I support a much higher level of immigration. I’m swimming against a strong tide on this, I know. I promised not to pull any punches on this blog, so here it goes: If you’re anti-immigration, you’re just another bigot.
Even if you’re a “native American”, at some point your ancestors walked across what is now the Bering Strait. My ancestors immigrated here, from roughly the 1850s to the early 1900s. There were plenty of people here then who didn’t want them to come. People will offer a variety of reasons why they oppose immigration, but they all ring hollow. Bad for the economy? Nonsense. Immigrants continue to add great value to our economy, far and away outstripping any costs they impose. Destroying our culture? I thought we were supposed to be a melting pot. And since when does America have a culture? To paraphrase from my favorite movie (Stripes), we are the wretched refuse … we’ve been kicked out of every decent country in the world. No room left? Rubbish. We have lots of room, and many developed areas (especially in this district) have become depopulated. That’s why Schenectady welcomes the Guyanese.
As a nation we celebrate the Statue of Liberty. Well what’s the poem associated with it?
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Someone please tell me what happened to this. The tired, poor, huddled masses sneak into our country under cover of night and when caught they are harshly treated and then sent back. Perhaps we should rephrase the poem:
Give me your wealthy, your elites,
Your skilled athletes yearning for larger endorsement deals,
The shining scholars of your teeming universities.
Send these, the well-off, silver-spooned to me,
but only a few of them.
Or maybe we should just close the statue, tear it down, and sell it off for scrap metal or send it back to France.
Lest I forget the theme of this blog, all of our efforts to keep out the huddled masses are quite expensive. As a criminal defense attorney in Albany, I’ve handled a couple of illegal immigration cases so far. In both cases these were otherwise decent people who did violate US immigration law. One will be sentenced to roughly four years in prison, while the other has been sentenced to 9 months. Each federal inmate costs approximately $40K/year to house. Add that up over 10,000, (or is it 100,000) inmates, and you start getting to some pretty big numbers. And that doesn’t include the substantial costs of catching them and prosecuting them. Overall it’s gotta be 100 billion dollars a year. And it doesn’t even work. Much like the drug war, it doesn’t matter how much we spend to keep them out, they keep coming anyway.
