Immigration

As seen in the New Haven Independent:

[A]t a late Friday press conference, as City Hall remained filled with ID-seekers, Mayor John DeStefano announced the the first-floor office processing the cards will stay open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays for the indefinite future. The number of applications taken by the office passed 1,150 since it opened Tuesday.[...]

At 9:15 a.m., the line already snaked from City Hall to Elm Street, forcing the city to stop accepting more applicants and turn the rest away, said city spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga. The day was a repeat of Thursday, when immigrants waited eight hours in line.

A couple of banks in the area have announced that the New Haven ID cards will be sufficient proof of identity to open accounts at their institutions.

Meanwhile, all the interest in undocumented folks getting any form of ID card is reminding me of a Heinlein quote:

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

I can understand the interest in wanting folks to be able to prove, or at least consistently document, who they are, given the way the world is these days, but I think it is kind of sad that it’s not sufficient to just take folks at their word, and that the fine art of the use of pseudonyms is fading away.

Seen in the AJC:

Genao used to sell about 15 vehicles a week, mostly Ford F-150 or Silverado pickups to a Mexican clientele. Now he sells only two or three.[...]

Genao is feeling the fallout from a new state law, effective July 1, that requires a valid Georgia driver’s license or ID card to register a car in Georgia.

The law is cutting deep into traffic for many auto dealers and tag and title services catering to the state’s growing immigrant community. Illegal immigrants can’t get driver’s licenses because to do so, they must prove they’re in the country legally.

The law also has the potential to cut into sales taxes and county ad valorem tax revenues, though metro area counties say it’s too early to measure that effect.

I can accept the idea that in order for a registration to be valid, there needs to be documentation as to who’s actually registering the vehicle. And I certainly don’t condone breaking the law to enter the country illegally, even if our national immigration policy is absurdly stringent.

However, some advocates for undocumented immigrants have made an argument that such folks are already here and are contributing members of our society, even if they are here illegally.

Stories like this make me wonder about the unintended consequences of other measures taken to marginalize undocumented immigrants.

Seen in the Wall Street Journal:

Mowing the grass between the U.S. and Canada, though, doesn’t weigh heavily in the arena of border security. With the collapse of its immigration overhaul, the Bush administration is promising to keep on spending billions for guards, fences, radar towers and robot airplanes. The focus is on the dry expanses of the Mexican border, where weed whacking isn’t the main issue.

Meanwhile, the Boundary Commission — whose officials think it’s probably the smallest and poorest independent agency in the federal government — is still working with the maps it drew up in 1937. It often has trouble finding the Canadian border, much less mowing it.

“They talk about securing the border, well, nobody ever came to talk to us,” Mr. Hipsley said. He circled around Lake Memphremagog, just west of Beebe Plain, turned north up a dirt road and stopped at a border gate with a rusty padlock on it. “That’s what we don’t understand. What could be the most basic thing you’d think of? How can you protect it if you can’t see it?”

The Boundary Commission charged with keeping clear a 20 foot wide vista along the U.S.-Canada border, and the article reports that the 12-position organization is running a few hundred miles behind schedule on its upkeep.

Good thing the Canadians are our friends, eh?

Idea du jour from Sunday’s New York Times:

Pritchett, a development economist and practiced iconoclast, has just left the World Bank to teach at Harvard and to help Google plan its philanthropic efforts on global poverty. In a recent trip through Chaurmuni, he praised the goats as community-driven development at its best: a fast, flexible way of delivering tangible aid to the poor. “But Nepal isn’t going to goat its way out of poverty,” he said. Nor does he think that as a small, landlocked country Nepal can soon prosper through trade.

To those standard solutions, trade and aid, Pritchett would add a third: a big upset-the-applecart idea, equally offensive to the left and the right. He wants a giant guest-worker program that would put millions of the world’s poorest people to work in its richest economies. Never mind the goats; if you really want to help Gure Sarki, he says, let him cut your lawn. [...] If goods and money can travel, why can’t workers follow? What’s so special about borders?

The economist profiled in the article advocates a guest-worker program as a tool to ease poverty in underdeveloped parts of the world. For example, in Nepal, there has been growth in the national GDP and improvements to a few families’ lives arising from remittances received from Nepalese who get jobs in India, and send back parts of their paychecks. Consider the benefit if more Nepalese who wanted to go abroad to work actually had a place to go to and be employed.

I like the idea in principle. However, I doubt (in the U.S.’s case) that the xenophobes in Washington would even consider anything remotely like toleration to an idea such as this.

Q&O points to a Rasmussen article discussing why the all-but-dead immigration reform bill died:

There is no mystery to why the public opposed the bill. In the minds of most Americans, immigration means reducing illegal immigration and enforcing the border. Only 16% believed the Senate bill would accomplish that goal.

It wasn’t amnesty or guest-worker programs or paths to citizenship that doomed the bill. Each of those provisions made it more difficult for some segments of the population to accept. However, most voters were willing to accept them as part of a true compromise that accomplished the primary goal of reducing illegal immigration.[...]

From the beginning, the Senate approached the issue with top priority of addressing the legal status of the illegal aliens. They addressed concerns about guest-worker programs and questions about whether family or skill level should be more important when determining who could enter the country.

All of those are important questions, but they are not the most important question. Rasmussen Reports polling found that 72% of Americans believe it’s Very Important to reduce illegal immigration and enforce the borders. Just 29% said it was Very Important to legalize the status of those illegally living in the country today.

I can, for the most part, agree with that stance. The immigration bill was a bloated piece of legislation that I cannot imagine would have done anything about security or the the growing population of undocumented immigrants.

True, I think in tandem with that, the questions of how to address the demand for immigrant labor and what realistically can be done with the immigrants already here need to be addressed… and I’m willing to believe that my views on those questions could be in the minority.

However, is there anyone other than perhaps a couple of congresscritters and bureaucrats that actually believed that the proposed legislation would have been effective in any fashion?

In the assorted news stories covering the guy quarantined for traveling with tuberculosis, I came across this gem:

A globe-trotting Atlanta lawyer with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed back into the U.S. by a border inspector who disregarded a computer warning to stop him and don protective gear, officials said Thursday.[...]

The unidentified inspector explained that he was no doctor but that the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely “discretionary,” officials briefed on the case told The Associated Press.

You know…why are we so concerned with locking down our borders when…?

Election Law Blog noticed an “interesting” addition to the proposed immigration “compromise”:

Notwithstanding the requirements of section 303(b), each State shall require individuals casting ballots in an election for Federal office in person to present a current valid photo identification issued by a governmental entity before voting.

True, there’s also language in the bill to help states get IDs into the hands of folks who need them, but that doesn’t address the fact that folks without ID’s are more likely to lean a certain way politically, that some of the elderly and disable have issues with acquiring identification, and that there are a few religious groups that have issues with being required to carry photo identification.

Might as well just barcode everybody and be done with it, I guess.

Seen on Tom Delay’s blog:

There is a time and a place for bipartisan compromise – and this is not it. What has resulted is an amnesty bill hampered by ridiculous and unenforceable ‘path to citizenship’ requirements that no sane illegal immigrant would consign themselves to. As for me, I’d prefer a little more principled partisanship and clearer more effective legislation as a result.

Hey, Tom — while I agree that there are issues with the bill, aggravated by sloppiness presented under the guise of bipartisanship, and I’d also like to see “clearer more effective legislation”…I’m not so sure that “principled partisanship” is what’s needed here.

How about a heaping helping dose of realism?

If I wanted “principled partisanship” rather than realism, I would be spending a lot of time here talking up Ron Paul in the 2008 primary race, rather than dismissing him as too idealistic and someone who will be perceived by many (most?) voters as a nut…and instead focusing my handicapping on folks who are viable realists.