Immigration policy bass-ackwards
Earlier this week, President Obama said that if we want to give health care to illegal immigrants, we should have a policy in place to make them all legal, according to the Washington Times;
President Obama said this week that his health care plan won’t cover illegal immigrants, but argued that’s all the more reason to legalize them and ensure they eventually do get coverage.
He also staked out a position that anyone in the country legally should be covered – a major break with the 1996 welfare reform bill, which limited most federal public assistance programs only to citizens and longtime immigrants.
Yeah, that’s fine – but my 32 years experience of dealing with US immigration laws and immigration officers tells me that the government is more concerned with immigrants who shouldn’t be here than they are with immigrants who have a legal and moral right to be here. For example, another story in the Washington Times about a military widow who is having problems staying here;
Hotaru Ferschke just wants to raise her 8-month-old son in his grandparents’ Tennessee home, surrounded by photos and memories of the father he’ll never meet, a Marine who died in combat a month after marrying her from thousands of miles away.
Sgt. Michael Ferschke was killed in Iraq in 2008, leaving his widow and infant son, both Japanese citizens, in immigration limbo: A 1950s legal standard meant to curb marriage fraud means U.S. authorities do not recognize the marriage, even though the U.S. military does.
It seems to me that the government would go out of it’s way to help a mother and child who, in their short lives have sacrificed more than most citizens will ever sacrifice in their entire lives. But, just like security procedures at airports are designed more to harass average passengers than actually catch potential terrorists, our immigration officers are more focused on harassing potentially legal immigrants than halting the influx of illegal immigrants.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Illegal Immigrants, Military issues
Off topic but check out B5, Matt just made the announcement he’s running for the Illinios state legislature….
This is so frickin’ jacked up, I could chew nails.
Rampant population growth threatens our economy and quality of life. Immigration, both legal and illegal, are fueling this growth. I’m not talking about environmental degradation or resource depletion. I’m talking about the effect upon rising unemployment and poverty in America. I should introduce myself. I am the author of a book titled “Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America.” To make a long story short, my theory is that, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty. This theory has huge implications for U.S. policy toward population management, especially immigration policy. Our policies of encouraging high rates of immigration are rooted in the belief of economists that population growth is a good thing, fueling economic growth. Through most of human history, the interests of the common good and business (corporations) were both well-served by continuing population growth. For the common good, we needed more workers to man our factories, producing the goods needed for a high standard of living. This population growth translated into sales volume growth for corporations. Both were happy. But, once an optimum population density is breached, their interests diverge. It is in the best interest of the common good to stabilize the population, avoiding an erosion of our quality of life through high unemployment and poverty. However, it is still in the interest of corporations to fuel population growth because, even though per capita consumption goes into decline, total consumption still increases. We now find ourselves in the position of having corporations and economists influencing public policy in a direction that is not in the best interest of the common good. The U.N. ranks the U.S. with eight third world countries – India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh,… Read more »