Immigration for Dummies

No, this isn't a "how-to" guide for all you travel agents and insurance salesmen who want to start practicing immigration law without a license.

It's a brief explanation and diatribe about what's wrong with the Lou Dobbs-Bill O'Reilly-Tom Tancredo-James "I'll make you nostalgic for our Sen. Joe McCarthy" Sensenbrenner school of "fixing" immigration by building a new version of the Berlin Wall across the southern border.

You can't build a barrier high enough to stop it, folks.

Just as the Berlin Wall didn't stop Peter Fechter (right) and countless others from trying to escape the tyranny of the Communist rulers, no wall, no motion sensors, no stepped-up patrols by Customs and Border Protection, no denial of drivers licenses and social security cards and education and health care and citizenship for children born here can stop the longing of people for freedom, for a chance to earn a decent living, for a chance to eat tonight before they go to bed.

That's the explanation. Here comes the diatribe.

The blowhards over in the anti-immigrant gallery talk as if leaving one's home to travel to a foreign land is easy. Blinded as they are by the great shibboleth illegal, they forget how much these people give up to come here:

Why don't you, Lou, move to a foreign land and learn a foreign language?

Don't pick an easy one, like Spanish. How about Japanese? Or Finnish? Something with a lot of tenses and cases and genders.

Then, spend your life trying to get by in that language.

Do it without help from any social service agency.

And, do it working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week as a presser in a dry cleaners, or a drywall installer, or a day laborer, waiting by the train station hoping that someone will drop by and offer you work for the day.

Then, live in a dump. How about an old house that's been divided into 15 rooms, each inhabited by one or two or five people in the same situation as you--sharing one kitchen and a toilet and a shower. Pay 60% of your weekly wages as rent? Send another 20% home to your family, who would starve without the help you send.

It takes a pretty powerful force to get people to leave their native land, where they can talk to anybody without a struggle, where they know and are known by the folks around them. Maybe the folks in Puebla don't believe the tales of how difficult it is in New York, or Albuquerque, or Victorville. Maybe they still think that the streets of the United States are paved with gold.

That force is freedom and economic opportunity. It's time you folks in the anti-immigrant lobby return to your Laffer curve, your voodoo economics. Quit trying to control immigration by raising the barriers to entry. Instead, reduce that force that is drawing people in. Reduce freedom in this country. Line everybody up and issue a national identification card. Don't let people travel without it. (Sounds like the old Soviet Union--remember how bad we thought it was that someone needed an "internal passport" to travel from some godforsaken rathole to another in that land of socialist opportunity!) Suspend habeas corpus, beginning with anyone who isn't a citizen. And, shut down the economy. Nothing like a nationwide depression and 25% unemployment to end the problem with illegal immigration. Hell, we won't have to deport them. They'll be digging tunnels under the new Berlin wall to get back to Mexico.

In the end, all the anti-immigration arguments are reducible to "We got here first, and we don't want to share the good things that we've got" or "They're not like us (ideal Americans) and they'll change this ideal America that we live in." We're all immigrants--the only thing that distinguishes one from another is how long ago we got off the boat.

And one of the founding principles of America--it's even in the Constitution, baby--is that there is no aristocracy, no nobility, no titles.