Saturday, May 19, 2007

Immigration Reform?

Wow. It’s not often that I’m absolutely floored by a bill in Congress, but this new “immigration reform” really does take the cake.
The problem isn’t that this bill isn’t going to accomplish anything positive. It’s that it really doesn’t seem to accomplish anything. If I may reference my own sociology paper on immigration, the level of illegal immigration to the United States seems to associated mostly with US economic growth and demand for labor; in other words, immigrants are going to keep coming because businesses will pay them for their labor.
So, if immigrant flows keep coming, what’s our response going to be? Apparently…more amnesty (except we can’t call it that, even though they only have to pay a small fine!) and more border control, neither of which has really worked in the past.
Color me ungrateful, but this bill seems to be a pile of useless paper.

What is positive, though, is the fact the new guest worker provision, which allows 400,000 guest workers to come to the United States legally; they also will be given visas based on their skill level and education as opposed to how many family members they have here. That much signifies a good trend in the United States; evaluating people based on their abilities and not their connections

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