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Wednesday, April 06, 2005Real ID ActHere we are, again in the immigration battles. And here's where I stand: I've watched three college teachers get the boot because of paperwork confusions while Mohammed Atta managed to stay in flight school until he got around to killing 3,000 Americans. The Read ID Act is a) a pernicious nativist effort to lock out legitimate immigrants while anti-immigrant sentiment is a little higher and b) a legitimate effort to figure out just who is here. It's nice to say that this act is no big deal because people who are here legally need only comply with its terms and they'll be fine. But a few years back, a good friend of my sister's (who was here teaching French at a small Christian college) was deported for listing herself as a "teacher" instead of a "professor" on her visa application. This constituted making a false statement to the INS and she was booted. Note that she was not initially rejected. They deported her when she filed an amended statement to correct the mistake. Some INS bureaucrat that day went back to his office, checked some boxes on a form to prove his vigilance in defending our nation and made a confirmed America hater of someone who had at one time considered becoming a permanent resident. Way to go, INS! At the same time, Mohammed Atta received his paperwork allowing him to stay in the country months after he became the greatest mass murderer in our history. So, where do I stand on the Real ID thing and all these other immigration measures? Right in the middle. Ours is the land of opportunity and this great American experiment wouldn't even be here were it not for some politically motivated immigration a couple hundred years ago. To decide to close the doors now is to deny our origins and the meaning of our nation. But we should at least know who's here. I've mentioned knowing people deported over bureaucratic hassles. I've also met "visitors" who are almost literally slaves to their employers because the rent went up and they had to take an illegal job to finance staying in school here - they came here legally, pose no threat and have jobs I sure wouldn't want. But the nativist element wants to spend taxpayer dollars to raid ethnic restaurants lest they get an unwarranted $2/hr because it would send the wrong signal to let them take a crap job with the normal protections. And yet, there's that Atta thing. We don't know how many Attas were caught or who, because of our crappy immigration setup, never even tried. That one got through may indicated that crap happens, or it may show that the system was lousy. That he was approved to stay another year after killing 3,000 people indicates that it was probably the latter. So, what do we need? We need to loosen up the system enough that those making an earnest effort to comply won't get deported by INS officers having a bad day. Then we need to clamp down on those who aren't in the system. If you file your paperwork and it's wrong, in other words, we work with you. If you don't file your paperwork and we find you, you're gone. The ultimate goal would be to create greater transparency. This includes two assumptions: 1) Immigrants would have more options than they do today, provided they kept the INS posted. 2) We would have more right to know what they're doing with those expanded options. In 2001, we were spending big bucks to make sure Manuel wasn't moonlighting as a dishwasher in defiance of the no-work provisions of his visa. We were spending big bucks assuring that Pedro had his papers lest he take an American's job cleaning that toilet. We spent more dough to be sure that Tran didn't get a programmer's job that could go to Jake. And we twiddled our thumbs about a known Muslim radical who wanted to learn to fly but didn't need to know how to land. It was all about economics, with hardly any concern for security. Today, as Friedman makes clear in his new book, The World Is Flat, the economic stuff is useless. If you can't get your workers a visa for here, you hire an outsourcing firm in India. This is certainly what's happening in Silicon Valley. Three years ago, there were Japanese people everywhere. They took the good jobs, but at least they bought their gas and groceries here and paid taxes. Now they're gone and the jobs are in India and one hopes our the anti-immigration idiots will eventually catch on that hunting down Pedro 'cause you don't like 'spics really limits the resources available to find the really bad guys. The INS, now that it's part of the DHS, hopefully has its head screwed on straighter. But I doubt it. Yes, something like the Real ID act is needed. But something else is needed. We need to send Charles Rosetti (former IRS commissioner) or someone like him to straighten out the immigration system first. Or ten years from now we'll have deported a whole lot more decent immigrants trying to make it and will have destroyed the notion of the American dream for countless more networks of families and friends in countries that should look well upon us. And then we'll turn on our tv sets to witness another mass murder by Arab terrorists who had the money to get their papers filed properly while we deported dishwashers in the name of national security. 
posted by gbarto at 9:37 AM |
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