Immigration: What Should Be Done

There are twelve million illegal aliens currently living in the United States, including about one in every twenty employed workers. All told, out of our current estimated population of 307,006,550, that means that nearly four percent of our population is illegal. (If that population number includes the illegals; if it doesn’t, the percentage is somewhat lower, but still approaching four percent.) In other words, one out of every twenty-five people you run across in America is an illegal alien, with no legal right to be here whatsoever. The majority of these, of course, are Hispanic, though not all.

This is too many to deport. Sorry; I know this makes me an amnesty-supporter, but we have to face the reality of the situation. Twelve million people simply can’t all be rounded up and sent back to wherever they came from, if we can even determine where they came from in the first place. That’s assuming that their host countries would take them back; I expect that any attempt to deport twelve million people would result pretty quickly in lots of military trucks with machine guns on them meeting our ICE agents at the border. But let’s assume that Mexico wants all of its illegal expatriates back; asks us for them, even. How could we possibly round up all these people and send them back? It would be an undertaking like no other ever embarked upon by our government.

For comparison purposes, the Indian population of the United States prior to the arrival of the Europeans was somewhere between one and eighteen million souls. Twelve million or so is a perfectly reasonable estimate. It took Europeans no less than two and a half centuries to remove these Indians, and they had to commit what can only be described as genocide in order to do it. Deportation of all these people would be similarly ugly. We're talking about large-scale round-ups; handcuffs; women and children being herded into holding camps awaiting transportation over the border. Do we really want to walk down that road?

No, some form of amnesty is necessary. But that amnesty must be properly formulated and properly executed. Some necessary terms would be as follows:

Amnesty should be available only to (otherwise) law-abiding illegal aliens. Any illegal alien found to have been convicted of any felony or any violent misdemeanor should not be eligible for amnesty and should therefore be deported.

Amnesty should be time-sensitive. The government needs to set a date certain; amnesty will only be available to those in this country prior to that date and not otherwise ineligible.

The borders must be secured. The above point only works if, at that date certain, the borders will be sealed shut and crossing it tightly controlled. Enforcement of immigration laws would have to begin, in earnest, on that date. Those who remain in the country despite being ineligible for amnesty would need to be rounded up and deported. Otherwise, amnesty will be a sham; we’ll have legalized twelve million illegal aliens only to create another huge body of illegal aliens. Closing the borders is a necessary step.

Between the passage of amnesty and the closing of the borders, the borders must still be tightly controlled. Only immediate family---those within the nuclear unit---of those already in this country should be permitted to enter. We don’t want to split apart nuclear families. On the other hand, we don’t want people bringing in everybody related to them to the sixth degree of kinship. This seems the most reasonable medium.

Amnesty must only be available to those who, within a reasonably short period of time after the date certain, complete their citizenship courses and actually become citizens. If illegal aliens are to be legalized, they must also be naturalized and made citizens, subject to all the rights and duties attendant therewith. The right to vote; the right to speak; the duty to serve in the military in time of war; the duty to serve on juries when called; and so on. Those who fail to do so should be deported.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Those who are illegally in this country but are otherwise law-abiding on a given date can, if within a reasonable time they complete citizenship work, gain citizenship and remain here with their families. If they don’t do this, they’ll be deported.

What about forcing them all to speak English? This is a ridiculous concept. The United States has no official language. If we want one, we should go to Congress and pass a bill to that effect (though it seems clearly unconstitutional to me, since it matches none of the enumerated powers in any way). Individual states may choose to do so. But as long as neither the federal government nor individual states have an official language, forcing people to speak one language rather than another is foolish.

“But what about their culture?” scream the nativists. What about it? Let’s review. The United States is a large country. It was stolen, in its entirety, from its original inhabitants. Over most of this country the original inhabitants were mostly Indians. Over some of it, there were also French (the Old Northwest and parts of the Louisiana territory were French, and sometimes those French had intermarried pretty thoroughly with the Indians of the same areas). Over an enormous swath of it, however, there were Mexicans. These Mexicans were (are) largely of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, and thus have as much title to being the original inhabitants as the Indians themselves do (given that they are part Indian). Our actions against these Mexicans were particularly ruthless.

Americans were permitted to settle in Texas under two main conditions: that they learn and speak Spanish, and that they convert to and practice Catholicism. In 1829, slavery was abolished in Mexico, as well (of which Texas was still a part). This abolition was widely ignored by American settlers, as were the two other conditions. These American Texans (called “Texicans” at the time) later rebelled against Mexico and stole the state from Mexico, after refusing to obey the laws of their host country. This hardly amounts to fair dealing.

The border of Texas was at the Nueces river traditionally, but the Republic of Texas claimed it much farther south, at the Rio Grande (called by the Mexicans Rio Bravo). Despite the fact that Texas had always ended at the Nueces, Texas required at the treaty ending the rebellion that the Rio Grande be so recognized. This treaty was signed by an imprisoned Santa Anna and was never ratified by the Mexican Congress; Mexico, then, quite reasonably held that Texas still belonged to it, and that even if it didn’t, the border was at the Nueces where it had always been. Texas, of course, held otherwise.

After the United States annexed Texas, the Mexican army was patrolling, as it really had every right to do, the area between the Rio Grande and the Nueces, when it met a patrol of the American army and routed it, an engagement known as the Thornton affair. Happy to accept this excuse to go ahead and steal California, which he already wanted to do, President James Polk mounted a full-scale invasion, crushing America’s smaller neighbor in a two-year war which went well beyond its stated justification (enforcing the Rio Grande as the border between Texas and Mexico). Despite claiming as justification the violation of American territory (specifically, that land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande), the United States extorted from a crippled Mexico the entirety of its claims not only to Texas (which still had, even then, some justice), but also to what is now Arizona, New Mexico, California, and parts of Nevada and Colorado. In other words, about half of the territory of Mexico. This theft is known euphemistically as the “Treaty” of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

And this doesn’t even count the fact that the English stole from the Spanish a huge swath of what is now the American southeast, going from the northern border of Florida all the way into Virginia (which the Spanish called by its Indian name, Ajacan) and the Chesapeake Bay (which the Spanish called “la Bahía de la Madre de Dios,” the Bay of the Mother of God). Jamestown was not far from a Spanish Jesuit mission in Ajacan, founded some thirty years previously (and slaughtered by the Indians after about a year); Parris Island in South Carolina held a colony called by the Spanish Santa Elena.

Yet, despite all this; despite the fact that a huge swath of our country was simply stolen from Mexico; despite the fact that the greatest number of Hispanics in this country live in those parts of it which were stolen from Mexico; people still grumble about Mexican immigrants not sharing our culture. Why should they? Their culture is perfectly honorable and dignified, and it’s already been substantially wronged by ours as it is. Why should they surrender it still further simply because they are moving in large numbers back into lands which are really rightfully theirs anyway?

Now, as unjust as the Mexican war was, it happened and this territory belongs to the United States now. Nobody says it should be ceded back to Mexico. But to attempt to reject these people because their language and culture don’t match our own is ridiculous. There are many very good reasons to limit immigration; let’s not make them look bad by including these terrible reasons among them.

Obviously, the issue is complex. But this is a basic outline of a solution that would, I think, work; a solution that balances both the right of our own country to enforce its borders, and fairness to those who are already within them.

Praise be to Christ the King!