unless they refuse then we look around all confused). I say we negotiate with a couple of pisshole countries like Chad, Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan, Haiti, Nepal, Bulgaria etc. and arrange (pay) them to take the illegal immigrants off our hands. It’d be cheaper than imprisoning them and may act as a deterent knowing that if caught, you find out real quick there are worse places to live than Mexico.
Charge the home countries the social welfare, education and prison costs for their foreign nationals here illegally.
Then you have permanent populations of non-citizen aliens, which is a major barrier to assimilation and precludes the legal equality the United States is built on. The Koreans of Japan or the Biharis of Pakistan are two examples of this phenomenon. Your solution is worse than the problem it claims to fix.
Nope. Residents (defined by SCOTUS as one residing in a state and not synonymous with citizens) still get equal protection of the law. The way I would rewrite the 14th Amendment is to allow anyone born here whose parents have a lawful presences are citizens. Note that that is a very different situation than anchor babies where the children are citizen but the parents are here illegally.
Human Action. I simply do not see your point. We already have non-citizen aliens. Some are here lawfully and some are not. Children born to those lawfully here would be citizens which is no different than the situation now. You also have many aliens here illegally. All my change would do is say that their children are not legal citizens (just like their parents).
What we don’t have, that other nations do, is a mechanism by which non-citizenship is passed down through generations to form a sort of legal underclass. The longest any group can be aliens in the United States is one generation, and this is a good thing, as it promotes assimilation, legal equality, and a harmoneous society.
While I think it’s a good idea, if someone can find a job here that doesn’t require them to be able to speak English, then it really shouldn’t matter that much. They just have to be aware that their inability to speak English will cause them problems particularly with filling out paperwork, dealing with authority, and all of that stuff.
Rather than the English requirement, I’d rather them just be able to show they have a job lined up. Overwhelmingly immigrants take unskilled jobs or highly skilled jobs that we have trouble filling domestically, whereas most Americans take jobs somewhere between those two, so a lot of this fear of them taking our jobs is unfounded. As long as they’re working while they’re here, I don’t see how that’s anything but a net positive for them and us. If you really want to do unskilled labor for the same wages, or a highly skilled job and are equally or better qualified, by virtue of being a citizen and speaking English, you’d almost certainly get the job over a non-English speaking non-citizen.
We have this bizarre double standard where we don’t want to do unskilled labor ourselves because it doesn’t pay well but don’t want the people who are willing to do them for those wages to do them. And we seldom see people complain about someone from India or China or wherever coming over here, well educated, and taking a high paying job, but we have a quota on those kinds of jobs coming in, and when it takes them years to get in, they just take their skills elsewhere.
As long as we make it easier for people to get here legally, there will be less incentive for people to want to jump the border. Really, I don’t think we should care if half a million people want to come here every year, as long as they’re not simply sucking off our economy, and the overwhelming majority of them aren’t, why not let them come? They jump the border because being an illegal immigrant here working a less than minimum wage job is a better prospect to them than staying where they are. The only reason it’s illegal is because of quotas and the whole idea that their taking our jobs.
And as I touched on above, it hurts us even more in the highly skilled jobs because those quotas force people who would bring their education and skills here can’t get in and just go somewhere else. For all the crap we talk about how we’re falling behind the rest of the world in science and math education and research, why are we turning these sorts of people away because of some arbitrary number.
Regardless, the whole idea that they’re taking American jobs is self-contradictory. If we bring these people into our country and give them jobs, they’re no longer foreigners, they’re Americans. So as long as we can make it easier to screen for criminals and all and remove them when we’ve found them, I say let them all in.
A natural-born US citizen cannot be deported. So you have a situation with two illegal immigrant parents and a citizen child. Although it wouldbe legal to do so, would any immigration court split up the family and deport the parents? The child’s citizenship in effect anchors the parents in the US although they have no legal right to be here.
The idea is that the parents immigrate illegally, have a child; then when the child becomes an adult (and is a legal citizen), they act as a sponsor for the citizenship of their family members.