The voting public may not be ready to recognize distinctions among “good” immigrants who obtain paperwork, or fall within quotas, or escape certain types of persecution or come here with other acceptable motives and procedures, as we all presume our grandparents and great grandparents did; and “bad”, “illegal” aliens who want to work or study here or simply want to escape persecution that is not currently validated by our nation’s foreign policy.
On the other hand, the majority of us may be putting too much stock in this notion that there is a clear definition of good and bad immigrants, and that the government knows what it’s doing.
Some time ago, I spoke with a congressional aide who works on immigration issues on behalf of local residents, and he indicated that the outcomes for each case seem entirely irrational to him at times.
I have also spoken with an administrator at a research university, and she indicated that the U.S. began losing out on recruiting top science researchers in a big way when post-9/11 homeland security measures precluded many foreign-born prospects from entering the country.
I found several links that support this idea that U.S. research institutions are hurt by the shift in immigration policy, including [this one
http://www.ucdc.edu/faculty/Immigration/studies.pdf].
Maybe this post-9/11 xenophobia was part of a long-term Bush agenda: keep out scientists who always end up pestering us with crazy ideas about evolution and missile defense feasibility and stem cell research, whip up an artificial crisis that will be ripe for voter outrage in 2006, and get Congress to pass a new and improved guest worker (=slave labor) program that will help out our corporate buddies who want a ready supply of cheap, obligated workers.
The interesting Massachusetts angle for me, however, is that it does not appear that someone can be a strong supporter of scientific research (such as stem cell research) while at the same time supporting the government crackdown on all these (irony alert) wicked immigrants who seem to be taking over all the good jobs.
Or am I confusing two separate types of immigrants – the good and bad ones – as it were?
At any rate, I like Molly Ivin’s take on the federal immigration issue.
if you talk about letting uneducated farmers and dirty Middle-Eastern people over the border in this day and age, you’ll get a significant negative response. But call them “Irish,” “Germans,” or “Jews” and they suddenly become OK (again, in this day and age. 100 years ago, not so much). Calling them “Mexicans” or “Arab” on the other hand….
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And by “funny,” I mean funny depressing, not funny ha-ha. I honestly don’t understand the rationale towards not allowing people who genuinely want to work from entering the country. I’m not advocating completely open borders, but there has to be some way to simplify the labrynthine process that we have today.
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As for science, science education has few physical borders in this day and age. If we don’t let foreign scientists into the country, we’re just going to fall behind. Not allowing them in is an extremely myopic strategy that may support certain established domestic corporate interests in the short term, but will certainly lead to our long-term demise as a world leader in technological development.