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Thursday, December 09, 2004I think this Instapundit post on immigration is about right.A few years back, a friend who was teaching here got shipped back to France: Her crime? She was teaching at a university, but registered as a teacher, not a professor. For those who have wandered through ivy-covered halls, a professor is someone with a PhD and tenure. For the INS, though, it was a different story. The language confusion - and not French/English, but immigrationese/academese - got her shipped out when she applied with the right designation and was asked what had changed. Idiotic. But, who's at fault? Was the official who judged her case an officious bureaucrat? Or an overworked functionary who really wasn't ready to challenge his boss, his boss and the next boss up the line, much less the idiotic system of rules that created the situation? Particularly given that Congress loves nothing more than to hear about the number of illegals and frauds that were dealt with, this being the INS' best proof that it is doing something with taxpayer money. The INS (or whatever this week's acronym is) official is dead on in noting that the biggest fault is with Congress and the taxpayers. We, the taxpayers, love cheaply picked fruit. We don't want to pay, either in fruit costs or in taxpayer dollars, for cherrypickers that break an arm falling out of a tree. We love clean public toilets and neatly manicured lawns, but react in high dudgeon if a Mexican willing to be available any day, any time, beats out our teen for a job in which said teen wants his schedule adjusted for football practice, class trips and visits to the really good orthodontist an hour away from town. And we adore the au pairs, refugees and others who make our own communities more interesting while wondering why those who are going to have the hardest time assimilating can't just get a job and shut up about it. In short, we the people like immigrants just as long as they're doing things we don't want to and not getting things we want. Finding the balance where we can screw them enough to feel like we got our money's worth without feeling guilty about it is tough business, which is why American's simultaneously bitch about illegals and keep quiet about their gay friend who only married the Russian woman so she could stay in the country, worry about Mexicans taking our jobs but hire them to put up the back shed (for which we also didn't get building permits) and so on. The biggest complication of 9/11 for immigration was this: up to that point, the problem with illegals is they did jobs we might want more cheaply than we would; their selling point was that they did jobs we wanted done more cheaply than other people would. When some of them suddenly wanted to kill us too, that was a bit upsetting. Worse than cutting into your Uncle Fred's lawn manicuring business, ya know? But I'll betcha Angelenos haven't started cutting their own lawns in greatly increased numbers to take away the incentive of illegal migration. I haven't yet heard anyone in the supermarket complain that if their lettuce was really California-grown, American-picked, they should be paying an extra 80 cents a head. Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods, Asians put up with crappy conditions in native cuisine restaurant jobs so they can learn English and earn a living and Mexicans congregate at every Home Depot and Builder's Square to help you move your heavy purchases, low cost for you and no taxes paid by them. Which brings me to a little bit of bad news: The immigration voucher plan is nice... but... if it's going to work, we need to get back to the issue I raised earlier: Americans don't necessarily want justice for immigrants, and the businesses that use them certainly don't. What's sought is the balance where they're underpaid enough that it's worth the hassle of using them but not so terrible that Amnesty might declare your state the new Guatemala. Any voucher system will have to assume, among other things, that while guest workers have basic human rights, their minimum wage is lower and employer obligations are less. Otherwise, guess what? The lowest of the low will still use illegals, and probably of a worse variety since sincere strivers will go into the guest worker program, and then the strivers, the ones we want, will be shut out - at least of the better jobs - because the costs are the same to hire them as natives and the paperwork is worse. The solution to the whole mess? Here's one piece of the puzzle, offered before: Designate a number, say 123-456-7890, as the guest worker number. If someone shows up for a job, you put that on the W4 while they apply for a tax number. If they're still actually there when the tax number comes through, they get guest worker status at whatever wage they negotiate and if they file income taxes two years in a row, welcome them onto the citizenship track. Such a plan has massive imperfections and details to sort out, but the crucial element is there: Those who find a way to function within our society are welcomed with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss so that the bureaucratic apparatus can focus on those who want to be here but whose place in our society is more difficult to figure out. Would it have stopped 9/11? Hard to say. Would it cut down on a lot of other problems and maybe, just maybe, allow the INS or whatever they're calling it, to do a better job of determining who they didn't need to spend so many resources on - and thus who they did? Quite possibly. 
posted by gbarto at 11:15 PM |
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