The two main issues facing our government leaders are no longer unemployment, the deficit, the debt, our war in Afghanistan or abortion. The main main issues today have become immigration and the regulation of firearms.
Immigration has become a top priority because the heavy favorable votes from members of the Latino-American community are credited for at least part of the President’s well deserved victory last November.
The regulation of firearms has come front and center because of the increasingly brutal mass shootings that have occurred in the past few years.
On immigration there appears to be the beginning of a bi-party agreement to resolve the issue of the estimated ten million or more people living in America without proper documentation caused by their illegal entry. The plan seems at first glance to be very sound and well balanced. First our southern border will be completely secure. Then a national i.d. system will be put in place to ensure that only legal residents are hired and are working in our country. Then people here illegally will be given a criminal background check. If they pass, they will be required to report where they worked and how much they earned for the time they were in this country and will then be assessed for back taxes with penalties and interest and only then will be issued green cards to work here legally. To ensure that they are not taking jobs from Americans, the immigrants will be eligible only for jobs that no American wants. They also must learn English and pass a U.S. civics test. Then they will be allowed to place their names behind everyone else from their homeland who has been waiting for legal entry.
But at second glance, there are some problems. First comes securing the border. What does it mean and when will it be done? We have been trying to improve security at our southern border for the past 12 years. It is still not even half done. When will it be completely secure? What are the criteria for calling the border “completely secure?”
Then there are the work histories. The vast majority of illegal workers have worked off the books, for cash, for less than American workers would have demanded and for employers who were illegally exploiting their labor. How will the illegals document their document-free employment? How many employers will verify that they in fact hired and exploited the illegal workers? How will the criminal justice system check on criminal history when the documentation of criminal identification is unavailable, because the arrestee is undocumented and not all fingerprints obtained during arrests are in the database?
How will back taxes be calculated absent any documentation? How many illegal workers earned enough to owe taxes when 47% of American families didn’t? If there is a general fine, what if these poor workers don’t have the money for these fines? They have to learn English. What does that mean? Do they really have to be fluent and be able to read and write English too? And how much U.S. civics must they learn and where can they learn it?
Though many of them are already working here, they must yield their jobs if Americans want them. They will no longer take lower wages than legal residents, so how many of their employers will see no reason to keep them?
And then they should get to go to the end of the line to get full citizenship so they can equal to everyone else. Why? Why isn’t letting them become legal residents with work permits enough of a reward for people who came here illegally and took jobs away from those here legally? Why should they also have citizenship? Is it so that they can be eligible for welfare benefits and later to Social Security and Medicare? Why can’t lack of citizenship be their penalty for their illegal, uninvited entry?
As a compromise, what about first securing our southern border, completely and tightening our monitoring of short term visitors’ visas while creating a national I.D. card system to ensure that only legal residents are hired, doing a criminal background search mindful that it might not be complete, give English language classes and charge each undocumented immigrant a flat fee, say $10,000, to obtain a green card to work and receive special driver’s licenses. If as many as ten million paid $10,000 each we would raise $100 billion and ten million people would no longer be undocumented but would not be eligible to any welfare benefits.
With gun control legislation, it seems that all the ideas are good ones and couldn’t hurt and would probably help. We don’t need assault style rifles. We don’t need large clips holding more than 10 bullets. We register car ownership and homeownership, we can register gun ownership too. More has to be done about early detection of mental health issues for many reasons as well as gun safety.
But it seems clear that the real problem is our culture. We idolize violence and make heroes of our most violent. We love our military because they can crush their adversaries with brutal force. Our soldiers are heroes. Our favorite T.V. shows and movies are violent. We love James Bond, Rocky Balboa, the Terminator, Rambo, Jack Bauer, Van Diesel, Dirty Harry, et al. Even our news magazines have become showcases of past violence. The CBS show “48 hours” used to be about different topics that occurred over a two day period. The show is now only about murder cases. The same with NBC’s “Dateline.” Both shows teach us that even white, middle-class Americans can be vicious murderers too. Then there are our violent video games that show what fun it can be to kill people and blow things up.
When we turn on the evening news to get away from all the violence, we see violence both locally and then internationally. Every night the question is which Muslims are killing whom in what forsaken country (Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, Turkey, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Chad, Niger, etc). Lately each night holds news of another mass killing somewhere in our country. We are becoming numbed by and immune to the effects of more news of violence.
We are a violent culture and we must change our ways. Just as we are polluting our atmosphere and causing climate change, we are polluting our society with violence and destroying the very fabric of our humanity. We must change our ways. But it won’t be easy. We changed our culture regarding slavery, women’s rights, and civil rights, and are changing our cultural attitude toward gay rights, pollution and smoking. We’ve done it before, we can do it again. We must do it again.
