On Immigration

31 March, 2006. 277 words.

I suppose I should comment on immigration, since it’s the hot topic of the week.

Unfortunately, I don’t know much of anything about the immigration situation. But I found a shockingly non-partisan (or, at least, minimally-partisan) overview of the situation at Daily Kos: A primer on immigration: background and legislation. The section describing current immigration law was particularly helpful in addressing my main misunderstanding about the whole thing, which was basically, “why didn’t those 12 million illegal immigrants just become citizens??” (The answer, apparently, is that most of them can’t because the U.S. only gives out like 5000 immigrant worker visas per year.) (“They” and “them,” by the way, are my discreet euphemisms for Latinos.)

So after a little self-education, I still don’t know what to think about immigration. I can find valid arguments on all sides. It looks like there’s no reasonable solution; somebody’s going to get screwed no matter what we do. So I suppose it boils down to who can tolerate being screwed the most?

Maybe we should just annex Mexico and make it a state. (Hehe… I just Google’d “annex mexico” to see if anyone else had thought of that, and there’s like a bazillion results. So much for originality.) But seriously… the root of the problem is that the cheapest, crappiest, unskilled jobs in America, even the ones run by the most contemptible, below-minimum-wage-paying bosses around, are still way, way better than the unskilled jobs in Mexico. So the real “cure” has to come from Mexico (as in, they need to do something to make their country attractive to its citizens). And we can’t do anything about that unless we own it.

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