The Effective Reform Scenario

To be effective, a solution to the immigration conundrum requires several elements:

(1) Patrol, fortify and militarize our borders to ensure only legal and vastly reduced immigration, perhaps at a national rate of no more than 150,000 or so legal entries per year. Cross-border traffic would have to be reduced substantially and methods found to assure that day visitors and those holding visas exit when their authorization expires.

(2) Under conditions of such strict legality, unless they can make a strong case why they should be allowed to stay, illegal aliens would have to be deported immediately in a systematic, stepwise, orderly process. The deportation appeals would have to be based on the demonstrated labor needs of employers and upon proof of the aliens’ social integration and cultural and linguistic assimilation. All others would be subject to a strict migrant labor law which would require them to return to their homeland every six months or whenever a female migrant worker becomes pregnant.

(3) Insist on rapid cultural immersion and an absolute end to all ethnic chauvinism, bi-lingualism, and separatism. Outlaw MEChA, the Brown Berets, La Raza, Aztlanistas, and other similar organizations that espouse or support separatism or racial supremacy agendas. Remove all local, state or federal support for members of such organizations and for the organizations themselves. (If you want federal student aid, you can’t belong to MEChA or any other seditionist organization.)

(4) Develop a domestic Marshall Plan to inculcate the norms and values of traditional education—a core curriculum that emphasizes the American heritage and unifies us through civic responsibility rather than divides us through an obsession with race. Fund this plan by suspending U.S. membership in the U.N. for five years and by turning all Iraq reconstruction projects over to the Iraqi government to be funded from Iraqi oil revenues.

This holistic approach would require the adoption of sweeping restrictions on immigration and an end to separatist ideology. Respect for law would be strengthened. Population growth would reach a natural equilibrium by the end of this century giving us the time necessary to: (a) deal with the limits of our natural resources; (b) develop the alternative energy and water sources necessary to serve our citizens; and (c) curb potentially catastrophic climate change and extinction of species.

Businesses would have to accept a permanent scarcity of unskilled workers. Citizens in turn would pay more for their hotel rooms, lawn care, roofing, painting, fruits and vegetables—and have to do more of their dirty work themselves thereby taking the first steps to curb the nationwide epidemic of obesity.

In such a scenario, our present problems would vanish almost immediately, while prices for wage labor would steadily escalate making it possible for many of our citizens on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to make a living. In theory, American citizens without specialized skills would find themselves in far greater demand and would acquire greater leverage in negotiating more than minimum wages. In this scenario, the inclusiveness of daily habit and custom, married with active support of a higher sort of inclusiveness promoted by our schools and government, might make near-instant citizens with a greater degree of loyalty and allegiance than those currently created by the 14^th amendment. We could hope then that the children of all immigrants would then have a greater opportunity to enter the middle class, becoming a part of the bourgeoisie disdained by Socialists, Marxists and Communists.

With the development of inclusive standards, multiculturalism and watered-down, feel-good curricula would lose some of their vitality. The race-based organizations, ethnic studies, and ethnic chauvinist dinosaurs would gradually die off as their habitat became depleted of new clients and their landscape altered through the effects of intermarriage and the assimilative youth culture. Professors of ethnic studies might have to find real work and their graduate students might have to produce theses and dissertations that actually advance our knowledge of the world in which we live.