There are lessons here for those who have eyes to see. While these lessons have broad applications
throughout life, they are particularly relevant with regard to government and
governmental policies. Briefly they can
be summarized like this:
1) If you start
a policy, it is very hard to end it.
2) If you give
people something, it soon becomes a right.
They will then expect it, and it will be very hard to take it away from
them.
3) The smallest
thing will usually grow to something very large, and this is why you have to
nip things in the bud before they take root.
4) If you
create something, ask yourself where this could lead in 30,40,50 years, because
it will go there.
It is illegal for a person to cross the border into another
country without the consent of that country, assume an identity, and continue
to live there. Many people who do that
have brought their families, including young children. They are illegal as well, we get that.
The problem is that for years our government was not serious
about stopping this. At times it was
even encouraged, though not openly. And
this was known to those who wanted to come to our country.
Now many people are complaining about illegal immigrants,
but they should have started complaining 20,30,40 years ago. I know. It’s hard to regular people who have
jobs and families to organize or be heard by the powers of government. Now we have somebody in authority who wants
to do something about it, but he is facing immense pressure from others in
government to just go along with the program.
I would like to offer some thoughts in resolving this issue:
1) President
Trump is right to let DACA expire. When
it was first enacted, everybody knew that President Obama did not have the
authority to enact it. It was a law, and
Presidents don’t make laws. Congress
does. Congress is totally inept in solving
any problem, so I am not hopeful they will get it right.
2) The first
and biggest problem is that Congress will pass a blanket amnesty. The problem has gotten so big, they will want
to try to solve it all at once.
Immigration used to be and needs again to be an individual process. A country has to know who it is letting into
its country. And that, of course,
implies the right of refusal.
3) But first
things first. No program of legalization
for illegal immigrants should even begin until a wall is built to secure the
border. Why? Any kind of legalization will encourage more
illegal immigration, because it will hold out hope for a future
legalization. But, secondly, President
Reagan agreed to a blanket amnesty when he was promised that a wall would be
built. That was in 1985. Get the wall first, or you will have this
same problem ten years from now.
4) I would give
these children of illegal immigrants six months to apply for legal status. But first we need to establish again the
rules, or standards, for legal immigrants.
I have a government textbook from 1949 that lists over a dozen
requirements, including literacy at least in their original language, healthy, normal
as in not crazy or really stupid, good morals (by our standards, not theirs),
and not likely to require government assistance.
If the line is too long, give them a letter of intent that
will protect them deportation if they can show they meet these requirements.
5) But what
about their families? If the children
are still dependent on their parents, or even if they are not, should their
parents be protected as well?
If families are so important, then by that reasoning we
should never imprison somebody who has a family. If somebody in a family is deported, they can
decide if it is more important for the family to stay together or for some to
remain in this country.
6) Could this
lead to citizenship? I have no problem
with that, but we need to think again about what citizenship really means. You can’t have allegiances to two
countries. You also need to speak, read,
and write English. How can you be an
informed, responsible citizen if you can’t read an American newspaper, watch
the evening news, talk to all your neighbors, read our books, and listen to our
politicians?
And they should also be required to learn about what made
America what it is, not just a few facts about the branches of government. They should be required to take and pass a
college or high school level class on Western Civilization, taught in English,
of course. A citizenship loyalty oath to
the United States doesn’t mean much if a person doesn’t understand the
essential nature of our country. This
oath should also include a commitment to those values.
Now that DACA is due to expire, Congress will work very
hard, in a big hurry, to address as many immigration problems as they can, so
allow me to offer some more thoughts on the subject.
1) Birthright
citizenship is a very important issue if we have any intention on controlling
illegal immigration, and it is also being highly abused. Children of foreign workers and people
visiting our country do not automatically become American citizens if they are
born here. The American Indian didn’t
even receive citizenship under birthright citizenship. That required an act of Congress. So why would we think that children who are
born to people who are in our country illegally should be considered United
States citizens?
This must end, otherwise our country will still be
encouraging illegal immigration.
2) We need a
pause on legal immigration until we get the jobs back. We have way too many people who are not in
the labor force who should be and who are on government assistance.
3) We must end
chain migration. This is where legal
immigrants are able to bring their extended families over here as well. Most Western countries are encouraging
immigration now, because their populations would shrink without getting more
people into their countries. Westerners
are not having enough children to maintain their population, so the population
grows older, and younger people are needed to help pay the social costs for
these older people.
Bringing family members of immigrants into our country
basically defeats the whole purpose for bringing these immigrants here in the
first place. Any benefit of a new
taxpayer is generally offset by family members who are more likely to need some
form of government assistance or government services, whether public schools or
public health services.
4) Look after
the interests of our own country first if you want to continue having a country
that can help people in the first place.
We are told we are a nation of immigrants, but that was before
multiculturalism and diversity. We used
to have a distinctly American culture that we were proud of and that we fully
expected immigrants to embrace and assimilate to. But now we don’t teach American culture, or
at least Western Civilization, and we are told to embrace diversity. They say that diversity enriches us, but they
don’t say that it unites us, which is what our Constitution prioritizes. And it’s not.
We are told we are a nation of immigrants, but we are not
told that for most of our nation’s history, those immigrants came almost
entirely from the same nations of immigrants who founded our country. And that was by design. It was always regarded as wise to maintain
the same demographics in our country. It
was only recently historically that we were told that diversity is our
strength.
Now immigrants come almost entirely from what we used to
call Third World countries. And they
will make our country more like those countries from which they came and less
like the country they wanted to come to in the first place.
Immigration is not a right that people have to move to
another country. Houses have doors, and
yards have fences, and countries have borders.
If you don’t want strangers pitching tents in your yard, walking into
your house, helping themselves to the food in your refrigerator, then you might
understand that countries exist for the general welfare of the people living
there. If people are free to enter them
without restrictions, then countries cannot ensure the welfare of their people. Immigration exists either to benefit a
country or at least to try not to hurt it.
Any attempts to deal or resolve these issues in a manner
that puts the interests of our country and its citizens over that of the people
who want to come here are being labelled as racism, bigotry, phobias, hate,
nativism, or nationalism. And those who
want to have a common sense immigration policy will need a better understanding
what that entails if they want to withstand that verbal onslaught.
5) Focus on the
best and brightest immigrants. We are
told that we have a responsibility to help all the poor and refugees in the
world, because we are so rich. What they
are not telling you is that we are no longer rich. We cannot be rich if we are 20 trillion
dollars in debt and we have to borrow money from other countries to pay our
bills.
There are between 19 – 55 million refugees in the world today,
depending on who’s counting, and most of the rest of the world is living below
our standard of living. Should we take
them all, or are we allowed to choose between them? Choosing some means rejecting others, so it
would be hard to do that today without somebody being up in arms over how we
made that choice.
So let me suggest that if we choose the neediest first, then
any aid we give to them will be a direct one to one transfer of money. We feed them, we clothe them, we house them,
and maybe they will get some kind of job that pays enough where we will
actually receive some tax dollars from them to offset in some way what we have
given to them. Is that a selfish thing
to consider? You decide, but it does
mean that we are only able to help the least amount of people. There is a limit on how much money we
have. In fact, we have none, if we have
to borrow money to do this, which we do.
If we chose people on the basis on how much these immigrants
can contribute to our society, educated people who already know English perhaps
with marketable skills and from a culture similar to ours, then their
dependence on the wealth of others for survival is limited and what they can
pay into our system in tax dollars is more substantial, which means that we can
theoretically help far more people. Our
government is already so deeply in debt from being ‘compassionate’, it’s at the
breaking point. There is compassion, and
there is stupid. You don’t give your
kid’s college money to feed, house, and clothe a homeless person.
Any debate on immigration will be emotional. You will see and read stories about real people. OK, we help create this problem. But we must not be lured into trying to do
too much where we end up doing something stupid, like giving things to a
million people who you don’t know who they are, where you are spending money
you don’t have (i.e. borrowing) and can never pay back, and you give up things
that don’t belong to you. Governments do
this when they spend your money, give things to people and send you the bill,
or give away your children’s future for their political gain.
