[quote]maybe I should have clarified, I am against illegal immigration, not immigration. I’m cool with the same amount of immigrants, but with pictures and fingerprints on the way in, not the way out, that’s all. Bring us your tired and weary, but can you sign the guestbook? And dont tell me we can organaize or coordinate that much data, we cant get our s%^t together when we want to.[/quote]
Are you cool with family-based immigration?
The way it works here, it all started with Reagan legalizing 3 million illegals back in 1986. Most of them poor, male, uneducated farm workers.
Then a few years later, they all went and filed family reunification papers for all their relatives. For the most part, still poor, still uneducated, still farm workers, but often female and sometimes pregnant.
Then a few more years later, those relatives noticed that they got the right, but not the opportunity, to immigrate: because the US Govt failed to adjust family reunification quotas for Mexico in response to legalization of the 3 million.
So they’ve decided to walk across the border illegally and to wait for their quota to arrive here.
Ultimately, this is an infinite process, and, if the US were to lift the quotas, it would not take long for about two thirds of the population of Mexico to move stateside (the famed “six degrees of separation”).
So what should we do?
Should we lift the quotas?
Should keep the status quo?
Should we prohibit any further family reunification?
[quote]Bring us your tired and weary, but can you sign the guestbook? [/quote]
The tired and the weary would like nothing more than to sign the guestbook. All five billion of them.
But, unfortunately, that is not an option in the current US foreign policy (nor was it for many decades), unless you’re talking about gay and/or Jewish residents of Iran and Saudi Arabia (people who can plausibly file for asylum on the basis of persecution in their home countries). Unconstrained free legal immigration to the United States officially ended in 1882 for the Chinese people, and in 1921 for everyone else.
Nowadays, other than asylum, there are three main ways to sign the guestbook:
– Family reunification (see above)
– Skill-based immigration (H1B, does not apply to the tired and the weary because having a master’s degree is a prerequisite)
– Diversity visa (limited to 50,000 people/year worldwide, and one of our local San Diego GOP congressmen has been introducing a bill in each Congress that would abolish the program).
