Real immigration reform

Pat over at Born Again Redneck Yogi has a post about his support for the president's latest immigration reform proposal (which is far better than what he has been suggesting). However he presents a common straw man argument in opposition to the idea of sending back those who are here illegally that I can't allow to pass without comment:

. . .You can't just round them [illegal aliens] up, put them on buses and send them back to Mexico. The SCOTUS has already ruled that illegals must appear before a judge before they can be deported. There just aren't enough judges and it would take years to accomplish.

Notice that the choices are laid out as a stark alternative between allowing them to say legally or staging mass deportations. There is not even the barest hint that any kind of third way is even possible. Yet there is another way which accomplishes the goal of ridding the nation of its population of alien criminals while sparing the expense of tracking down and deporting all 12 - 30 million of them.

Here is how you do it. You focus on the people who employ them and the people who rent to them. You put teeth in the laws against hiring an illegal so that in addition to the fine which employers simply pass along to their customers as part of the cost of doing business you add serious jail time for the company officers and board of directors if a corporation and owner or owners if a privately owned business.

You cannot pass along a prison sentence to your customers.

The prison sentence should not be 90 days in the county work farm either. If those who knowingly hire illegals have the reasonable expectation of doing at least one year behind bars in the state prison where they will have the joy of learning how much fun it is to start every morning by performing oral sex on a fellow convict with a name like "Snake" or "Big Leroy" then they will be highly unlikely to continue to attempt to lower expenses by hiring the "undocumented".

The law should also be modified to place the same penalties upon those who rent to illegals or to those who knowingly sell them real property.

Hospitals should continue to provide care in their emergency rooms to anyone who presents, however they should be required to make a good faith effort to verify the citizenship status of all who come in for treatment. If a patient is found to be an illegal then law enforcement should be notified. Individual doctors who fail to report illegal patients should lose their license to practice medicine for 1 year for the first offense and permanently for the second. Hospitals who condone their doctors shielding illegals should be closed and their administrators and board of directors should be jailed just like employers who hire illegals.

All law enforcement agencies, federal, state and local should be required to enforce immigration laws. Police administrators who order police to look the other way on illegal immigration should be removed from office and jailed just like those who hire illegals and police convicted of aiding illegals should serve their time in the general population. This way we would no longer have "catch and release" immigration enforcement. When an illegal was caught for speeding or drunk driving or just got caught in a routine license check he would be guaranteed a trip back to Mexico City.

If these measures were adopted jobs and housing would dry up and the illegal aliens would deport themselves back to where they came from where they would at least be able to earn enough not to starve. This process of self deportation would be aided by a policy of offering free transportation back to Mexico (or other nation of origin) to any illegal turning him/her self in to any law enforcement. Three hot meals per day at the collection center and a nice clean bed to sleep in until enough of your fellow illegals are collected to fill a Greyhound then a nice air conditioned bus ride back to Mexico where you belong and have every right to be.

Some people will think that I am being overly harsh, but the truth is far from it. Mexico is a corrupt dysfunctional basket case. Most of the money and all of the power is in the hands of a small number of elite families who are descended from the original Spanish Conquistadors. These families routinely run Mexico through their olive press (to borrow the Sicilian expression) and squeeze themselves out vast fortunes.

This leaves very little for the rest of the Mexicans, those descended from the original native Mexican Indians. The lid is kept from blowing off the nation by the safety valve of immigration to the United States. Deny that safety valve and the current graftocracy would melt like a snowball in a blast furnace.

The Mexican ruling class knows this and this is why they scream like banshees whenever gringo politicians talk about doing things like building a wall along the Mexico/US border.

This is why it is absolutely vital that we build a wall along the entire border. From Brownsville, Texas to Imperial Beach, California a real physical barrier must be constructed and then patrolled so that access to this nation can only take place at designated entry points and only after who and what comes in can be inspected.

Doubtless someone will point out that no wall can be perfect and keep everyone out. This is true, but if we build the wall and thousands make it in every year that will be infinitely better than no wall with millions making it in every year.

Tightening our immigration laws to force those here illegally out and building a wall to keep more from coming in is the only way to force Mexico to deal with its serious internal problems. Mexico, if it is to survive, must make serious efforts to move its economy in a free-market capitalist direction. They must put serious curbs on the corruption, cronyism and nepotism which keep real political power the plaything of the privileged few.

The only way that a nation can create and distribute enough wealth to adequately feed, cloth and house a population is through free-market capitalism in the context of a firm rule of law. Mexico will not have any of these as long as it can export its discontent to the North.

The only compassionate way to deal with Mexico and the Mexican people is to take away the safety valve of illegal immigration and force their rulers to pursue genuine reform. Anything less may help some individuals in the short run, but will only serve to make the coming (and it is coming) explosion South of the border that much worse. And by worse I mean bloodier, more violent and more likely to produce some kind of totalitarian Marxist dictatorship.

Ultimately the way to solve America's illegal immigration problem is to fix Mexico and that cannot happen as long as those most aware of what is wrong in Mexico are in America doing a half-assed job of hanging drywall and driving around drunk.