This new immigration compromise bill is quite the monstrous piece of legislation. I’ve been trying to get a good grasp on it for awhile now, and I still have no idea what all of its provisions are, or if it will be on balance a good or bad thing. My gut reaction is that this is a compromise bill for the sake of a compromise bill, and one that all sides will agree is more a lateral move than a step forward or backward. In particular, it seems to me that any decent immigration bill ought to accomplish the following, in no particular order:
- Increase the odds that smugglers, and other criminals who attempt to cross the border, will get caught.
- Provide a reasonable, accessible way for productive workers in the United States to be accepted as legal members of society, and to bring their families here to live with them.
- Provide a legal, accessible way for future unskilled labor to enter the United States.
- Maintain close economic and cultural ties with Mexico.
As far as I can tell, this bill makes a head-fake towards all of these things, but it really accomplishes none of them. The costs of legalizing, for current undocumented aliens, seems prohibitively high, as does the cost of coming over on the temporary worker visas. Perhaps the implementation will be kinder than the bill indicates, but the administrative hurdles and the $5000 fine just seem over the top. Furthermore, the two-year temporary work visas seem custom designed for people to get one once, and then to overstay them. Current legal immigrants are already up in arms about the changes that would make it more difficult to bring friends and relatives over to the United States from other countries. And this bill, like most of the debate in Washington, still doesn’t seem to recognize that effective enforcement of the border will require keeping otherwise law-abiding families from trying to cross; and that means giving them a reasonable alternative way to come across. (Make it so that the only people trying to cross the border in the middle of the Arizona desert are actually dangerous criminals, and you’ve just made the job of the border patrol a heck of a lot easier–not to mention eased tensions with Mexico in the process.)
In short, I have no idea whether a Congressmen or Senator ought to vote for this thing or not. But I am disappointed in the compromise. We have a president and a Congress who really had an opportunity to make life a lot easier for millions of Americans. And instead, they’ve come up with a bill that changes a lot of things, makes no one happy, and probably won’t actually accomplish anything substantial.
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