Can we - and should we - reform our immigration policies without wholesale deportation?
My answer on all counts is yes.
As I've said before, amnesty is wrong - it rewards lawbreakers for their lawbreaking, and encourages more. It severely devalues citizenship. It also makes fools of the tens of thousands who have obeyed the law and are, right now, still waiting and working through the legal channels to obtain citizenship "through the front door."
I also believe that wholesale deportation is also wrong, on both moral and practical grounds.
The moral case goes something like this:
Implied Permission
America has been divided internally for 20+ years about enforcing our immigration laws. The Feds have laws against being an undocumented alien, but clearly don't care enough to actually enforce it. The other levels of government have actively assisted people entering illegally, including passing laws to forbid local law enforcement (and state and local bureaucrats) from asking about citizenship status, to agencies holding special outreach events to sign up illegal aliens for state services to which they are not legally entitled. Taken as a whole, there's been something of a welcome mat set out - woven unevenly out of federal indifference and local encouragement.
That internal division, this de facto welcome mat, is not without consequences. Morally, it makes the arrival and the residency of illegal aliens something that America has allowed. We've become complicit.
Consider a very rough parallel with property rights and the idea of "adverse possession." Suppose you own a field, but you allow me to put up a fence on it, you allow me to mow it, water it, graze my animals on it, plant it, and so forth - and you allow me to do that for a number of years. Then, in most states I can make a legal claim to ownership of the land. And I can get the title to that land transferred to me, without paying you a dime.
You thus lose your property rights - because you abandoned them. You allowed me to make use of the property as if they were mine and never complained about it. The law allows you to bring a complaint of trespass against me. You can easily get the authorities to stop me. By choosing not to enforce your rights, you abandon your claim to the property.
Why Adverse Possession is a Good Doctrine
The good side of "adverse possession" is that it prevents an injustice that was depressingly common in the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s (though the concept was well established in England and Wales hundreds of years earlier). During the homesteading period, a settler could live on and improve a piece of land, and by improving it, lay title to it - the state or territory would transfer ownership from the state to the settler. (Native Americans were of course conveniently excluded from this equation.)
The homesteading deal was conditional - you had to actually improve (farm) the land, not just squat on it. A temptation could arise when someone owned a very large amount of land, having purchased it instead of improving it. If a settler came along and started building improvements, thinking it was unclaimed land, the landowner could sit silently while the settler worked for years to improve the land. Then, years later, the owner would "suddenly" discover this person living on his land and evict him - but keep the improvements (buildings, cleared fields, fences, etc.)
The settler who worked for years in hopes of earning the land now discovers he was working for free to improve someone else's land.
The Parallel
The parallel, though inexact, is this - I think that America has allowed illegal immigrants to come here too easily. We've allowed the federal laws to go unenforced while locals have acted in ways that welcome illegal immigration. We've looked the other way or been (effectively) silent as aliens have moved here and built their lives.
For us now to suddenly decide we want to enforce the laws after all, feels a little dishonest to me.
If the undocumented or illegal alien is really so unwelcome, why did we look the other way for over twenty years? It's not as if our citizens haven't benefited from the arrangement. We have. We've hired them, sold them houses and cars and clothing and food, and taken their tax payments and Social Security contributions. We today live, many of us, in houses built with their labor. We've allowed them (indeed, by discontinuing the guest worker program, encouraged them) to bring their families here and establish lives.
Given where we all are and how we got here, I think amnesty is too much to give, but mass deportation is too harsh to inflict.
So Now What?
Here's my proposal.
Allow illegal aliens with (say) 5 years or more of residency to receive a new visa and stay indefinitely as a legal resident alien, with these limits:
- They can never become citizens
- They will be deported if convicted of any crime
- They must demonstrate within two years that they have paid all taxes they owe
- They can never collect taxpayer funded welfare or medical benefits
An illegal immigrant parent of a US citizen child may, if facing deportation, either leave the child with a legal resident, leave it with an orphanage, or waive the child's citizenship and take the child back to the parent's home country.
Path to Citizenship
If a permanent resident alien wants to apply for US citizenship after all, they should be allowed to do so under these conditions:
- The permanent resident alien must leave the US and establish residency in their home country
- Every other applicant who has already applied for US citizenship must be processed first
- The existing quotas on US citizenship will still apply
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