Tuesday, April 04, 2006

A Modest Proposal

The question of immigration has risen to the top of the political heap and I want to air my view, a view I think a lot of Americans share, about how to deal with this issue.

First, the main issue should be protecting our country from terrorists and fanatics who want to come to our country and destroy it.

Second, we rightly want to preserve the culture and political system that has served us so well and which is directly or indirectly the reason people want to come to our country.

To maintain the integrity of our boarder, we need to end the industry that has built up to smuggle people across the boarder. To do this we need to do two things, increase boarder security and decrease the incentive to illegally enter the country.

The way to achieve the first of these objectives is to increase the number of boarder guards and build a fence or the like to make crossing the boarder harder. Israel is doing some work in this line and we could benefit from their experience.

The way to decrease the incentive to enter the country illegally is to make it easier to enter legally. That means in essence much easier immigration for those who apply to come to this country.

What I propose is that we should heavily patrol the boarder, but build 50 or so immigration point were anyone wanting to immigrate to the United States will be held for one or two days while a background check is performed so that we do not admit terrorists, criminals, or others who mean us harm. Those who are not found to be a threat to the safety of the republic would be admitted with a green card good for ten years.

How exactly tourists, people visiting friends and family, and people coming for brief business trips would be worked into this system will require more thought, but it is not impossible. For example companies that want someone to visit could be required to pay for a bounty hunter if the person does not leave our country and could have their right to admit people additional for business trips suspended until the first person is caught and deported. Hotels which have tourist come to stay and people who have foreign visitors could also be held to a similar standard.

The system I have proposed would reduce the number of people illegally entering the country and thus reduce the demand for the industry which smuggles people into the country. This would make our country significantly safer.

As for how to preserve our culture and political institutions, I believe that what we need is a strong program of education aimed at assimilating emigrants. Specifically we need to ditch the immoral and impractical multiculturalist ideology in favor of a assimilationist, melting pot, patriotic, Whig-historical ideology.

That is to say we should teach students about how people came to this country and built new and better homes for themselves and their descendants. How the colonists rebelled against the unconstitutional usurpations of George III and built a new constitutional system on the basis of the old English Whig tradition. We should tell our students about how generation upon generation have come to this country and adopted the essential parts of the Anglo-American cultural heritage as their own while also preserving and helping to incorporate into American culture many good parts of their native cultures.

Multiculturalism is just poison and we should get it out of our schools. As Jim Benet says, “democracy, multiculturalism, and immigration chose any two.”