With so much debate on this topic, I feel the need to throw in my two cents.
What I see here is a situation best explained by imagining someone attempting to pour a gallon of liquid into a shot glass. In the long run, you have nothing but a big mess.
The one thing Americans won't seem to ask anyone is why the damn shot glass is so small in the first place. Listen, I am all for obeying the laws and being a moral person, but when a law is obviously doing such a horrendous job, shouldn't we at least take it out and glance at it? Just to see if it makes sense in the first place?
So I google, "history of immigration laws".
A brief history of immigration law in the United States:
1790 - Congress establishes a process enabling people born abroad to become U.S. citizens.
1875 - Congress passes its first restrictive immigration law. It prohibits the immigration of criminals and prostitutes.
1882 - Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibits Chinese laborers from coming to the U.S. It is repealed in 1943. Congress expands its list of unacceptable immigrants to include "convicts, lunatics, idiots and persons likely to become public charges."
1913 - California's Alien Land Law prohibits "aliens ineligible for citizenship," which at the time included Chinese, Japanese and Korean immigrants, from owning property in the state. Ten other states follow with similar laws over the next decade. In 1952, the California Supreme Court rules the law unconstitutional.
1917 - Congress expands the 1882 list of unacceptable immigrants to also cover alcoholics, beggars, criminals and the "mentally and physically defective." It also establishes a literacy test for immigrants and bars people living in most of eastern Asia and the Pacific Islands from immigrating to the U.S.
1921 - Congress creates a quota system for visas based on an individual's country of birth. It limits the number of annual immigrants from Europe to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born members of that same nationality in the U.S. during the 1910 census.
1924 - Congress reduces the limits to 2 percent of the number of foreign-born members of each nationality in the U.S. during the 1890 census, favoring immigrants from northwestern Europe, which had higher numbers based on the earlier census, further discriminating against the newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and barring immigrants from the Far East, which had no representation in the 1890 census.
1930-1939 - A joint local and federal effort called Mexican Repatriation includes raids, roundups and the denial of jobs to Mexicans. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including U.S. citizens, return to Mexico either forcibly or on their own.
1942-1964 - The Bracero program allows Mexican nationals to legally come to the U.S. for temporary agricultural work.
1952 - Congress makes some tweaks to the quota system and abolishes remaining exclusions against Asians.
1954 - A joint local and federal effort called Operation Wetback includes raids and identification checks. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including U.S. citizens, return to Mexico either forcibly or on their own.
1965 - Congress replaces the quota system with one that gives preference to individuals who have either special skills or relatives who are U.S. citizens.
1986 - Congress makes it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, grants amnesty to certain immigrants who entered the U.S. before 1982 and creates a citizenship path for certain agricultural workers.
1994 - California voters enact Proposition 187, which prohibits providing of public educational, welfare, and health services to undocumented immigrants. The courts later declare the law unconstitutional.
In reading brief descriptions of these laws they, almost without exception, scream of the prevalent racial over-tones of the day, not sound immigration law. Other than mentioning the occasional convict or crazy person, these laws were almost to a one, written to establish some kind of racial balance that was desired by the culture of the time. So here we are, decades later, yelling and screaming at each other about enforcing laws that may be no more relevant to today than the laws written to limit the size of the stick with which you could beat your wife.
When immigration policy is so clearly a failure, shouldn't we first ask, "Why?" ?
It's a common characteristic with the history of immigration in Australia, from Wikipedia:
ReplyDelete"The White Australia Policy, the policy of excluding all non-European people from immigrating into Australia, was the official policy of all governments and all mainstream political parties in Australia from the 1890s to the 1950s, and elements of the policy survived until the 1970s. Although the expression 'White Australia Policy' was never in official use, it was common in political and public debate throughout the period."
But they changed it completely to a "multiculturalism" immigration model, many of the younger embrace it strongly and there was a strong support to settle down when I was there.