Regulate Immigration, Don't Ban It

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Mark Steyn, a columnist from the Chicago Sun Times, has this immigration problem solved: deport our politicians who spend more time quick fixes and sound bites than lasting solutions to legal immigration. In the interim, let's all remember that immigrants, who slave away for a chance to improve their lives, are a part of the engine that drives economic growth in this country. They key to immigration is not to stem its flow; rather, we should focus our efforts on ensuring that it proceeds at an acceptable flow in order to harness the strengths of all those that would hope to make this country better for their efforts while in the process not bleeding our coffers dry in efforts to support the untold millions of undocumented workers. Check out the following excerpts. -EBO)

No Easy Answers on Immigration Conundrum
BY MARK STEYN
The Chicago Sun-Times
Monday, April 9, 2006

Say you've got two kids under 5, and you'd like to bring over a nice English nanny to look after them. Name of Mary Poppins. Good references, impeccable character. If you apply now, there's a sporting chance the process may be completed before your children's children are in college.

All developed countries have immigration issues, but few conduct the entire debate as disingenuously as America does: The president himself has contributed a whole barrelful of weaselly platitudes, beginning with his line that "family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." True. They don't stop at the 49th parallel either. Or the Atlantic shore. Or the Pacific. So where do family values stop? At the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. If you're an American and you marry a Canadian or Belgian or Fijian, the U.S. government can take years to process what's supposed to be a non-discretionary immigration application, in the course of which your spouse will be dependent on various transitional-status forms like "advance parole" that leave her vulnerable to the whims of the many eccentric interpreters of U.S. immigration law at the nation's airports and land borders.

How about "the jobs Americans won't do"? Most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won't hire Americans to do -- that's to say, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one's employees has become one of the easiest means of controlling costs. I see no reason why this would change, and given that, as a matter of policy, U.S. illegal-immigration law is not enforced by the U.S. government, it's hard to know why private employers should do it.