Immigration: Two articles

I received a couple of emails in response to my series on immigration.  One of the emails suggested several articles.  A couple of those articles stood out: 

More Thoughts About Immigration from Crisis Magazine. 

...I will concentrate on problems that seem important but are often ignored or denied.

The first problem immigration causes, then, is inequality. California, once the epitome of the Golden West and the postwar American Dream, is now the most diverse state, the most unequal state, and the state with the highest poverty rate.

Low-skilled workers suffer especially from liberal immigration policies.

The rich, on the other hand, do quite well. Increasing the supply of immigrant labor makes capital and forms of labor that can’t easily be imported (e.g., that provided by upper management and other experienced and well-connected people) proportionally scarcer.

...continuous large-scale immigration from all over the world...destroys common culture and thus ease of discussion and civic cooperation. It means fewer common habits, attitudes, loyalties, understandings, and assumed standards of behavior.

In the absence of a populace that trusts each other, and is similar enough in loyalties and assumptions to deliberate effectively, government will be carried on by a small minority with little effective public answerability. Worse, it will be easy for the ambitious to advance their careers by provoking fear and suspicion among groups...

 and Obama's Immigration Decree, also from Crisis Magazine.  This author has a way with simple, declarative sentences.

Persistent refusal to enforce clear statutes  that demanding deportation of those entering the country illegally...has been this president’s consistent policy. It is a policy in defiance of both law and common sense.

There is no more basic duty of a government than that of protecting its borders.

Our immigration policies are clearly broken, unfair, and harmful to the national interest. They are also harmful to the interests of those who are entering this country, for they promise them a life the laws and the realities of economic and social life will not allow.

Current policies...provide for deportation of immigrants only if they cause too much trouble and leave determination of who is “too much trouble” to powerful economic actors and an overburdened criminal justice system. They foster contempt for law among many immigrants, fear of the law among most immigrants, and a callous misuse of the law by all too many employers who claim to be supporting American values.

This point merits expansion:  Populations that have both contempt for the law and fear of the law are both breeding grounds of the highly criminal and are systemically vulnerable to victimization by all criminals.  This is not a Christian condition.

The next two paragraphs do not excerpt well.  The author is disgusted with both sides of the aisle.  Both parties want to have their cake and eat it too.  It can only be done by having the citizens pay for one cake and the immigrants for the other.  These paragraphs are notable for coining the term: gray-market immigration.

The proper response is simple, but unfortunately not easy given current political alliances. The answer is to stop giving amnesties, to stop allowing people to enter the country illegally and stay, and most important to stop allowing employers, and agribusiness in particular, to get away with knowingly using illegal immigrants as little more than slave laborers. Real, meaningful fines combined with real protection of our borders would allow for development of a real immigration program that would, in fact, call for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to enter our country legally to provide labor and services in an open, free economy without fear of legal reprisals and looking forward to the real chance of gaining citizenship.