I have no idea why 10 Americans, in Haiti on a humanitarian mission, thought it would be a good idea to take 33 Haitian kids to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. No one that I have seen has suggested that they were paid or had any insidious motive. My guess is that they were trying to help, but doing so in a naive and arrogant way.
With that in mind, a few thoughts:
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Our relationship with Venezuela has really gotten out of hand. For awhile I admit that I found the back-and-forth between American conservatives and the Venezuelan government kind of amusing. Pat Robertson would encourage the assassination of Chavez, Chavez would get his picture taken with Castro, and I would sit back and laugh. It didn’t even raise warning signs when I saw a news report awhile back in which they described how the Venezuelan people (particular the Chavez loyalists in the slums and the countryside) were arming themselves to prepare for an American invasion.
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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.
There are roughly 2000 working hours in a year (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year), at least for most white-collar employees. There are roughly 215 immigration judges employed by the Justice Department to handle asylum cases. Those judges are asked to handle roughly 350,000 asylum seekers each year. (Those figures are according to this New York Times article.) Doing the math, it means that each person asking for asylum gets, on average, 75 minutes of a judge’s time.
The decisions handed down by those judges are literally life and death decisions. Asylum laws are meant to protect people who would face imprisonment, torture, or death if they were sent back home. They protect people on the wrong side of political shifts in third world countries, and they protect people who have been persecuted for their ethnicity or religious beliefs. America’s liberal granting of asylum to the world’s most downtrodden people helps keep the American Dream, and the American Myth, alive. It’s the current means we have to fulfill the promise written on the Statue of Liberty:
| Give me your tired, your poor, |
| Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, |
| The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. |
| Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: |
| I lift my lamp beside the golden door. |
Immigration judges must decide who is deserving of asylum. It’s their decision that makes the difference between a life of opportunity in America, and potentially a life of pain and death in another country. They separate the worthy from the unworthy. And we give them just 75 minutes to do it.
These decisions ought to be made with some consideration and some deliberation. If I’m deciding on whether to keep a man here or send him back to a war-torn country where, he claims, he will be shot on sight by the police–I would think that I owe him my best effort and time to consider his case fully. I would want my judge to take longer than an hour and fifteen minutes to decide my fate; wouldn’t you? Is it really too much to ask to pay a few dollars more per person, to hire another couple hundred judges, so that we can make sure to do this right?
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