The Need for Legal Immigration Reform

Here is the conclusion of an op/ed on immigration I did for the Sacramento Bee: 

“To begin to reform the laws in a lasting way, the nation needs to acknowledge that undocumented immigration is in no small part a labor migration. Workers in Mexico want work. Employers want workers. The magnet of the U.S. economy is just too strong. The lagging economy has put a damper on undocumented immigration, which should teach the nation a lesson of what is truly at work here.

What the United States needs to do is bring our laws concerning legal immigration more in line with the nation’s labor needs. Allowing easier migration of labor in North America, like that permitted in the thriving European Union, is one possibility. At bottom, we need to regulate, not ban, workers from coming to the United States. This will require some liberalization in our employment visa system.

To claim that undocumented immigrants should have waited in line like everyone else is meaningless. Under our current system, there are few ways for low- and medium-skilled workers, groups that employers demand in the greatest numbers, to come lawfully to the United States.”

Some of the comments to the op/ed on the Bee website — other criticisms were even less comprehensible — suggest the difficulties in rational discussion of immigration:

“Put up a border fence with gun towers.

Drive them like cattle south of the border.

Yes I’m serious.”

“Send them back and tell them in english to go to the back of the line, apply, and wait their turn.”

“This author is definitely very biased on one side of this very complicated issue; one only has to look at his resume to ascertain that fact.

This is the country that put a man on the moon 40 years ago and that could secure its ports and borders overnight if the corrupt politicians in Washington D.C. decided to do it. . .  .

Poles indicate that a majority of citizens want less immigration and not more. Do we really want 450,000,000 residents in 50 years? More and more of the labor being donen by legal and illegal immigrants can be mechanized, and more mechanization or robotics is right arround the bend.”

“If you want to embrace that heritage, Mexico is still there.”

“Back in the sixties the government came into the schools and brainwashed us with the idea we needed to control the population because it was rising so fast. They said the roads would become crowded and we would run out of things like water.

They unleashed abortions, birth control pills, and other forms of Family Planning.

To allow the country to be over run with the criminals in businesses illegal labor while the criminals in the government aid and abet the invasion is a travesty against mankind.

They have seen to it our children were killed to control the population at the same time allowing the world to export their population problems here.

What about our sacrifices, many made against our will?

We still haven’t recovered from the last time the criminals in business were allowed to bring in their slaves.”

“Looking at the author’s `credentials’ (UC Davis law Prof. in Chicana studies!) how is he not biased? How about some credible so-called experts rather than mouthpieces for illegals? His money figures for the cost of illegal immigration are laughable.”

“Since the author is “naming names”, (During World War II, the U.S. government interned people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, with the vocal support of then-California Attorney General Earl Warren.), lets not for get that the internment of which he speaks was done by executive order by FDR.”

KJ