Tom Osborne, Congressman, Former Football Coach, and Candidate for Governor of Nebraska, recently came out with his own plan to deal with illegal immigration. Basically, he wants workers that immigrated here legally, but are employed and are not felons, to register, return to the country that they came from, re-apply for a "W" visa, pay a fee, get finger-printed, and come back and work. Such a visa could be renewed for an unlimited number of terms, but wouldn't lead towards full citizenship. In the article that I linked to above in The Sioux City Journal an immigration activist asks why anybody would volunteer to participate, given the costs of traveling to another country and then back again, considering that there isn't much of a guarantee that the person will be allowed back into the United States. That's a good question. It speaks directly to the physical feasibility of Osborne's proposal.
I've got a different question. What of the precedent for creating, legally, a class of people who can work in America indefinitely, but not have citizenship? That sounds like officially labeling people as second-class, which I don't think is a good idea at all. I don't think it's wise to limit the civic-potential of any law-abiding person permanently living and working in America.
Right now, our immigration system is deeply flawed. We have a situation where we have tight restrictions coupled with relatively loose enforcement (compared to what the letter of the law calls for). Moreover, as Congressman Osborne notes, many places, including his state of Nebraska, have economies that thrive on the work that illegal immigrants do. If the job market is calling for more workers in places like Nebraska, and obviously people want to come into America to work and are willing to take great risks to do so, what should our policy goals be?
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