Is anyone sensible about the immigration "problem"?

Lately there's been a lot of hot air about a so-called "immigration problem". There are currently something like 12 million people in the U.S. illegally, mostly Latin American. Families often consist of people with different statuses: illegal, naturalized citizens, resident aliens, and children born as US citizens.

I read an article recently detailing the fact that a majority of illegal workers work under either fake social security numbers or valid social security numbers that belong to someone else. In either case income tax, payroll taxes, and other fees are taken out of their paychecks and delivered to federal and state governments. However, these workers will never recieve social security payments or many of the benefits legal workers would get. In fact, without these workers who pay but never get back, social security and other pensions would be in worse trouble than they already are.

The hard-line right wing response to 'illegal aliens' is to criminalize it and actually attempt mass deportation. The hard left response to exploited 'undocumented workers' is to issue a general amnesty and put all undocumented aliens on the path to citizenship. The current Bush administration proposal is to normalize all undocumented aliens via 'guest worker' program with a 6-year limit.

Flawed thinking abounds in all three approaches. A general amnesty with a citizenship track is basically an invitation to everyone on the planet to attempt to enter the US. Criminalization and mass deportation would cost billions, drive the illicit labor market even farther underground (leading to even worse abuse ), and result in US-citizen children being taken from their undocumented parents to be put in foster care. A guest worker program with a 6-year limit, without the same draconian approach embodied in the hard-line proposal just pushes the problem into the future.

The only sensible approach is the following:

• 1. Normalize all undocumented workers as resident aliens, with a track toward permanent residency. But specifically make it impossible to ever become a citizen. It simply isn't fair to all the people spending years going through official channels from their home country to allow people who did break the law to "cut in line."
• 2. Specifically make all US labor laws apply equally to resident aliens and encourage workers to report employer abuse. In addition to being a humane measure, it should have several follow-on economic effects: a quick bump in labor rates, making native-born US labor more competitive by comparison, and an increase in tax revenues as the previous labor black market becomes licit.
• 3. Increase the quotas for US citizenship to more realistically reflect the demand for migration abroad and labor domestically. This again is part of facing reality and provides another disincentive to informal migration, even with a resident alien program. It also recognizes that skilled and/or highly motivated migrants are good for the country, and that culturally we not only can tolerate, but positively need a steady influx of "new blood."
• 4. Tighten restrictions, reporting requirements, and fines for businesses that use undocumented labor--knowingly or unknowingly. And vastly increase funding for enforcement on this front. The 'problem', if there really is one, is mostly perpetuated by businesses that want the inexpensive labor of a desperate underclass. If the jobs weren't there to be had, most immigrants wouldn't be here.
• 5. Use all reasonable means available in the vast U.S. foreign (and domestic) policy toolbox to help develop the economies of the countries from which most illegal immigration is originating. More than 50% of undocumented people in the U.S. are from Mexico, and more than 80% are from the Western hemisphere (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Haiti). If conditions were significantly improved in those four countries, our immigration "problem" would be largely solved. But such development assistance would need to be offered in the best interests of the local populations, not simply efforts to establish exploitative "free trade" zones where people can take non-unionized sweatshop factory jobs for pennies an hour. Domestic policy could also help: the reduction or elimination of U.S. farm subsidies could make local agriculture in Latin America more lucrative, which would lead to more jobs. Another idea would be to establish minimum wages and enforce U.S. labor laws for U.S.-based multinationals regardless of where their manufacturing is. Creating good, safe jobs with a living wage in Mexico and Guatemala would be good for them, remain relatively inexpensive for the companies, and much less costly for the U.S. (even if we offered tax incentives to the companies to do it).

These measures are rational, reasonable, and workable. They balance the interests of everyone involved and are oriented toward the common good. And to quote a discussion I heard on the radio, "Like all solutions to political problems that are rational, reasonable, and workable, it doesn't have a chance of being implemented."