More Immigration Issues

Pursuant to a recent post I made about Chinese espionage, a commenter said, "Wow. Not only do we have to be worried about Islamic immigrants, now we have to worry about Chinese ones as well."

Well. It looks like we haven't worried enough about those Islamic immigrants yet. Robert Spencer quotes World Net Daily:

WASHINGTON -- In announcing the introduction of legislation aimed at preventing illegal aliens from getting driver's licenses yesterday, a North Carolina Republican member of the House of Representatives casually dropped a bombshell that went over the heads of most of the media covering the event -- that three members of al-Qaida were recently captured trying to enter the U.S.

"This isn't aimed at any one race," said Sue Myrick, who is being mentioned as a potential candidate for governor of the state. "Our main concern is: Who's in our state? This is a critical issue today. They just arrested, down on the border, a couple of weeks ago, three al-Qaida members who came across from Mexico into the United States."

This ties directly in to the current debate over illegal immigration from south of the border. One of the better recent pieces I have seen on this matter I learned about via RealClear Politics, and was penned by Dick Morris.

Bush needs to:

* Back the fence. Walls work. Just as the Israelis whose West Bank fence keeps terrorists out and has reduced terrorist attacks inside Israel to a fraction of their former number and intensity. Good fences make good neighbors and the United States should act to regularize the traffic of immigrants into the country by the kind of border control that only a well positioned fence can offer. This is no Great Wall of China seeking futilely to keep out the rest of the world. It would be a modern, high tech affair, spotting breaches and relaying the information to highly mobile border guard units to plug them up.

* Establish a legal guest-worker program. Nobody can deny the manifest need of Americans -- both individuals and businesses -- for the work that currently illegal immigrants provide. They would not be coming if they did not have access to jobs, and there would be no work if there were no demand.

Bush's current program for legal guest workers is a good one and should be adopted in the context of broader immigration reform. But the plan should include a track to citizenship for these workers, providing certain criteria -- such as English fluency, English literacy and no arrest record -- to let them earn the right to become American citizens.

* Prosecute visa overstays. Half of the people who live here illegally entered the United States with legal visas and overstayed them. All 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers came here under the law and then stayed on after their visas had expired (or should have been revoked because they did not attend school, having entered on student visas).

* Regularize cash shipments home. A vital form of foreign aid for Mexico and the impoverished countries of Central America is the remittances sent each week by illegal immigrants to their families back home. ...

The last of these sounds like it could be a clever way to tax these cash shipments, or that it would quickly turn into one. And the guest worker program could easily end up reducing the wage (i.e., labor cost) advantage that immigrants currently enjoy by subjecting this work force more easily to federal regulation.

And if regularized immigration might cut off a way for businesses to escape the negative effects of government regulation of the economy, current intrusions of the federal government might also be used as an excuse to curtail the beneficial immigration Morris speaks of. I noted this sort of argument long ago:

So we have just seen how the ... debate ... [is] warped by the idea that government force is a part of the human condition [bold added]. This same kind of confusion is also very prevalent in the immigration debate, when appeals like the following are made.

More than 33.1 million immigrants live in the United States, a number unprecedented in U.S. history. Poverty rates for immigrants and their U.S.-born children are two-thirds higher than for native-born Americans and their children and account for approximately 25 percent of those now living in poverty in this country. Twenty-four of the southernmost U.S. states have accrued almost $1 billion in unpaid medical care - all attributed to illegal immigration.

While I am not arguing against some immigration reform (primarily with the end of keeping terrorists out of the country), I wish to indicate that this kind of thinking distorts the debate. The problem lies with the "safety net" of the welfare state, not with immigrants per se. Andrew Lewis elaborates upon this point further here.

The problems of uncontrolled immigration will not go away, so watch for immigration to become more prominent in the public debate.

And watch for that debate to be especially muddled.

Oops! Too late! It already is: Just as we may be getting ready to tighten the southern border, we're making it easy for would-be airline hijackers to fly our skies again.

We have a Visa Waiver Program that permits aliens from 27 countries plus Canada to enter the United States without first applying for visas. And now our government is implementing a program for frequent fliers that would enable passengers to pay a fee, subject themselves to a cursory background check and be able to by-pass the security measures that were implemented after the attacks of 9/11 that killed three thousand innocent victims.

...

I would remind you that according to the "9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel," ... the 19 terrorists who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001, in the aggregate, had provided themselves with 364 identities. So, while a 90 year old grandmother who travels infrequently is thoroughly searched as she prepares to visit her grandchildren a terrorist who has established a track-record of frequent travel and pays a relatively small fee will be able to sidestep the security process!

Wow. We can't even get what should be the easy part right: keeping terrorists out. Lord help us.

-- CAV