IMMIGRANTS - May 6, 2010

The argument over immigrants is another of those battles of extremes. They stand guard over the positions that attract the most opposition with the threat of condemnation for anything that does not separate the sheep from the goats. In the Right corner the drumbeat is essentially for the application of draconian law, to the extent of cruelty, in fortified borders, military patrols, arrests of illegal entrants with imprisonment and deportation even when that entails breakup of families. On the Left, no one claims that everyone in the world has the natural right to permanent residence in US, barring only criminality and human rights offenses. In fact, there is a much less cruel law now in effect that would ease the attraction to US of people from countries of middling prosperity in which the People stand for predatory government. A simple action that would put more of the onus where it belongs is a strict program of fines for companies (like some meatpackers) that seem often to hire people with questionable social security numbers. It would be reasonable to require the employers to obtain from holders of such numbers data on the date and place of birth, the parents’ names, the names and locations of the schools attended and a full schedule of alternate names and their spellings. Also the employers should be required to vouch for the use of English by workers who claim to be born and raised in US. Fines for employers that are habitual offenders should be stiff and escalating. Demanding such questions in the allegations by those with a genuinely unlikely story would be merely a way of maintaining the Social Security system. The dogged refusal of government after government to press the issue of who is using a bogus SS number is not racism, does not entail arrest or deportation, but would stem the flow of people fleeing the depredations of their ruling economic elites, into the arms of ours.