Many folks seem to be pretty OK with the brutal tactics Trump is using to enforce immigration law. As a contrast let’s talk about how we’d do it if we were actually compassionate humans, and heck also concerned with not disrupting businesses that depend on immigrant labor.
Why are we doing it?
Before we dive into how to do it the right way, let’s try to understand why we’re doing it as we are now. Surprisingly, it’s got little to do with actual immigration. Immigration enforcement is really just billionaire theater to distract you from where the real money is going.
Immigrants contribute in many ways to the economy and a number of businesses, for better or for worse, leverage cheap immigrant labor. Farms, hotels, car washes, construction, and of course your gardeners and nannies come to mind. The immigrants pay sales tax on everything they consume. But they are not eligible for any federal government programs except for hospital emergency room basic “stabilization.”
A political frenzy
The billionaires have their own TV networks and they use them to publish a constant stream of false information to keep you from noticing how they’re raiding the government right before your eyes. It turns out that if you just make up stuff you can have pretty exciting content and very good ratings. If you’re bound by facts and reality, meh, that’s not nearly as fun or exciting.
How would you really do it?
Currently we give immigrants a pretty impossible path to legal status: you need to live here legally for 3-5 years, pass a basic citizenship test, have some familiarity with English, and then after all that it still costs a good chunk of money, too. Some folks who do skilled labor enjoy H1B status but the cheap labor doesn’t get any perks like that.
So first off, we’ve got to give them a way to be here legally. We need to have some program similar to the H2B visa but that’s workable, easy, and broad. The H2B visa is currently considered to be a complex red tape nightmare, it’s not widely available, and therefore not really used extensively.
After we establish a legal way to work here we need to trial it for a year or two, get the kinks out, make sure it addresses the issues.
Meanwhile we need to give immigrants notice that we’re going to begin enforcing legal status, tell them when it starts, and establish the conditions and repercussions for non-compliance.
We need to also make clear to employers that we will begin enforcing legal status for their workers and establish for them what repercussions they in turn will face for hiring undocumented persons. Yes, we need to prosecute the employers as well.
Like REAL ID, this might take a while. The deadline for REAL ID was extended several times to allow folks (travels and travel companies alike) to take the necessary steps to prepare for it. And this would probably be a significantly more complex undertaking.
Finally, after all is well and good, we begin enforcement, but not via kidnapping people, ripping them away from their families, and “disappearing” them. But through an orderly and humane program the maintains basic human rights and follows legal precedents.
I know, I know, not near as exciting as seeing ICE agents shoot pepper balls as those darn dirty illegals.