Immigration thoughts...

An interesting view from an Australian...

I have not so far posted a lot on the topic as I live in a country that has a settled immigration policy that I and most others of my fellow citizens agree with. Some years ago, Australia's conservative government firmly reasserted control over our borders and we now have virtually no illegal immigrants. And since Australia has many thousands of miles of unguarded and mostly deserted coastline, that was not intrinsically easy. And we have far more poor Asians living to our immediate North than the USA has poor Hispanics to its South. So it seems completely obvious to me that the USA should and could control its borders too...

I'd say he's right that we can and should control our borders, but not correct in comparing our difficulty with Australia's. He should imagine standing on an Australian beach and looking out and seeing thousands of little boats, just hovering offshore waiting for someone to let down their guard, or for night to fall. THAT would be comparable. Plus imagine many coastal areas having large Asian populations that those people could melt into, and local economies that have grown up by using Asian labor.

The family business I grew up in in Southern California was horticulture. The "greenhouse business." Growing foliage plants. it was and is very labor-intensive. And the routine work, then and now, was done by Hispanics. Mostly decent hard-working likable people, not much interested in the managerial or thinking end of things. But imagine you are, like various creative people in my family, interested in building a plant business, in building an exciting horticultural enterprise in California. Those people would be as vital to you as capital, or land, or electricity...or sunshine. You won't move off square one without them. You can't even imagine it.

You can see what the plant-growing Weidners are currently doing here. Weidners Gardens was the small business my Dad started after he "retired" and sold his big nursery. You can read the story here. And here's my Mom and my sister Mary . It's a pretty interesting story, and you have to imagine, underneath what you see, a good many brown skinned people doing things like standing at a potting bench all day potting up thousands of rooted cuttings, and then arraying those pots on greenhouse benches, and then rearranging them as the plants grow and need more room..and then re-potting them all in larger pots! And pinching-back, and packing for shipment, and placing thousands of drip-tubes for watering. Fussy labor that makes my head spin just remembering it all.

So I have a hard time seeing illegal aliens as the threatening miasma of crime that they are often portrayed as by people like Ms Malkin. I suspect President Bush is coming from the same place. If you own a ranch in Texas, you are going to think the same way.

I wish we were getting some more decisive leadership from the administration. It seems to me <armchair theoretician alert> that we need to put a number of pieces of the puzzle together all at the same time, and that only Bush could make the proposal. We should control the borders AND throw more resources into stopping criminals or terrorists AND we should consider the future of other countries in the hemisphere, using their need of us to prod them to make reforms AND we should work harder on assimilation and teaching English AND do better at not corrupting people with easy access to welfare [ahem, California]...

AND have a viable guest-worker program that actually works (hard to imagine in a government program) with extreme transparency so anyone could see what's happening from a web-site PLUS easy-to-use so anyone can hire with minimal paperwork and worry PLUS including encouragement for many of those workers to remain part of their home country, and return home home eventually, carrying our ideas with them. PLUS...well, I could go on, but that's enough for today.... </armchair theoretician alert>