Go, Dubya

Hey, you've gotta give credit when something goes right. Last week, George W Bush proposed a plan to give legal documentation to millions of immigrant workers. ``Our current limits on legal immigration are too low'', President Dubya said.

This rocks. Politically, it is obviously a pandering to Latino voters, who are the only minority which has shown any willingnes to vote for Republicans. But when has a policy ever not been pandering to somebody. The basic mechanism as proposed is that those who are now in the country without documentation can get a guest worker status, and those who have documented jobs three years from now will be able to stay in the country.

The overall gist is that those who are working outside of the system can now work inside it. Of course, the system itself will be increasingly hostile to them. The first point is that U.S. employers who want to hire a guest worker will first need to try to hire a native. The current law requires this, but isn't really enforced. ``Our government will develop a quick and simple system for employers to search for American workers,'' the Commander-in-chief explained. I guess he means Monster.com with enforcement capabilities.

But along with new digital fingerprinting requirements, the focus on a panoptic technology is a bit intimidating. ``This month, we have begun using advanced technology to better record and track aliens who enter the country---and to make sure they leave as scheduled.'' In other words, people who now exist illegaly can make their status legal, but as soon as they do, they will be carefully tracked.

It's not scary that there's lots of neatly collated data out there: if the government wants to run Monster.com, or it wants a fingerprint as well as a photo on every visa, I have no problem with that. [U.S. visas have had digital photos since the technology was viable over a decade ago.] It seems fair enough to me that if somebody claims to be somebody, then verifying that claim with a fingerprint or such is not a big deal. My fingerprints are with the FBI, since I used to work at a brokerage firm, and I don't really care.

The scary part comes in what they wish to do with that information, which seems to be to track immigrants as closely as possible. They need to be associated with an employer, and as a compromise with the red-blooded xenophobes, the government will make that as difficult as possible. If they aren't associated with an employer, or they fail any of the other paperwork hurdles the US CIS (formerly the INS) is famous for, then the government will use as much information as it can get to track the person down and have him or her forcibly moved out of the country.

So if this proposal achieves one of its main goals---making it easier to deport people whom the database says are illegal---then we can't expect it to achieve its other goal---getting people who are currently out of the system enthused about registering. But on the margin, this will help some people who really will be better of normalizing their status, and will allow some percentage of people to enter the country legally. It will, on the margin, make for less work for the border patrol, since they'll have more people with reliable paperwork whom they don't have to strip-search. But sweeping reform it ain't, because entering the system comes at a cost of increased scrutiny, and the people involved have been trained for decades to not trust U.S. authorities when they say `trust me'.

One last note: the plan includes a clause that social security taxes would be held in escrow, and if the guest worker goes back to Mexico, the taxes and attendant retirement benefits go back with the migrant. I haven't seen the details, but this is a great idea. Yay, Dubya. Twenty or thirty more propsals like this and I'd forgive you for John Ashcroft, $87 billion in `reconstruction of stuff we blew up' expenses and over 7,900 deaths.