Illegal Immigration

No easy answers here, but a whole lot of easy sidestepping is going on.  Once again, when you ignore a problem for a long time (remember what your parents taught you, if you would have come to them right away with the problem none of the extra trouble would have happened, right?) your easy and relatively painless options disappear, leaving you needing to work in ways that will make people upset.

I come from a family that immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine and Russian regions.  My family was not just using America as a place to live prosperously, sending money back to their families, until their real ‘homeland’ became somewhere they could return to in prosperity.  My family knew that when they made the decision to come here to escape the troubles at home, they needed to become a part of this country and keep it a place where they could be free and prosperous.  They became citizens, learned English, joined the military, worked in industry, paid taxes and volunteered in their community.  They took pride, calling America home.  And America, asking little more than that, bestowed the welcome of family and the blessings of the land upon them, and thus upon myself.

Since the beginning of this decade, illegal immigrants have transferred over 237 Billion dollars to Latin America.  These people have made the US the commuting workplace for Latin America.  We are losing the tax revenue from most all of this money, and quite simply, since a functional economy has to have a finite amount of money for the money to be worth anything at all, this is money lost (it is not changing forms into another sort of asset, it is lost to us)

The cost of infrastructure support is staggering.  Simply hiring bilingual agents in almost every office and business that deals with the public is a frightening expense.  But solving the problem by declaring English as the official language of the US, a solution considered almost every session of Congress, is always blocked.  It is not for any reason other than political expediency that Congress refuses this concept, fearing that if they do support such legislation then the growing population of non-English speaking residents will vote them out.

Now consider the cost of policy implementation.   Placing teachers in schools who are fluent teachers in a second language was much easier when foreign languages were optional classes.  But now it is mandatory, and the pool of teachers qualified to teach foreign languages is smaller than the pool of English as a first language teachers, thus finding excellent teachers is harder.  But even if you do not count the changes in the quality of education, the simple cost of maintaining an English as a second language force nationwide in the schools is outrageous.

Then consider the cost of social services and benefits.  Staggering.  Estimates as high as $500 billion over the past 15 years, and costs are expected to rise exponentially.

OK, so you see the problem with people living and working in the US illegally and acting like they have sovereign right here.  Now let’s see the benefits

We have a workforce more willing (people say, I don’t believe it fully myself, I have cleaned bathrooms and washed fleet vehicles and installed car stereos and was paid minimum wage and was happy to get it, and I am not alone among my friends) to to the low-wage and menial jobs than the average American citizen is.  We are educating people better, who then return to their homeland and can help elevate their own people (how’s that working out for anyone, I’d like to know)  We are being compassionate.

What part of that can’t we accomplish by making sure our immigrants enter and remain legally?  Oh, I know, when people are forced to accept citizenship in our nation, they don’t come here in the numbers many folks say they need to continue farming and processing operations for their companies.  The prophets of the fruit and vegetable and poultry industries foretell doom and gloom and the failure of America to feed itself without them.  They claim huge increases in prices.  Well, once again, prosperity doesn’t and never has meant that everyone in the country has the guarantee of becoming rich beyond the dreams of Midas.   Prosperity is not delivered, but it is a symbiotic system.  When you, as a person who wants to gain wealth, keep the host from which the wealth flows happy, you gain that wealth.  But when you undercut, when you overfeed, when you allow the host to weaken and your intake exceeds the ability of the host to provide resource, both you and the host inevitably suffer.

Thus promoting relaxed acceptance of illegal immigrants doesn’t improve anything in the medium or long term, and only moderately improves bottom line in the short term.

We must incorporate the logical relationship between legal, tax-paying, local spending citizens and a healthy economy, thus a healthy country, into the core of our political ideals.  As long as we cannot understand how supporting an ever growing base of illegal foreign nationals who removing asset from our economy is harming us, we cannot ever come to a workable solution to this problem.

Once you grasp the importance of having a sustaining citizen population which supports the national economy and prosperity over the global economy, you will realize that 2 things need to be done simultaneously – and we have the ability to do them, most officials just feel it would be political poison to do so.  Those things are immigrant entry control and social services funding verification.

We need to get control of the route and transit channels illegal immigrants use to get here.  We have the manpower, the technology, the money to control our most wide-open and troublesome national border, and we have the ability to gain more control over the trickier transit routes used by people from countries other than Latin America.

We need to create proper and authorized procedures for peace officers, medical personnel, and social services officers, when they identify illegal immigrants in the performance of their regular duties.  These procedures must provide an efficient way to turn these immigrants over to immigration department officials for processing.

We need to find ways to more efficiently and quickly process immigration deportation hearings.  These hearings still need to be fair, but they do need to be handled quickly and efficiently.

And we need to create an efficient and functional method for returning those who need to exit the country to their own country of origin.

Once we gain control over the number and travel of illegal immigrants, we need to incentivize the process of becoming a legal citizen, not through amnesty but by rewarding those who will make the effort to join the citizens of the U.S. freely and without reservation with the rights given by the Constitution to our citizens.  Requiring proof of citizenship, and developing effective and non-intrusive ways to verify it, in order to obtain the tax-paid services and make use of the publicly funded programs of the United States, will give those who want a real change in their lives, and not just a temporary escape from their home, the same connection to the nation that  my grandparents and their parents had.

Stop the flow of illegal immigrants from all nations into our country, and return those who are here illegally efficiently and compassionately to their homes.  Limit access to social programs and entitlements to only the legal citizens of the United States.  These two steps will not diminish the promise America has for those who want to immigrate here to improve their lives.  In fact, it will strengthen our ability to provide that promise.

Yes, I wish there were effective answers at this point that were more appealing, but when you get into trouble deep, really appealing solutions aren’t always available.  And brothers, we are in trouble deep.

Chris Nogy