Give Me Your Tired, Give Me Your Poor

We have an immigration system that is expensive and Byzantine, ineffective and rewarding of criminality, and immoral and shameful given the nature and purpose of the American Republic.  The Wall Street Journal Reports:

The nation's immigration chief is proposing several fee increases for green cards and visas in an effort to plug a revenue shortfall at his agency, caused in part by a decline in applications.

The fee increases—proposed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and likely to go into effect this summer after a public comment period—would be the first since 2007. They would raise by an average of 10% the cost of filing petitions for permanent legal residency and temporary residency for foreign skilled workers and foreign entrepreneurs.

The move could cause applications to rise as people rush to get their paperwork in ahead of the increase. Applications surged in 2007, although that fee increase was much sharper.

The recent increases are from $355.00 to $420.00 for family members of U.S. Citizens and Permanent Residents to apply for visas; from $930.00 to $965.00 for a green card; people wishing to start businesses in the U.S. would have to pay $1,500, $3,750, or $6,230 depending on a variety of factors which I don't understand.  

The ultimate absurdity is that this fee increase seems to be in response to a sharp drop in the number of people who want to live in America, from 1.4 million in 2007 to 570,442 in 2009.  The last time I checked, increasing the price of something makes it less popular: increasing the price of immigration makes fewer individuals immigrate.  Isn't our goal to increase the size of the U.S. workforce, especially with the richest generation that ever lived suddenly fat, in debt, and newly eligible for entitlements?  

There is a fair counterargument to be made that an average 18% increase is really not enough to affect something as important as where one wants to live.  It's just a huge pain in the ass, much like all the paperwork one must fill out in addition to paying the aforementioned fee.  There are now three Federal agencies overseeing immigration: INS, Homeland Security, and the U.S. State Department.  An application for permanent residency for a family member of a U.S. Citizen requires upwards of 60 pages of indecipherable and pointless forms, and even then it's not over.  From the Wall Street Journal:

"This is certainly better than last time, when increases averaged 66%," said Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. But "we continue to be plagued with poor-quality service."

...Echoing a common grievance among immigration attorneys, Ms. Williams said that adjudicators who review applications often appear to use arbitrary standards and request clarifications that delay the processing of visas.

"It seems almost every application has a request for evidence that extends the time of the whole process," she said.

In related immigration news are the recent reports about a border patrol agent shooting and killing a 14-year old Mexican boy for throwing rocks.  I understand that there are some bad elements hanging out by the border that occasionally attack the brave men and women who protect us, but really?  A 14-year old throwing rocks?  

I would now like to present a short play about what probably happened:

<MISE EN SCENE: It's hot, the Rio Grande is in the foreground.  A group of MEXICAN TEENAGERS ambles towards the border.  One wears a faded Che Guevara T-shirt.  A Kevlar-clad BORDER PATROL AGENT takes a break from his Slim Jim to see what's going on...>   

BORDER PATROL AGENT: "What the **** are you doing, ******* **********?  You wanna ******* get put on my ******* **** list?"

MEXICAN TEENAGER: "Landlords and power whores.  On my people they took turns.  Dispute the suits I ignite.  And then watch 'em burn!  Burn, Burn, yes they gonna burn.  Burn, Burn, yes they gonna burn!"

BORDER PATROL AGENT: "Allright, ya'll just made my **** list!  I don't ******* speak Spanish, ************.  Put down the ************ rocks.  I mean it ********!"

MEXICAN TEENAGER: "Come on!  Yes I know my enemies.  They're the teachers who taught me to fight me.  Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission.  Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite.  All of which are American dreams.  All of which are American dreams.  All of which are American dreams.  All of which are American dreams.  All of which are American dreams.  All of which..."

<M-16 fire>

<A body lies in the muddy river.  The flow of red blood disappears in the faint current; it is all that is left of this boy.>  

FIN.

Coupled with the frenzy in Arizona and the fact that they continue to take our jobs in this difficult economic climate despite entreaties to the contrary, how to keep brown people out of America is an important issue right now; and for the brown people who want to live in America to find work or give their families better lives, but can't afford the fees and can't understand the paperwork (which I can't), the solution is simple: sneak in, keep to your own kind, don't assimilate; the alternative is a thousand dollars in fees and 60 pages of forms in English.  (Your children are fine though, because the Founding Fathers gave us a failsafe against xenophobia.)  

Our immigration policy reminds me of gun control measures which require stricter and stricter standards for registration: criminals will always buy on the black market.  Creating stricter standards only puts a higher percentage of guns in the hands of criminals.  Immigration is similar.  A certain number of lawful good types will always comply with our immigration standards, no matter how ridiculous.  There will also always be Armadillo-esque chaotic evil types that never will.  The vast majority of potential legal immigrants are somewhere between these two extremes, choosing between poverty in their country of origin, legal immigration, and illegal immigration.  Any time we make it more difficult to immigrate legally, we increase the number of illegals.  Anytime we pass laws like the new one in Arizona that single out and ostracize immigrant communities, we disincentivize assimilation.

Real patriots should welcome all those who want to be Americans.  The status quo is unbecoming of the country that gave the world Albert Einstein, I.M. Pei, John Muir, Madeleine Albright, Martina Navratilova  Joseph Pulitzer, Felix Frankfurter, Subranhmanyan Chandrasekhar, Irving Berlin, St. Frances Cabrini, Edward M. Bannister, Mother Jones, Antonius Dvorak, Johnny Weissmuller, The Ringling Brothers, Giacomo Puccini, and this man.

Comments

[Ichibantroll]

Can't really take the article seriously with the so called here's what probably went down play. Also you fail to include the numerous negative aspects of illegal immigration.

[Christopher Carr]

My short play was obviously tongue-in-cheek, what with the Mexican teenager quoting Rage Against the Machine and wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. It's not particularly germane to my argument, so dismiss it if you like.

You seem to imply that I am not aware of the many problems associated with illegal immigration and in fact support it. On the contrary, I think that illegal immigration is a problem, and a fairly major one at that. However, instead of throwing more money at it and hoping it goes away, I go a step further and advocate making the path towards legal immigration easier as a panacea for all our immigration problems.

As I said, there will always be some bad dudes who come into the U.S. illegally. We should continue to treat them like bad dudes. And there will always be some rule-followers who comply with the system no matter how difficult. However, to make the math easier let's say out of 100 potential immigrants, under a theoretically neutral system, 50 choose to stay in their country of origin, 25 choose to immigrate legally, 25 choose to immigrate illegally. If legal immigration becomes considerably more difficult, those numbers would change to say 55 staying at home, 10 choosing to immigrating legally, and 35 illegals.

It's not really all that difficult to figure out why illegal immigration is suddenly a problem again, given the fact that in 2007, fees jumped up by 66% and the INS's own statistics show a sharp drop in applications filed after that date. What should really chap your ass though is that not only do tough immigration laws create more illegals in a direct causal way; they also use your tax-dollars to do it.