The Unity Blueprint, found at http://www.unityblueprint.org/, is an immigration reform vision endorsed by scores of immigration organizations. Its legislative proposals are general enough to mostly describe my vision, without enabling anyone to guess my vision from reading these goals. Therefore, while I endorse these goals, I have interspersed, in blue, my comments about them and how I believe they can be reached. The following is the Unity Blueprint:
The Unity Blueprint for Immigration Reform provides specific legislative proposals for rational and humane transformation of the current immigration policy disaster in the United States. While we encourage the efforts of all organizations to achieve broad immigration reform, these proposals reflect the aspirations of a wide range of civic and labor organizations participating in discussions aimed at achieving a workable, just, and fair immigration system that addresses the interests of the nation and the millions of immigrants who give their labor, talents, and investments to it without the benefit of protections and rights extended to its citizenry.
We recognize that organizations supporting immigration reform may adopt different priorities and strategies in their public education and advocacy work. However, virtually all organizations agree on the need for an immigration system that dramatically reduces the size of the undocumented population and replaces the visa processing system with one that prevents expansion of the undocumented population in the future while protecting U.S. workers.
The Unity Blueprint advances the following goals:
- Protect the well-being and safety of immigrant and U.S. citizen children.
Good. Giving them a legal line to get in will get them out of hiding, into safety. Plyler v. Doe (1982) points out that while unauthorized alien parents -- “those
who elect to enter our territory by stealth and in violation of our
law should be prepared to bear the consequences, including, but not
limited to, deportation. But the children of those illegal entrants
are not comparably situated. ... the children..."can affect
neither their parents' conduct nor their own status."
....legislation directing the onus of a parent's misconduct against
his children does not comport with fundamental conceptions of
justice.” (Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 220 (1982)
- Achieve faithful enforcement of immigration laws by fully reinstating the jurisdiction of the
federal courts to review agency decisions involving immigrants.
I need someone I can talk with about this detail. My most current knowledge about
it is from reading McNARY v. HAITIAN REFUGEE CENTER., INC., 498 U.S. 479 (1991). In that case, the USCIS
(then the INS) was conducting hearings with Creole-speaking Haitians without a translator, without the right
to bring witnesses, and without the right to a record of the proceeding, without which an appeal was pretty hard!
Pretty major denials of due process! Is that still going on? The Haitians could have appealed to an administrative
law judge, who might conceivably have corrected the deficiencies in the initial hearings, in the opinion of the
dissent, but for some unexplained reason they skipped that step and appealed to federal court. The Court's dilemma
was whether they had jurisdiction. Congress had provided them the administrative review, without spelling out Court
jurisdiction. The majority wiggled its way into the issue, in the opinion of the dissent, and ruled that the lower court had
jurisdiction to review the merits of the case. Even before that, there was no question that courts had jurisdiction to
review deportation orders. So as of that ruling, courts could review quite a bit. But that was 16 years ago. I need an
update. But I've argued (pro se) before both real judges, federal and state, and bureaucrats pretending
to be judges (Administrative Law Judes). The expectation of greater justice from one than the other is, in
my experience, a false hope. The real problem, which I propose should be everyone's focus, is an impossible
bureaucratic process that takes a
generation to wait through. With that legal quicksand still in place, my question is whether thrusting
federal courts deeper into it would leave courts time for anything else! According to an article about "amnesty"
on Congressman Sessions' website, "you can legitimately appeal a determination you are in the country illegally",
and there were 6 times as many appeals in 2005 as there were in 2001, resulting in a 27 month wait for a hearing.
He speculates that immigration attorneys only appeal to get another 27 months in the U.S. for their clients. I hope
immigration reformers will focus instead on getting the USCIS to move FASTER.
Achieve maximum protection of the labor rights and working conditions of U.S. and immigrant workers through enhanced labor protections available to all workers regardless of immigration status. "Enhanced labor protections" is undefined here, but giving them a legal line to get in would give them the same protections as citizens. .
- Achieve maximum reduction in the size of the undocumented population through a program granting prompt permanent resident status to undocumented migrants. Amen. That means eliminating quotas. Doing it promptly can be achieved by dramatic simplification of bureaucracy, which in turn can be achieved by computer processing of people voluntarily standing in line as opposed to hiding in shadows. Quotas permitting only a handful to get in a legal line dictate years of waiting and USCIS caseloads beyond imagination. Merely expanding quotas to a number 50% greater, for example, will solve nothing; the line must be long enough for everyone who meets attainable criteria, or millions will remain in hiding, artificially bloating the USCIS caseload as much as the caseload which highway patrolmen would experience if we set a speed limit of 5 miles an hour on our interstates. .
- Achieve a legal framework for future migration through the issuance of a realistic number of permanent employment and family-based visas.
I agree and call for more: not just employment and family visas, but visas to come here and start one's own business, or to do anything, really, so long as assimilation-enhancing criteria are met. That realistic number would be, to eliminate quotas. - Adopt rational and humane border enforcement policies that avoid more deaths, injuries, and destruction of border communities.
I don't know what border enforcement policies are directly causing deaths, other than the fact that border enforcement policies of any level of effectiveness at all, while millions are desperate to come, will kill. Therefore, the only solution is to eliminate quotas, and instead have a criteria-based path to LPR (Legal Permanent Residence). - Adopt rational and humane interior enforcement, detention, removal, and related policies addressing the presence of immigrant communities.
I agree and observe that removing hard working, otherwise honest residents whose only crime is breathing U.S air is irrational, when by eliminating mindless quotas and offering assimilation-enhancing criteria we could have the best quality new citizens any nation could ask for! We believe that immigrant families contribute to our society and culture and help meet our labor force needs. We also believe that a revised employment-based immigration system should strive to use objective economic factors to determine labor market needs and should produce immigrant visa numbers in proportion to labor shortages. A rational visa issuance process would result in immigration waiting lines being relatively current and affected only by processing time.
Although this kind of language seems politically necessary, given public misunderstanding of the relation between immigration and job shortages, the reality is that this kind of government manipulation of the flow of jobs accomplishes nothing but prevent small businesses from hiring immigrants. And make it impossible for employers to interview job applicants. The typical existing and proposed laws require employers to advertize for possibly months to give citizens a chance to fill a job, before they can hire an immigrant. This might work for hiring a thousand orange pickers, but suppose you have a tiny business and need a couple of employees next week because your daughter is going to the hospital, and you know someone across the border who understands your business. You're out of luck. The reason this bureaucratic manipulation is totally unnecessary is that every worker who comes here is also a consumer, creating one new job; and conversely, if by some miracle all 12 million illegals were to head south tomorrow, we would not have 12 million unfilled jobs because with 12 million fewer consumers those 12 million jobs would not need doing. (Of course dramatic shifts cause dramatic economic turbulence.) These principles explain why unemployment levels have managed to remain fairly constant from the time the earth's population was 8, to today when it is approaching 8 billion. In view of these facts, the only "rational" visa policy is to just let people come. Let them sign up for a trial period where they have a chance to meet our criteria for staying here; if they shirk, the USCIS knows where they are and can deport them. They will not go into hiding if that would torpedo their chance to try again later. We do not believe that walling-in the borders, the current regime of employer sanctions, and large-scale domestic enforcement are productive in reducing or controlling undocumented migration. Such measures have not in the past stopped migration or forced undocumented migrants to leave the United States. Instead, they simply drive immigrants underground, encourage a black market in immigrant labor, and cause the separation of families.
I agree that such measures haven't worked in the past, and in the present will work only at the cost of being prohibitive. For example, an expensive enough fence will keep people from crossing it, but that still leaves the oceans; but if we had criteria instead of quotas, hardly anyone but a handful of terrorists, drug lords, and other criminals would even want to cross illegally, which means a much cheaper fence would be adequate to catch them. I think S1348's employment verification database will indeed drive many of our 12 million South, but at horrible social cost! First, because of the financial upheaval to businesses and illegals' families of such a massive, immediate move. Second, because of the death toll from exposure and starvation as illegals wait till the last minute to try to delay impoverishment by starting their own businesses or internet sales. Third, because of the potential for tyranny, Big Brother style, as the databases of the Departments of Transportation of all 50 states are combined with databases of the Social Security administration and the IRS; Fourth, because of the nightmare of workers unable to work for months because of mistakes in the database, a possiblity foreseen in the bill and provided for by access to lengthy court battles! Nor do such enforcement approaches in any way address the underlying root causes that drive migration to the United States, including massive inequality in wealth distribution, economic dislocation in major sending communities, the U.S. demand for labor, and free trade agreements that have caused workers to lose their jobs in migrant sending communities.
I agree, and observe that the solution to this is USCIS processing times of a year or two instead of a generation or two, so that when workers send all that money South, they will be able to export political experience with it, enabling their families back home to transform their governments. When we make immigrants wait a generation or two before they can vote, why, by that time, the families back home they are sending money to are all dead. Shortening processing time can occur only if we eliminate quotas and use instead a simple, computer verifiable criteria system. While we are making specific proposals to vastly improve the rationality of U.S. policy, we also recognize that immigration policies should not be imposed unilaterally but developed cooperatively through multilateral agreements similar to those used to govern international flows of capital, goods, commodities, and information. The Unity Blueprint supporters believe that nations have responsibilities beyond their borders, and unilateral actions taken by the United States can have serious negative repercussions for other countries linked to it in the global system. We therefore recommend that the United States engage in bi-national and multilateral discussions with major migrant sending countries to arrive at a coherent and long-term set of migration policies.
Let every qualified applicant come, as it was before 1882, and those multilateral discussions will go better. We will hold the moral high ground, and tyrannies will be embarrassed into reforming abuses which are driving out so many of their citizens. The Unity Blueprint collaborators intend to advocate for, assist in the drafting of, and support legislation consistent with the detailed proposals set forth in the Unity Blueprint for Immigration Reform.
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