About Immigration
Monday, May 17th, 2010
I highly recommend the recent white paper by the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) as a starting point for a rational discussion about immigration. (Richard Land, the head of the ERLC, has a briefer statement about the issue here.) I believe the statements about immigration coming out of the ERLC right now are the sanest and most transparent of any I hear from either side.
My approach to the issue itself is simple. I believe any real solution to immigration reform must involve three things (which I will get to in just a moment), whether anyone in particular likes them or not. I don’t mean that statement as an arrogant disregard for public or private opinion. Rather, I mean by it that this problem, once properly defined, will neither simply go away because we build a bigger fence or stop offering ballots in Spanish, nor because we grant amnesty to everyone here illegally and open the borders completely. And for the problem to become something other than just that, we are going to have to be smarter than we have been for the past hundred years—on both political sides. Liberals have tried amnesty and other floods of illegal immigration have followed. Some conservatives have at times raised the ugly face of misoxeny. Yet the problem has persisted, partially because each side only acknowledges half of the problem from the outset.
So what is the problem? It is NOT simply that millions of people have entered the country illegally and that many if not most have stayed. And it is NOT simply that the illegal immigrants who are here are taken advantage of as they live on the fringes of society. It is rather BOTH the influx of immigrants who are neither fully accountable to nor fully protected by the law AND the things in our society which attract them and keep them here—basically economic interests. It doesn’t matter how big a fence we build as long as employers are motivated to pay sub-minimum wages to people who regard dirt-cheap work as so much better than what they can do at home that they leave everything else behind to get to it. Both sides of the issue must be addressed in order to effect real improvement. That is, laws must be BOTH enforced and morally and economically sane. The current law is neither enforced nor is it either morally or economically sane.
So here are the three components (more…)
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