Reply #22: Which is the lesser of evils?

[primavera]

I think you hiot the nail on the head. Few among us, I think, would claim that illegal immigration is a great thing, but whether we like it or not, it does happen, and will continue to happen so long as there is such economic disparity on either side of a contiguous border. The more one tries to ostracize undocumented aliens and shut them off from services, the more we force them to go underground - not, mind you, to stop coming. We therefore create a whole subclass of people who are doomed to stay that way, because we've left them with no means for improving their lot.

Consider, if you will, by way of contrast, a small program that was set up several years ago along the Texas/Mexican border whereby children from a Mexican border community were allowed to enterthe US to attend schools in the US sister city just on the other side of the border. The program cost virtually nothing, they used old used textbooks and hired a few extra teachers for peanuts, but the rewards were far-reaching. Mexican children took back with them the educations which they'd acquired, shared it with family members, economic prosperity increased in the Mexican community, profitable trade between the two communities developed, and illegal border crossings in that area dropped substantially, as they was no longer so great an incentive to move here for jobs. Everybody won and nobody had to get nailed or anything.

I don't mean to suggest that there are simple solutions for immigration questions, but I do think that we do ourselves and undocumented aliens both a disservice by focussing our efforts so exclusively on punative responses. Our whole focus on border enforcement is on beefy guys with guns and penalizing people for entering illegally; there's no carrot, just bigger and more menacing sticks. It's never been an effective strategy, I don't know why we keep thinking that the solution is to become simply more and more repressive in the hopes that sooner or later it will work.