Thursday, June 29, 2006
Thoughts on Immigration
Nian and I are one step closer to being together permanently. Visa application forms came the day before yesterday in wake of her CR1 citizenship application. Not many steps left, but we still have to wait until August, 2007 before we can get final approval, this because there is a mandatory return home for 2 years requirement because of her having been here in America on a J1 (student) visa. There didn't seem to be any easy ways to sidestep this wait, and Nian wants to do everything absolutely by the numbers. And which is a topic I will return to after a few other pieces of news.
After having started a new blog project Brink I had had essentially NO visits. On the one hand this is a little depressing, on the other it means my BNL hit numbers have some validity and that people are making return visits and must be finding this blog by means other than just the random blog link that Blogger.com allows. I posted a +5 insightful comment on Slashdot.org today on whether SETI is a waste of time and linked in one of the Brink articles as pertinent. Boom about 40 visits in an hour or two. I don't expect to keep this audience, and I'm not sure Brink is worth maintaining, but I have several more essays I intend to write in it before putting it to bed.
Already posted to Brink:Nuclear Fusion To be posted soon:
| Possible topics: (advances less likely, less soon, or possibly ever)Digitized Minds |
Hopefully others will suggest a few more possible advances that could have a huge impact on society, either here or in Brink directly.
Back to our scheduled topic tonight and that would be immigration as I await Nian and I to be reunited.
Nian gets a little upset if anyone accuses her of marrying me because I am American and suggests that she wants to be American. If anything, it seems I have married the only Chinese woman in China that doesn't want to be an American and would prefer I find good gainful employment in China. But she has become a focus of attention to her friends on how to snag an American. She seems unhappy in this role, especially since love doesn't seem to be the first priority of those looking to marry an American. As for Nian and I, we were together 3 months here in America, and I traveled to China to marry her -- there is no doubt of our love and commitment to one another.
I am a little conflicted over how to feel about illegal immigration. Nian and I are following the rules and are apart for 2 years as a result of it (one more year to go). Mostly I blame unscrupulous employers for offering the carrot of (low paying) jobs to those they know are illegal. Also to blame are those who exploit migrant farm workers who are paid by the basket of food picked, where even good workers can make less than $2.00 an hour under slave like conditions.
In my opinion we shouldn't turn a blind eye to illegal workers with the rationalization that it is better than what they can get at home. Paying such disgusting low wages for such hard labor depresses the value of all manual labor and ensures Americans never will seek those jobs. Food in America does not have to be picked at $2.00 an hour. We pay the lowest percentage of our income in the world on our food and paying decent wages for this labor would allow foreign farms to compete more fairly with America. This is what free markets are suppose to all be about.
It has been suggested we need a guest worker program. Other countries do this, many Arab, and it leads to a stratified and inequitable society. The Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman have an average of 37% foreign residence, mostly Asian workers who can never hope for permanent residence (one could assume a large racial and religious prejudice component) with United Arab Emirates having a shocking 80% of its citizens without resident status. Honest work is honest work, if there is work that needs to be done it should be done by the citizens of whatever country that that work is in. If there aren't enough citizens to do these jobs then the solution is to allow enough legal immigration to do those jobs.
How to deal with illegals already here, I'm less sure. Amnesty is sure just to fuel more illegal immigration as it has already been proven to do. Sending 10 million plus back is impractical, disruptive, and probably cruel in the majority of cases. Letting them stay slights millions of others from other countries that will be denied entry and who have applied legally. If it should be demonstrated that the recent huge influx is in some sense orchestrated as a stealth takeover of certain regions, then this needs to be addressed also.
America could/can accommodate a lot more that it currently does. One solution would be to open the doors wider on legal immigration -- though this is a hard sell in this climate of fear over terrorism. One thing is sure; America's ability to stay an economic superpower rests with its ability to harness in a fair way an influx of immigrants from around the world. Only if we do these things in an equitable fashion, will America continued to be admired as a beacon of freedom around the world.
