You know until the 1870s we didn’t have any immigration laws. Anyone could come to America. Thankfully I had Alsace, Scottish, Irish, and British ancestors that put home and family in their hearts and left everything they owned to come to America. Our violent xenophobia characterized so well in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York began rearing its ugly head in the 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was signed solely to keep out brown people who worked cheaper, harder, and longer than local labor. Oh, and they were brown.
Since World War II American immigration law has kicked into high gear. You know all those people we helped save from the Nazis? Well, unless you were a scientist then screw you.
As many of you know my third wife was also an immigrant. The saga of her gaining legal residency in the USA was epic as some of you might recall. Our first petition for her ran into the hundreds of pages. We had to carefully document everything, because you can’t have just any college educated Canadian woman with an opinion waltzing into the country and getting a job. Especially if she was actually married. That’s just crazy talk.
I understand the immigration issue on a deeply emotional and personal level. My great grandparents understood it as well.
Immigrants commonly contribute more tax dollars to the system than they take out. "Each year, for example, the US Social Security Administration maintains roughly $6 billion to $7 billion of Social Security contributions in an "earnings suspense file"—an account for W-2 tax forms that cannot be matched to the correct Social Security number. The vast majority of these numbers are attributable to undocumented workers who will never claim their benefits." (Business Week-Econ 101 on Illegal Immigrants-S&P-April 2006 ). “A RAND study concluded that the total federal cost of providing medical expenses for the 78% illegal immigrants without health insurance coverage was $1.1 billion, with immigrants paying $321 million of health care costs out-of-pocket. The study found that illegal immigrants tend to visit physicians less frequently than U.S. citizens because they are younger and because people with chronic health problems are less likely to migrate. (http://www.rand.org/news/press/2006/11/14.html). So we can take in billions in additional social security, but the Federal government refuses to pay the states and hospitals that provide that care, which could still leave a surplus of 5-7 billion dollars per year.
Instead we are spending the surplus on something else, completely ineffective border enforcement and incarceration, which can cost upwards of $50,000 per inmate, per year. “Center of Immigration Studies reported that in 2007-2008 enforcement resources like spending on border and interior enforcement cost far more than the tax savings they generated from reduced illegal presence in the United States. Because the net impact of illegal immigration.” (http://www.cis.org/IllegalImmigration).
In my opinion anyone who wants to emigrate to the US should be allowed regardless of the color of their skin, and our current immigration laws vastly favor immigration of “politically sensitive” people while vastly discriminating against our allies. As an example, my wife who lived eighty miles from the US border struggled for two years with the immigration process. Meanwhile the average time for a person from the former Yugoslavia was three weeks, and that included cash assistance, housing, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, and English language education all at no charge. All my wife wanted was to live with her husband.
There is nothing fair about the racist and xenophobic US immigration discussion. Immigrants have no constituency because it is ten to twenty years before they are allowed to vote. Just a few years ago it was found that the INS shredded almost 90,000 legal petitions because there were “too many” (http://v2011.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/obtainlpr/oblpr087.htm). Later it was found that the employees at that facility were embarrassed that they weren’t working very hard and didn’t want people to know.
Maybe we should hire immigrants to do it since they are cheaper and they work harder.
