Real Immigration Reform

I wrote this article for my college newspaper after a couple of weeks of debate on campus by the Young Conservatives of Texas and liberal groups here. It started when YCT did "Catch and Illegal Immigrant Day" in which someone dressed up as an illegal immigrant and was chased around campus. LULAC and other groups then did a protest, but have also asked the administration about possibly limited free speech more on campus (we already have unconstitutional "Free Speech" zones). Anyway, I almost never post my articles here since my blogs overlap anyway, but I felt this makes several good points:


Ever since the Young Conservatives put on their “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” the campus has exploded with discussion. But so far, we’ve seen no substantive debate from either side on the issue of illegal immigration. Those in YCT relish in their own obnoxiousness, while some of those protesting their actions have gone too far in their accusations of “racism” and even attacked the first amendment rights of students.

I oppose Bush’s guest worker program, as do most Democrats like myself, most Republicans, and just about everyone else except his big corporate backers that would benefit from a cheap labor source. I do not fear it because of racist reasons like conservatives such as Michael Savage do. I do not fear that illegal immigrants “will take my job” (we have much more to worry about from multinationals on that score). More often than not it’s true they do the jobs we don’t want, though I do believe it would be bad for our economy because they would be earning money here but many would send them back to their families in their home country. I oppose it because it is all-around bad policy that doesn’t address the real problem with our immigrations laws at all; that they encourage illegal immigration and discourage legal immigration.

In fact, we've made it virtually impossible for anyone who dreams of becoming an American to do so legally. Legal immigration is basically limited to people who already have relatives here, are sponsored by an employer or are seeking political asylum from a tiny list of approved countries. Obviously if we had this kind of immigration policy since 1776, Native Americans would still be a majority of the population!

Since I do agree that we have to worry about security, I believe a sane immigration policy would look like this: A reasonable and graduated increase in border security while completely reforming our immigration laws to put more legal immigrants on the path to citizenship. It’s time to finally tell big business no, and again welcome those who wish to be Americans with open arms.