As a Teddy Roosevelt-Progressive Republican, I believe that the assimulated immigrant makes us stronger, not weaker. To felonize their “undocumented” status or to impose crushing fines is ridiculous, it would merely drive them deeper underground. If security is the rationale, then we need every illegal alien to be encourage, not discouraged, to register and regularize their status as guest worker or as potential citizen. It is reasonable that they should be required over a number of years to settle their current and back-taxes as part of their obligation as residents, but I woud oppose “extra” punitive penalties such as surcharges or a one-time fine.
It’s also impractical and onerous to require them to return to their “country-of-origin” to start their naturalization…they are already here…and more to the point their families and minor US-citizen children are here. Let the penalty be they have to wait 7 or 11 years, rather than the current 5 years for naturalization; but issue them green or blue-cards to they can properly be documented, be issued drivers’ licences (and insurance). And once they are documented, then guarantee that they can return home to visit, or reside back-home if a guest-worker without suddenly finding the door slammed behind them.
It is only by regularizing their status that we as-a-nation can avoid the trap of multi-culturalism that traps both Europe and Canada. The influx of economic immigrants from Mexica and Central America is a hydralic-inevitability….it is not a test of Sovereignty. If we want to insure that the official entre-ports are used, then it must be beneficial to use them. If you could get a guest-worker blue-card at a computer kiosk at any border-town bus terminal or airport where in a moment your retenal-scan and fingerprints are recorded, and you recieved a bio-metric ID with RFID chip; would you cross time-efficiently at US Customs or walk across the desert?
As for the US vs. Mexican and Central American flag-wavers; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/10/AR2006041001798.html
To those who say build a wall; our government can barely manage to levee New Orleans, and you want a frontier barrier from Tijuana to El Paso to Brownsville? There’s 900 miles of river-frontier from El Paso to Brownsville, and 700 miles of mountains and desert the otherway to Tijuana. Summon the damned-shade of Erich Honeker, and ask him about barrier-walls and how to train the guards to shoot women and children.
Deport the 12-20 million undocumented? Order the barbed-wire and cattle cars for the camps; I’m sure there’s a few “good Germans” who remember how. “Patriots” to knock on the door in the middle of the night; to take children from their mothers and fathers; to search home-by-home and business-by-business.
Damn you who would make “Ihre Ausweis, Bitte!” an American virtue.
