An Idea for Immigration

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Oneuli said:
To get it out of the way, some will be tempted to reply "tl;dr" and move on. Consider it done and save yourself the time. But for those willing to put in some time and thought, here's an idea for addressing our real immigration issues.

First, let's clear away the manufactured panic over illegal immigration. You may not know it from watching Fox News, but there's no actual border crisis. Illegal immigration in this country has fallen greatly from its peak back in the Clinton years. And, anecdotes of individual criminal acts by illegal immigrants notwithstanding, illegal immigrants tend to be less violent, on average, than native-born Americans, so those immigrants are actually making the US safer.

It goes beyond that. We desperately need a large increase in immigrants in this country, due to the imminent explosion of a demographic time bomb. The short-form briefing is this: with Baby Boomers heading into retirement, we're poised for a couple lost economic decades, similar to, but worse than, what Japan suffered through, because we simply have too few younger workers. Immigrants tend to come from the exact age groups that we need to bolster to balance our demographic mix, so boosting immigration will make us far better off in the decades to come. The real immigration crisis is a crisis of immigration falling exactly when we need it to surge.

If that short form isn't clear or convincing, watch this video, which isn't actually about immigration, but gets into a fair amount of economic detail about the nature of the demographic timebomb we're facing. It's harrowing:


Nonetheless, I think we can all agree that solving this problem with legal immigration would be better than solving it with illegal immigration, and that bringing in motivated workers who will assimilate beats the alternative. So, here's the idea:

Fund a giant university just south of the border -- with a long-term lease for the land from the Mexican government. Make it big enough to house 1,000,000 people, at least (less than twice the size of the state university system of New York, and half the size of the California Community Colleges system, to put it in perspective.) The idea would be to provide no-cost education to people who want to come to the US.

Enrollees would be given adequate, no-frills food and housing for themselves and their dependent children. In exchange, they'd need to stick with a particular program. First, children and adults would all take intensive English-language education. The children would also get grade-level-appropriate general instruction, while the adults would take vocational instruction appropriate for their backgrounds and skills and the needs of the US job market, plus some civics and social training to prepare them for life in the US. In addition, the adults would be required to work 20 hours per week on tasks that decrease the operating cost of the university (doing low-level maintenance and admin work, and helping to grow and prepare the food).

The adults would graduate with a certificate once they'd achieved (a) working-level fluency in English, (b) demonstrated skill at something that will make them employable at a living wage in the US, and (c) basic knowledge of US civics/culture/history, equivalent to an easier version of the citizenship test. The certificate would come with a permanent work visa (so long as they avoided any serious legal trouble), and residency visas for their dependent children. Thus, graduation would signify to US employers that they're legally able to work, and have certain basic skills.

For some, graduation could be achieved almost immediately, if they've already got English skills, a decent education, and some practical skills. They'd only stay long enough to pass background checks and take their tests, and then they'd be on to the US. For others, it might take several years, like a real university. But, on average, I'm picturing about two years, such that the system would churn out 500,000 new legal residents per year (about 300k illegal border crossers are apprehended per year, to put it in perspective).

This would have a lot of advantages. First, it would give us somewhere to safely house refugees and their families pending hearings, in an academic, rather than penal system. Two, it would greatly decrease illegal immigration, by filling up the jobs that are drawing illegal workers with documented ones. Third, it would create an immigrant community that is more productive, employable, and prepped to integrate. Fourth, it would serve as a vetting period, to weed out problem immigrants. Fifth, it would fast-track the most motivated immigrants.

How much would it cost? Tough to say, but here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation. In Mexico, the monthly costs for basic needs for a couple with 2 children is about $320 (converted from pesos):

http://bajainsider.com/article/mexicos-cost-living-vs-income-how-do-they-do-it

In theory you could go much cheaper with the communal living and the people contributing to their own support, but just to be safe we'll go the other way and round that up to $1,000 per person, per year. Public universities cost between $378 and $818 per year in Mexico, but let's round up the high end of that, too, to be safe, to $1,000 per year for the education I'm talking about. So, $2,000 per person, per year, total. Multiply by 1 million people, and you get $2 billion in annual cost.

The Trump wall, by comparison, has been estimated to cost as much as $70 billion, followed by $150 million per year to maintain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/senate-democrats-border-wall-cost-trump.html

So, a thirty-year cost for each would be as much as $74.5 billion for Trump's wall, or $60 billion for my idea. Trump's wall would likely prove entirely useless, but even if it succeeded, what it would succeed in doing is making the detonation of our demographic time bomb vastly more painful than it needs to be. My idea, by comparison, would help to defuse that time bomb, while benefiting America with many millions of graduates who will become well-integrated and productive members of society.
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In other words, tale "illegal" out of "illegal immigration" and let's enjoy change the left can believe in.

Comrade, go fuck yourself. ;)
 
Oneuli said:
I did. I provided it in summary form. Go back and reread.
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responded to that.....your reply was "watch the video".....

If you need more detail, I can provide that, too. But the wingnuts don't seem to care to engage on the substance at all, so I'm not going to write a book they'll never read.
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I believe you can start at #21.....
 
Oneuli said:
This isn't about extortion. If they weren't eager to come here on their own, we'd be wise to be actively recruiting them to come. We need them almost as much as they need us.
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Hopefully, one of those illegals that has shown they're more than willing to commit a crime coming here will Kate Steinle your family member.
 
CFM said:
Hopefully, one of those illegals that has shown they're more than willing to commit a crime coming here will Kate Steinle your family member.
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Again, you are more likely to be killed by a family member than an alien. I’d hide if any of your family is like you.
 
Phantasmal said:
Again, you are more likely to be killed by a family member than an alien. I’d hide if any of your family is like you.
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Again, as long as WHEN an illegal does something like that it's too someone that supports them being here, I'm OK with them doing it.

I have no reason to hide.
 
Granule said:
In other words, tale "illegal" out of "illegal immigration" and let's enjoy change the left can believe in.
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Assuming I've translated that correctly into English, this isn't simply about declaring all those who are here illegally or who may be here illegally in the future are now legal. It's about setting up a system by which who can give the nation the big boost in legal immigration it desperately needs, while providing ambitious would-be immigrants a reasonable path to earn their way in.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I believe you can start at #21.....
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In post 21 you asked how there can be eleven million illegals here and not be a problem. Yet you said that in response to a post by me that did not, in any way, say that having eleven million undocumented residents isn't a problem. Instead, I said we had a "manufactured panic" over illegal immigration. Obviously, those are two very different things. Something can be a problem without being worth panicking over. In fact, my post pretty clearly implied there is a problem with illegal immigration:

"I think we can all agree that solving this problem with legal immigration would be better than solving it with illegal immigration..."

Why would the former be better than the latter if there's no problem with the latter? Why spend the money on the kind of immigrant university I'm envisioning, if we could instead just ignore illegal immigration?

There's a tendency on the right to want to reframe everything the liberals say into something they feel they have the mental capacity to address, rather than actually addressing what the liberals have said. Showing there are at least some problems with a large population of people here illegally would be easy, so you simply pretend I argued the opposite, so you have something to fight. But that's a distraction and I'm not interested in being distracted. If you can find the courage to debate for real, take on what I've actually said, rather than trying to assign me a position for which you think you have a rebuttal.
 
archives said:
Interesting, and the economic arguement makes sense, but it would never pass the right's demagogues attacks making it realistically impossible

However, why place the school in Mexico rather than on the American side of the border? You can process, train, and Americanize immigrants as they enter the country rather than containing them in Mexico?
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I think there are three advantages to doing it on the Mexico side:

First, it's an effort to placate the right-wingers, since it doesn't let the people into the country until after that vetting period.

Second, if it's on the Mexico side, we don't need to treat it as a prison. People can be free to come and go as they please (at least the Mexican ones), until graduation. If we put it on our side, the conservatives will be very uncomfortable with that kind of freedom of movement, for fear that the students will just abandon their studies and go to work (or, to put my conservative hat on, disappear into the criminal underworld).

Third, it would make it much cheaper. If we're on our side of the border, we need to pay US wage scales for constructing and maintaining the facilities, we have to hire US academics to administer it, we're paying US food costs, we face US regulations about housing standards, etc., and we're likely to have a lot more expensive litigation. Doing it on the Mexico side allows us to admit a VASTLY largely body of people at any given price point. For the cost of processing 100,000 people on our side of the border, we can do a million people on the other side.

That's not as good for US construction workers, academics, lawyers, farmers, etc., but it's better for US taxpayers overall, and I think in the big picture it's better for the immigrants, since there's some hope of meeting the demand at a reasonable price, rather than just having a symbolic university that's too small to have any meaningful impact. When I picture myself in the shoes of the immigrants, I ask which I'd prefer:

(1) A wait of many years for admission to the school, but with the school being up to US standards.

(2) No wait, but the school is only up to Mexican standards -- likely meaning a rougher living experience.

I'm sure I'd go with the latter, since the goal is to get into the US to start a new life and start making good money.
 
Oneuli said:
Assuming I've translated that correctly into English, this isn't simply about declaring all those who are here illegally or who may be here illegally in the future are now legal. It's about setting up a system by which who can give the nation the big boost in legal immigration it desperately needs, while providing ambitious would-be immigrants a reasonable path to earn their way in.
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There is a reasonable path to earn your way in. Rules exist. That illegals decided it was a good idea to sneak in because they didn't like them isn't a reason to change the rules to suit them.
 
countryboy said:
Exactly. I'm sure the families of Kate Steinley, and Ronil Singh, and countless others, feel the murder of their loved ones by illegal aliens was merely, "anecdotal". It really doesn't get any lower than that. What kind of evil scumbag would actually say that out loud? Wow.....
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If calling it anecdotal hurts your feelings, I'm happy to rephrase. A semantic fight is useless. What I'm saying is that there are definitely authentic incidents where undocumented residents have committed terrible crimes.... in the same way as there are authentic incidents of crimes committed by any sufficiently large population, whether it's Catholic priests, Trump supporters, pre-teens, red heads, bus drivers, guys named "William," etc. However, individual incidents are not a good basis for policy. We wouldn't, for example, want a law saying guys named William can't serve in the military because a guy named William once committed a terrible war crime in our military. Instead, we make policy based on larger trends. And, the stats show that there is no larger trend of undocumented immigrants committing serious crimes at a higher rate.... quite the opposite, in fact. They commit serious crimes at a lower rate than those born here, and thus make our country safer. That's why I call the right-wing freak-out over illegal immigration a manufactured panic. Whatever problems there may be with illegal immigrants, the notion that they're increasing the rate of violent crime in this country isn't one.
 
CFM said:
Hopefully, one of those illegals that has shown they're more than willing to commit a crime coming here will Kate Steinle your family member.
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I hope one of those undocumented residents will Antonio Díaz Chacón one of your family members.
 
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