17 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
I'm not going to whine specificaly about the US process which apparently is pretty bad though it doesn't seem to be quite as screwed up as the UK version.
A comment over at the Junkyard blog and its link to an email received by Michelle Malkin related a couple of stories about the US INS and how it works. In my own experience much of the anecdotal stories in these two places ring utterly true. The INS makes it hard for law-abiding citizens to get themselves and/or their relatives to remain legally within the US but utterly fails to handle asylum seekers or illegals. And this needs to be fixed
OK so reform sounds liek a good idea. But how exactly? The problem at present seems to be that the bad guys have nothing to lose by evading the law of lying whereas the good guys get severely inconvenienced by trying to bey the law. So what to do?
The main thing that I see is that the incentives need to be switched. At present a lot of effort is put into questioning people at legal ports of entry and very little is done thereafter - I mean you have to work quite hard to get thrown out once you have passed the border. This, it seems to me is wrong. The correct approach is to let anyone in with a quick note of why they are visitng and a clearly defined set of things they are allowed to do while in the country (clearly a check is required to determine whether they have ever been thrown OUT of the the coutnry but that is sufficient). Then you can move the manpower thus freed up to go after the violators and you can shift the incentives so that (for example) people who profit from illegals and/or assist in the fabrication of bogus asylum stories forfeit their own citizenship and property. Said property being sold for the benefit of the deserving asylum seekers os that they aren't dependant on government handouts....
Any other ideas?