Three good articles on immigration reform…first up, from Heritage:
The Kind of Immigration Reform We Could Support
Yes, there are border security plans that do not require a new 1,000-plus-page bill. As Heritage’s Immigration and Border Security Reform Task Force says:
There are practical, effective, fair, and compassionate alternatives. Washington has simply never tried them. For many years, The Heritage Foundation has laid out a problem-solving road map for addressing the obstacles to immigration and border security reform. The principles behind these proposals have always been about fostering the freedom, security, and prosperity of all Americans in equal measure.
Instead of throwing taxpayer money after ideas that are proven not to work, we should focus on enforcing the laws we have and fixing things that are fixable. Heritage’s immigration solutions include:
- Practical, effective ways to secure the border
- Support for local law enforcement
- Solutions for reforming our legal immigration system
- Temporary worker programs
- Welfare and education reforms
Immigration Reform: Not Easy, But it is Simple
By C. Edmund Wright
By enacting just two basic — albeit politically difficult measures — neither of which are possible with the current president and Senate, our massive and emotionally charged illegal immigration problem would largely take care of itself within a few years. Not only that, but a laser focus on these two steps could codify the conservative/Republican position around principles we all agree on, and would leave the messier areas of our disagreements to a more appropriate time.
The low hanging fruit — the crux of this matter — is truly far simpler than we are making it, while some other hypotheticals are far more complex than most are willing to acknowledge. Labor and deportation nuances are inherently intertwined with issues like welfare, food stamps, unemployment compensation, law-enforcement logistics, and even workers comp, and are the result of supply and demand and human nature colliding with a porous border for about six
Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality
The elite charm of comprehensive immigration reform
By Victor Davis HansonThe divide over immigration reform is not primarily a Left/Right or Democratic/Republican divide; instead, it cuts, and sharply so, across class lines. Elites blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration to ensure that the opponents of the latter appear to be against the former. They talk grandly of making legal immigration meritocratic, but fall silent when asked to what degree. They talk darkly of racist subtexts in the arguments of their opponents, but skip over the overt ethnic chauvinism of proponents of amnesty; they decry conservative paranoia over a new demography, but never liberal euphoria over just such a planned reset. They talk deprecatingly of rubes who do not understand the new global realties, but never of their own parochialism ensconced in New York or Washington or San Francisco. They talk of reactionaries who do not fathom the ins and outs of the debate; never of their own willful ignorance of the realities on the ground in East L.A. or southwest Fresno.