Immigration II: Duke replies and defends his proposalMar 27, 2006

A conversation between allies on immigration reform.

Duke1676

Thanks for taking the time to plow through the proposal. As I said in the opening, I am trying to deal with realities of immigration reform as they are and not as I wish they would be, so with that in light I will try to address your concerns.

You are not the first one to question the “assimilation” aspects of the plan, so I will explain my thinking on that first:

First off when I use the term assimilation it refers solely to fostering a climate by which emigrants are given the opportunities and resources necessary to enable them compete on an equal basis with those fortunate enough by birth to be “entitled” to the “American dream”.

We must face the fact that until the time comes when this nation actually begins to seriously look at bilingual education for ALL it’s children, we are at least two to three generations away from nation where the inability to speak English is not one of the greatest limiters of economic success for emigrants. At the present time there are two major factors that determine whether an emigrant toils away at a low paying, exploitive and often dangerous job or has the ability to escape the cycle of exploitation: attaining legal status/citizenship and speaking English. Studies show that when an emigrant has the opportunity to do one or both of these things their economic security is increased exponentially.(see DMI report on immigration reform, CSUP report on day labor).

As to your point about immigrants working 18 hour days and having little time to study, that is one of the main reasons I tried to tie the success of the emigrant directly to monetary incentives to employers. Hopefully having an equity stake in their employees and their ability to attain language skills and “move through” the system would foster a “culture of learning” in the workplace. As I pointed out, we would hopefully start to see employers setting up mentoring, learning and “language transition” programs in the workplace if only for pure monetary reason. It would save them money and eventually make their workplaces more productive.

Given these current realities, I see fostering language skills, not as a limiter or destroyer of emigrant culture and cultural diversity, but rather as providing emigrants with the tools to thrive in the current environment. Would I like to see a truly bi-lingual nation more in tuned with rest of the world where it is the norm for people to speak numerous languages?… of course … but at that present time I don’t see that happening in the near future. I certainly do not see change coming soon enough for the millions of emigrants already here, stuck in a cycle of exploitation and economic insecurity.

Under the present system, the powers that be have created a perpetual underclass of illegal workers who can be exploited at will and have no way to escape the cycle of abuse. The only way to break this cycle is to provide emigrants with a guaranteed path to legalization/citizenship. At the present time that path requires a certain level of English language skills, and this is why I believe it is important to foster those skills. The only way for emigrants to protect their rights right now is to make sure they have the same rights as “native born” residents, and the only way to do that is to give them legal status that cannot be revoked at whim by the changing political climes. Anything short of that leaves millions of current and future emigrants in jeopardy.

I will try to address some of your other concerns:

As to the “bulkiness” of the plan, form filling and fee paying -

The plan actually plays out much simpler than it appears on paper. It simply takes the money already paid into social security by employers and employees and re-directs it to incentives, immigrant services and processing. Currently most emigrants pay into SS and the tax system an never receive any benefits (your Barbara Bush analogy is quite correct)
All I propose is that instead of allowing this money to be dispersed into the general SS fund, we take it and use it for the direct benefit emigrants.

Unlike other plans this one does not call for punitive or exploitive fees to be paid in order to enter the system. The emigrant simply uses his/her “green card” number as a replacement for the fake Social Security numbers that he/she is already using.

All I propose is that instead of allowing this money to be dispersed into the general SS fund, we take it and use it for the direct benefit emigrants.

The only “hard part” I see in the plan is the background check process … but that responsibility would fall upon both the US government and the government of the country of origin… no different really from the current visa/ green card/ citizenship system all ready in place… except in scope. But that is the price paid by governments in our current climate of hysteria…If you want to whip the people up into a frenzy of fear, you must deal with the consequences… if that means having to actually check the records of emigrants for criminal and/or “terrist” ties so be it.

At least under this plan with all well-meaning emigrants having the ability to enter the country “legally” through authorized points of entry, they could take all the resources currently used to chase and capture hard working people trying to make a better life, and use them to actually prevent those who should not be coming into this country from doing so.