Improving immigration

Long dormant, the immigration issue has erupted back to life. Hundreds of thousands of Latino protesters are clashing with America's nativist wing. While the majority of Americans are sympathetic to immigrants in general, the general populace is nervous about this particular wave of immigrants for good reason. While the modern immigrants are primarily Latino, that is a superficial distinction. Cultural difference is also real but unimportant because 19th and 20th-century waves also came from countries very dissimilar to the America they arrived at.

The real difference is that past groups such as the Irish and Jews had to spend a small fortune and travel across the Atlantic Ocean to get here. Once here, there was no way to avoid the lawful authorities at places such as Ellis Island. Mexico, on the other hand, shares an all but unsecured 2,000-mile border with the United States, making it relatively easy to "break in." In addition, porous port security makes transoceanic human smuggling much simpler than it was 100 years ago. So while 12 million Irish émigrés could never bypass Ellis Island, the presence of 12 million illegal Latinos is a fact.

At first glance, this distinction primarily provides an immediate law and order problem. There is no way to register the arrivals and no way for the government to know who is in the country. There is no way for the government to collect taxes owed by illegal immigrants and no easy way to provide necessary services. These are all serious issues at the forefront of the immigration debate.

The bigger issue, however, is that illegal immigrants are, by definition, incapable of fully assimilating, creating a massive extralegal underclass. The longterm effects of this kind of group alienation were on display last November in France. Muslims immigrants brought in for menial labor eventually found that the European promise did not fully apply to them and that no brighter future existed. As far as society was concerned, they were in France but were not French, entitled to welfare but unworthy of work and full citizenship. Their response was revolt.

The largely peaceful demonstrations by Latino illegal immigrants show that we are closer to France than we think. A large segment of our population feels barred from society. There was a strange dissonance between the image of foreign flags and the rallies' stated goal of integration. Stranger still are the actions of those who tear down American flags at public buildings and hoist foreign colors while pressing for the benefits of citizenship without the responsibilities. It would seem as if those demanding access to the American dream would do better to trumpet their allegiance to the new country instead of displaying their strong ties to the old. The protestors proved that many of them are still strangers in a strange land.

Simply declaring amnesty will not fix this problem. Amnesty would be a reward for lawbreakers and a slap in the face to those who play by the rules. If you are in America only because you violated immigration law, you should have a much tougher route to residence or citizenship than law-abiding immigrants. That means paying back taxes and fines, in addition to the normal red tape and paperwork.

In order to make legal immigration less of a hassle and illegal immigration less attractive, paperwork should also be reduced. There is little incentive to abide by onerous rules when illegally crossing the border is so easy. This would not even present a security threat, as no terrorist is deterred by our system that is burdensome by virtue of incompetence. Less paperwork combined with a path to citizenship would be a powerful carrot to bring immigrants into the system.

Improved border security is the accompanying stick. Unless we make the cost of sneaking across the border substantially greater than the cost of following the rules, 20 years from now there will be 10 million more nonintegrated illegal immigrants. Any immigration program should improve border security to prevent more people from arriving illegally while assimilating those already here. Building some form of fence and strengthening our ports isn't racist but realist and will, by forcing prospective Americans to follow the rules and by forcing current Americans to treat immigrants equally, improve the lot of both immigrants and natives. Our policy should be to encourage order and eliminate the current chaos. Barry Caro is a freshman from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.