The imperial hubris of our legislators
The immigration process is entirely broken and breeds disrespect for all laws. All laws become less meaningful if a substantial portion of the population is seen to be flouting a law with immunity. (This is, by the way, not an argument against some form of eventual amnesty that we are making.) In Calabasas, California, a resident must turn a smoker in for public smoking or be an accomplice to the crime. Therefore, we face the absurd situation that a citizen can be harassed by police when informed on by an illegal immigrant doing his civic duty. The illegal immigrant may get the Key to the City for his assistance in enforcing the law! The ubiquity of these sorts of paradoxes is unacceptable in a country that says it values the rule of law.
Chances are you know someone involved in some way with an immigration law horror story. We sure do, ranging from work visas for employees that take half a decade and tens of thousands of dollars each, to the pending deportation of a person who has been in the country almost two decades. These are serious and difficult matters, but they are not fixed by the offensive make-believe that currently masquerades as reform.
We are dismayed by many aspects of the immigration debate, but never more than when the arrogant legislators (and the President) claim that the law recently proposed is not an amnesty. The bill, and any bill remotely like it, is obviously amnesty; only an idiot could think otherwise. Here’s why.
Anyone who has had any experience with immigration law, or for that matter, almost any legal matter in the United States today, knows what a horrorshow the process is. It is unbelievably expensive, but even more than that, it is unbearably slow: matters involving lawyers, documents, document verification, bureaucracies, and/or the courts take years and are touched by, it seems, hundreds of hands of busybodies. Moreover, at the end of the day, except for the most highly systematized processes — like buying a car or a house — legal procedures often inject uncertainty of outcome into the process. Therefore, it would probably take a million lawyers a number of years dealing with a million bureaucrats at a cost of untolled billions of dollars to process all the people the government is promising that the bill would process. And it is even worse than that.
It is even worse than that, with regard to immigration, because: there is no process and there are no people to deal with millions of immigrants. Mark Steyn touched on this the other day, when he said: “We’re now expected to believe that this system will be able to stop hassling 68-year-old cello players long enough to process an extra 10 million-plus immigration applications, and that furthermore an agency that keeps no reliable records of legal entry into the United States will somehow be able to determine on the basis of utility bills whether this or that undocumented alien falls into amnesty-eligibility category.” Therefore, the government has no real intention of processing ten million people, actually checking documents and so forth; to do so would require the creation of a new bureaucracy of what size — the Department of Defense? Therefore, the bill is amnesty by another name.
There aren’t enough people in the immigration departments of the government to process the current paltry number of legal papers currently issued. Why would you think if you increase that workload tenfold or a hundredfold you will get anything other than a meltdown. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, in the midst of a an extensive and fascinating floor statement, highlighted one of the smaller problems, the tripling of green cards as proposed:
Currently, there are 140,000 available. Currently, spouses and children, if they come in, they count against the 140,000 cap. Under the Kennedy bill that we voted down this morning they jumped that number to 400,000, and spouses and children didn’t count against the cap. This bill raises it to 450,000 annually, and spouses and children–we estimate about 540,000 more, family members–can come with them, and they do not count against the cap. That is pushing a million a year. That is a huge change.
The 140,000 green card limit is a problem, no doubt about it; just see Katherine Kersten’s excellent article in the Strib today for details. But thinking that a problem will be solved by magically increasing that number to 450,000 — as a tiny part of a much larger plan — is to invite chaos and a complete breakdown of our admittedly lousy system. A real cure would take serious thought and planning, would have to be phased in over time, would require extensive streamlining of current procedures and changes in government personnel, and, given the nature of bureaucracies, would take half a decade to fully implement.
But we do not have serious people as legislators. Instead, we have men and women who wave magic wands in front of cameras, and say all is now well! We have popinjays who strut, men of feeling for whom good intentions are all. This is not government; this is TV.
But it is far worse than TV, because these nonsensical and grandiose gestures affect the lives of thousands or millions of real people. Worse still, the imperial arrogance of grand gestures that are completely disconnected from the working of the real world increase contempt for the legislators and the laws they foist on the American people in the name of compassion, good intentions, and (one presumes) immigrant votes in November.
Real reform would begin this way: (a) taking steps to make sure the problem gets no worse than its already dreadful state — i.e., a fence or wall; (b) expanding and reforming procedures to more swiftly (and more humanely) process current legal immigrants; (c) expanding that program, when it has been made much more workable, to eventually deal with those who entered the country illegally. Real reform does not begin with grand gestures; it begins with the hard work of the bureaucratic and legal processes.
There is a reason that when we see the Senators bloviating about the grandness of their compassion we form a vision of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.