What’s the Answer to the Immigrant Problem?

On 6 September 2100, I specified the reason we are having a problem with illegal immigrants in the United States. Today, I intend to give my answer to this problem.

It must be realized that under the present circumstances with millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, they are collectively sending about $15-20 billion dollars home to relatives in Latin America yearly in the form of remittances. These illegal immigrants are facing increasing difficulties here in the U.S. finding jobs. States are cracking down on them; and even the Federal Government is taking some steps to discourage their presence here. From years of personal experience with these immigrants in southwest Denver, Nancy and I have seen first-hand the miserable circumstances in which these poor people live. It has seemed to me that there must be a better solution to this problem of illegal presence than allowing all the random chaos at the border, which we see today.

We need to find a win-win situation for these poor people as well, for Mexico, and for the United States. Fortunately, there is just such a solution to the problem.

I believe that the United States should start by building an impenetrable fence all the way across the southern border. Then, we should institute an immigrant guest worker program with specified numbers of workers allowed into the country to operate our agricultural and service industries. These guest workers should have temporary legal visas to stay here and work for a specified period of time, at the end of which, they must go home or get the visa renewed. Then these workers should be allowed to send as much money as they wish back home to Mexico; and that amount of money should be documented. Then, yearly, that amount of money should be subtracted from the $20 billion that is already flowing to Mexico and difference should be used to stimulate the Mexican agricultural, educational, and law enforcement economies under very strictly supervised programs. Employers who hire illegal immigrants should be severely fined and/or penalized.

As a corollary to this program, the practice of declaring “anchor babies” here in the states American citizen should be discontinued. (At present, any baby born to illegal immigrants in the United States is automatically designated as a legal citizen of this country. These babies are called “anchor babies.”) This practice is absolute nonsense; and it should be discontinued immediately!

I believe that measures such as the ones I have outlined would greatly mitigate the problem we have with illegal immigrants in the United States.