Immigration Reform

2008-05-23

Recent immigration raids in Postville, Iowa, in which over three hundred illegal immigrants were rounded up, have once again stirred the controversy over immigration reform. Some folks want the employers to face stiffer fines. Others want it to be easier for hard-working immigrants to get in legally. Yet others want bigger fences to be built around the nation's borders to keep people out. There are, however, some points that never get discussed.

The official LibertyBob policy on immigration is fairly simple. If hard-working, conscientious people want to come here, and especially if they want to do the crappiest jobs, we should make it easy for them to enter the country with proper identification as well as entering their finger prints and DNA into our identification databases. The ones who don't do so well, such as becoming criminals and such, will do the usual hard time at a prison power generation station before being deported. This is where I start to depart from many of the mainstream plans.

You see, there should be another route to becoming an American for those without meat-packing or fruit picking skills. There should be an American Foreign Legion made up almost entirely of persons who know that they can fast track themselves into citizenship through military service.

Basically, we set up some officers and cadre from the Marine Corps and let them gather recruits among the immigrant-wannabes from other countries. These recruits are given uniforms, training, food, and health care. They are also taught English and are required to repeat pro-American slogans until properly brainwashed. Those who show exceptional mental capacity will also be sent to Office Candidate School so we can maximize their productivity when they are done with their service.

We will have to be nice and not send these people back to their own native lands to fight. We will also have to be on the lookout for those who are really enemy agents trying to get into our military. Other than those two factors, it would be an easy way for many law-abiding immigrants to work toward a life in the United States.

The big motivator for this from an immigrant's point of view is that they get the food and health care while serving and then, at the end of their time, they can take the tests to become an American citizen. When taken from the American point of view, we get to bolster our military rather inexpensively and we get new citizens who have already proven that they are so dedicated to becoming integrated into American society that they were willing to disarm roadside mines by throwing rocks at them. Just as important, these new citizens will have been properly brainwashed into pro-American thoughts and will speak English.

Then there is the other side of immigration reform that no one ever wants to talk about. I think we need to discuss deporting people who were born here. Let's face it, if you can't hold a simple job, are in your twenties and just crash at people's houses, and like to toke up whenever you can mooch a little weed, then you aren't really what we want in an American citizen. Why is it that we can't just gather such folks, ask them for their green cards, and, when they claim they don't have one, deport them to wherever the plane happens to be headed that day?

Sure, there are alternatives to that sort of things. Compulsory service is one option, but who wants slackers in the military? We could also try to put them into counseling to help them get over what's wrong with them, but that just gives them an excuse to not work. "Sorry, dude, I'm in counseling for my laziness and lack of direction." No, I can only think of one real cure.

Some of the slackers will probably like the idea at first. The thought of an all expenses paid trip to some exotic locale might seem enticing. The trick with that is to let the stories get back of what happened to the last batch sent to that particular locale when local law enforcement found they were trying to enter the country with illegal drugs. Sure, the plane that day may be headed to France, but it is much more likely that it is headed to Turkey or Saudi Arabia.

Why would this cut back on the number of less productive members of our society? Imagine hearing the kid in the back saying, "Dude, I got to get this fry vat clean or I might get fired. If I don't got a job I might get deported."

Of course, I am only talking about the able bodied, able minded types who aren't as aggressive about productivity as we might like. You don't just put developmentally disabled people onto a plane for air-drop into the Sudan. But I don't see anything wrong with a thirty-year-old video-game-player who lives in his mom's basement being given some rations, a phrase book, and then being pushed out the back of a military cargo plane. I would even be willing to attach the guy to a parachute just to show what a humanitarian I am.

So that's my take on immigration reform. Hard working, conscientious types should be allowed in. We should even go so far as to recruit good talent from third world countries. Finally, we should reverse immigrate undesirable people such as slackers and televangelists. With a proper balance of incoming and outgoing immigrants we should be able to maintain a good growth rate on our nation's population and continue to improve our productivity.