Illegal immigration is an inventory problem

[underpants]

I know it sounds harsh to think of human beings as units or widgets or simply in a quantitative way but this is, at its root, the issue.

We are not sure how many of whom are in the country.

Now for the most part "illegals" are "normal" members of society. Low violence rates. Very low divorce rates. Generally healthy, to include not being contagious (the main concern when my ancestors made their way over here). Tax paying. Law abiding. and the rest.

What they aren't is involved in the governing process and they aren't paid at market rates. Those two aspects of this issue probably go a long way in explaining the contrived controversy over this issue.

But what needs to be mentioned is that we need to do is address this in an on-going basis. We need to manage it. Of course contrary to that is what you will hear a lot of in the coming days-lots of ultimatums about solving the whole thing right now. Once and for all! Either A or B! No we need to manage this like we do the forests or Indian affairs or crop subsidies or the military.

We need to dissuade people from not coming to us and telling us that they are coming into the country. We lose control of the inventory that way. We find ourselves where we are right now.

I can almost guarantee that upgrades in technology would go a long way in helping in this area. I believe that cases are still handled with actual hard copy files as if it were the pre-computer age. I have no proof of that but it seems very likely.

Lastly we need to realize that this is a huge shift in politics in this country. Like our forcing of our party’s leadership to force the war issue when they didn’t really want to (even after the election) the right had a come together grassroots movement on illegal immigration. This was another “cash cow” to their politicians-kick up lots of dust but don’t actually do anything about it. Now they have been dragged kicking and screaming into addressing it (by a rather uninformed but enthusiastic constituency) and the leadership has been shown to have pretty much no plan to deal with it and what they do have directly counters what they have been feeding their followers all these years.

My friendly advice to them-Treat is as an inventory problem and go from there.