re: "Discretion, Not Amnesty"

Andrew C. McCarthy at The Corner (" The one and only. ") had evaluated former-Speaker Gingrich's approach to immigration enforcement reform.

Money quote(s):

"A successful immigration enforcement policy, easily implemented under current law, would secure the borders; use the capability we have to track aliens who enter on visas to ensure that they don’t overstay; and target our finite law enforcement resources at (a) illegal immigrants who violate federal or state criminal laws (i.e., other than the laws against illegal entry), and (b) employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens and therefore provide the incentive that induces them to come. (An even better policy would deny illegal immigrants various social welfare benefits, but some of that would involve changes in the law so I put it to the side for present purposes.)

Such a policy would materially reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. — if they can’t work, many will leave and many won’t come in the first place. Such a policy would also call on government lawyers to exercise discretion (as they do in all aspects of law-enforcement) to decide which cases are worth prosecuting. Obviously, if an alien has been here illegally for a number of years but has been essentially law-abiding (again, ignoring the fact that it is illegal for him to reside and work in the U.S.), and if his deportation would have the effect of ripping apart an intact, law-abding family, you don’t bring that case. Such a case is not worth the Justice Department’s time when there are plenty of more serious criminals, including more serious immigration offenders, to pursue." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Unfortunately, although DHS was tasked with implementing a means of tracking entry and exit by visa-holding temporary visitors, it's never been fully implemented at every port/point of entry/exit. It's just too hard, apparently, even with a decade's worth of funding and effort.

What they did put together, U.S. Visit, isn't bad and has proven a very useful tool in visa work, but it's just not comprehensive enough to reliably tell us whether any one visitor is (or is not) still in the country past his or her supposed departure date.

(I suppose it sets up a form of Schroediger's Alien.)

"The Obama administration currently exercises its discretion by not only refraining from any meaningful enforcement of the immigration laws but also preventing states (e.g., Arizona) from enforcing the laws." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

&

"Newt was quick to point out last night that he was talking about a humane enforcement policy. He was not proposing that the illegal aliens who were not prosecuted be given citizenship. They just wouldn’t get prosecuted as long as they didn’t make a nuisance of themselves."

This approach tackles the problem from the two critical directions, that of "push" and "pull."

Diminish the "pull" by cracking down on employers of illegal aliens and cutting social benefits that make America such a lucrative proposition, as well as providing the safety net that allows illegal workers to send millions and millions of dollars out of the country in remittances.

And at the same time, increase the "push" by enforcing deportation and other penalties on those illegal aliens who commit criminal offenses above and beyond their immigration violations.

11/23

re: "You Can Have a Welfare State, or You Can Have Open Borders, But ."

Kenneth Anderson at Opinio Juris ("a forum for informed discussion and lively debate about international law and international relations") shows how Europe's experience parallels our own.

Money quote(s):

"This opinion piece addresses the same general concern as that book, updated to today: immigration and borders in Europe. In many ways, after all, at least alongside the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is the startling re-introduction of border controls in Continental Europe, and a call by Sarkozy and Berlusconi for a revision of the famous Schengen agreement removing border controls among twenty-two European states (not including the UK and Ireland)."

Be sure to read the quoted passages from the cited article. One slice of that:

"The Schengen agreements, signed in 1985 and 1990, permit
passport-free travel within 22 continental countries of the European Union (Britain and Ireland are among the exceptions), as well as non-Union signatories. Along with the euro, Schengen is Europe’s symbol, a milestone in its integration — on a continent long hemmed in by nationalism and bureaucracy, an Italian can travel to Paris without showing papers or changing money. And it’s growing: the European Parliament this week voted overwhelmingly to recommend extending Schengen to the European Union’s two newest members, Bulgaria and Romania."

re: "Obama and the new template"

Neo-Neocon is trying to make sense of something.

Money quote(s):

"I’m not advocating some sort of armed insurrection. I believe Obama can, and must, be defeated at the polls, and that the same thing has to happen to a significant number of Democrats in Congress. It seems an urgent matter to work for this."

"(T)he blogosphere represents only a small minority of the population. What we have in common here is that we pay more attention than the average person to political and world events; otherwise, we wouldn’t be spending all this time at our computers reading and writing. Whether as a group we’re more intelligent or wiser than people who don’t do this is unknown and unknowable, but we are at the very least more well-informed and more strongly motivated."

&

"(W)hat is “the worst?” For some of us, it’s that Obama is a puppet run by others on the Left who have nefarious plans of various sorts. For some (and again, I’m in this group I’m about to describe) he is mostly his own man, an ideologue of the Left who has grandiose ideas of how he will make this country into something between a European welfare state and Chavez’s Venezuela, grabbing greater and greater power for the executive branch, and cooking the election rules (through redoing the census, relaxing voter registration laws even further, and enlisting the help of ACORN in outright fraud) so thoroughly that he hopes that his wing of the party will never lose control. As for foreign policy, whether Obama be the pawn of others or the master of his own fate, his plan appears to be to weaken the US and its influence on the world stage, bowing to international groups such as the UN and other organizations that feature a preponderance of tyrannies, as well as selling out Israel.

To most people in this country, however, this sounds not only absurd but unhinged."

(Bold type added for emphasis.)