The Immigration Conflagration

It's pretty clear that immigration is the new abortion.

With the latter more or less conceded to conservatives, the left is fighting tooth and nail for the former. As proven by the government shutdown, it is equally divisive.

Like traditional Republicans, Donald Trump has resorted to the party playbook and is crying the sky is falling over immigration. Yes, filthy, crime-ridden vermin are streaming across the border like cockroaches after the light goes out.

Predictably, his base is kept awake nights by this. Which adds to the Trumpsteria demanding a brand new border wall.

Please ignore the facts which show conclusively that the majority of illegal immigrants currently in the United States overstayed their visas and didn't clamber over or through a crumbling wall.

But that doesn't give Don any inflammatory talking points to bellow about at his validation rallies, does it? Or Fox any blood pressure-raising video.

Yeah.

On the other side of the aisle, immigration-centric Democrats believe the wall is immoral and endorse sanctuary cities, where federal immigration law mysteriously disappears and illegal immigrants are protected from deportation despite being, well, illegal.

I'm not a fan of either approach. As unpopular as it is in twenty-first century America, clear and sober thought is required.

We need to stop making illegal immigration a United States versus Mexico thing. Illegal immigrants come from all over the world. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Liberia and Myanmar. For the geographically-impaired, the United States doesn't share a border with any of these countries. The entry point for these immigrants is, um, airports. Seaports. Not our southern border.

All of which renders Don's new and improved wall as stupid and useless as the man himself.

Overstaying your visa is, at the end of the day, illegal. Cloistering yourself in a sanctuary city should not be an option. Sorry if I skew a bit Republican here, but I'm not partial to rewarding people who successfully break the law with citizenship.

Granted, there are many people who have urgent need of the political asylum the United States can offer. One example are the translators who work with our armed forced in places like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq. If anyone is in need of sanctuary, it is them.

Sadly, there are tens of millions of others. Given the finite resources of the United States, it is impossible to offer all the world's deserving candidates protection.

Ideally, the United States could forever remain the place espoused by the Statue of Liberty. It would remain into eternity the lamp beside the golden door, offering shelter to the world's huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But those words were inscribed one-hundred thirty-two years ago. At the time, America was a growth stock. It was a teenager just beginning to sense its potential. The future seemed unlimited. There was no reason for America not to dream big.

All these years later, so very, very much has changed. The population has grown nearly six-fold. After a century of almost unbroken middle-class expansion, the nation is in the throes of a deliberate, on-purpose contraction.

The rest of us are holding too much of the wealth that is the one-percent's birthright, and aided by their strumpets in Congress and sitting on the Supreme Court, they have set about getting it back.

And they have been—and continue to be—wildly successful.

To the point where the United States now enjoys the wealth disparity of a third-world country. Current figures show that forty-percent of the United States' wealth is held by just one-percent of its people.

Does that sound like a democracy to you? Or Idi Amin's Uganda?

Left unchecked, the jackals setting policy will turn the United States into an oligarchy with an emphasis on feudalism, presumably making it less attractive as an immigration destination.

But until that happens, sensible immigration policy needs to be set.

In addition to the ideas sketched out above, I'd like to suggest measured immigration. We accept the refugees suffering unspeakable horrors in their native countries. We accept limited numbers from the rest of the world. We eliminate sanctuary cities. We issue visas and follow up on them.

Yes, this will require additional staffing in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office which will lead, inevitably, to big government. But if the big businesses and gigantic banks Republicans endorse are okay, so is big government.

Go big or go home.

We also need to make the security on our southern border more robust. While not the festering sore Don likes to tell us it is, there is an undue amount of criminal activity that takes place it would behoove us to monitor.

By now you may be looking up from your phone and thinking “What's the big deal? This isn't any radical new idea.” And you'd be right. This isn't radical. It merely sands off the extremes on the left and right.

Where I get all crazy-ass and unhinged is in suggesting that we implement a concentrated public awareness campaign about substance abuse.

We got people to wear seat belts. We got people to stop smoking. We have cut drunk driving incidents by fifty-percent since 1980. All of this was accomplished by coordinated media campaigns that crossed federal, state, county and municipal agencies.

And even if that didn't work, think of the debate it would generate.

America's $54,000 question is why can't we keep our population drug-free? Why are people in what is supposedly the end-all and be-all of human existence ingesting dangerous, life-threatening substances in record numbers?

There would be another significant benefit: What happens to Mejico when we stop taking the drugs that are the backbone of its economy—and its corruption? Does the quality of life get better? Or worse?

Let's say it gets better. Then what happens to the tens of thousands of citizens who want to jump the wall and escape the corruption and murder which makes Chicago look like a fragrant garden by comparison?

This is a conversation we really need to have.

But I'm not holding my breath.