NEVER MIND COMPREHENSIVE REFORM, LET'S TRY TWO SIMPLE THINGS.

Cato Institute contributor Alex Nowrasteh gets to the heart of the immigration matter.

[W]e hypothesize that many people oppose immigration liberalization because they don’t know how complex and restrictive the immigration system is. Many years ago, I spoke to a conservative audience in Arizona about immigration. Afterward, an elderly woman asked, “I understand the benefits of immigration, but why don’t the illegals just go to the Post Office to register and become legal? What are they hiding?”

Those questions are reasonable if you know nothing about the legal immigration system. Her question was spurred by ignorance, not by malice. As a result, we’ve identified ignorance of the actual laws as a significant problem in liberalizing immigration. Just imagine how hard it would be to talk about tax policy with someone who doesn’t know that the U.S. has an income tax or even what it is. That’s about where we are in terms of the immigration debate.

His interlocutor undoubtedly remembered those public service announcements that used to run on radio and television.  Aliens must report addresses during January.  I'm not sure whether that's still a requirement.  It's been a few years since I did any research on immigration policies.  I fear, though, that we have talk of amnesty or comprehensive reform or the like because the government's protocols for keeping track of aliens aren't working.

There was a policy change during the Great Society that might have changed the protocols.  "An immigration reform of approximately the same age might have come along at precisely the worst possible time, if the intellectual current pushed deconstruction of those notions most essential for the new arrivals to buy into. At the same time, might the new arrivals to the United States have been least equipped to buy into those notions?"  Mr Nowrasteh uses his post to make the case that the legal path to residency is too convoluted, and I concur.

Oh, there were flaws in the legal procedure then, and there still are. Ask any director of graduate studies about the joys involved in student visas, or any academic personnel officer about the joys of securing work permits or permanent residency for new faculty. The flaws, though, are interconnected, whether we're dealing with restrictive border enforcement then, or whatever passes for border enforcement now.

Yes, there are more people coming to the United States now than there were a few years ago.

Image retrieved from Issues and Insights.

It doesn't surprise me.  As much suckitude as Dementia Joe and his geriatric enablers in Congress have unleashed on the country in three years as they have, a lot of other place suck more.  "If you build a shining city on a hill, people will see it and attempt to come to it."

What, then, are those two simple things?

First, let's consider expediting legal entry for new arrivals.  That's not "comprehensive reform," that's a restoration of a state of good repair.  I have one great-grandfather who arrived in 1888 and filed a citizenship petition shortly thereafter.  He had to wait five years to file a legal petition, which he subsequently did.  Another great-grandfather arrived around 1900 with a letter of introduction from the Stockholm office of DeLaval to the Chicago office.  He had talents as a bowl balancer that Chicago could use.  The current company no longer make the separators that were their principal product.  There's apparently a collectors' market in them for antiquarians.  I've told the story of a great-grandmother who arrived with $5 in her pocket and seven kids in tow.  Her entry record listed a third great-grandfather (ah, the joys of doing family history, I have records on most of the great-grands) who had arrived, with his eldest son, to clear a farm in Wisconsin.  Five years to get a hearing?  Heck, five years to get a student visa approved?  It should be possible to write a dissertation in that time, and then get the permanent resident stuff going.

Second, let's use the expedited permits for refugees from Venezuela as a reason to end the "Democrats importing voters" stuff.

The New York Times reportedthat nearly half a million migrants from Venezuela will "be allowed to immediately apply for work authorization." The purpose of the move, the New York Times said, is this: "By allowing them to legally earn income, the change could alleviate the costly burden of housing the refugees in major cities across the country. The migrants also will be protected from deportation for at least the next 18 months."

Maybe that will mollify Adams for a while. It will certainly increase the incentive for Venezuelans to come to the U.S. as soon as possible. But how, one might ask, did the immigrants arrive in the U.S. from Venezuela in the first place? The answer lies with a Biden administration program known as CBP One. It is what is called a "parole" program — that is, it is designed to release immigrants into the U.S. quickly and without public scrutiny. This is from the Center for Immigration Studies: "A little-known part of the Biden administration's CBP One parole program permits inadmissible aliens to make an appointment to fly directly to airports in the interior of the United States, bypassing the border altogether."

The Biden program "allows migrants to take commercial passenger flights from foreign countries straight to their American cities of choice." The program applies to migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. The migrants, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, "request 'advance travel authorizations' through the CBP One mobile app and take commercial flights ('at their own expense') directly into U.S. airports, where U.S. Customs officers parole them into the nation, sight unseen, and in numbers publicly unknown."

Was it that hard, before computers and magnetic tape and snoopy Federal data bases to cross reference the arrivals recorded at Ellis Island or Baltimore or the Pacific Coast ports with the registrations submitted each January at the Post Office and the citizenship petitions filed with the county clerk?  Somehow, our ancestors managed.  Yes, that quotation refers to "inadmissible aliens."  That category includes potential terrorists, which is fine, and it also might include academicians, unless the university makes the case that there's nobody currently in country who can do the job, and it probably excludes bowl balancers.  I tried playing Cato's green card simulation using "farm implement operator," as in the 1888 great-grand, and it was a mistake tackling that just before bedtime.  "Inadmissible" is likely precluding lots of mutually beneficial trades, and the welfare loss therefrom might exceed whatever benefit we derive from the exclusion of potential terrorists thereby.

Yes, Byron York endorses the "malicious Democrats" argument.

Where are they going? The administration would not disclose which airports have received the immigrants. If any local leaders want to know how thousands of new people are arriving in their towns virtually overnight, courtesy of the U.S. government — well, if they want to know that, they can't find out.

Now the White House is offering immediate work authorization, not just to immigrants who crossed the land border illegally but to those who took part in the administration's secretive flight program. That will surely lure more to come, whether by foot over the border or to an undisclosed airport. If you ever hear an administration official say that Biden is trying to get the border situation under control — don't believe it.

But when Chicago's Democrat voters of long standing are embracing "Great Replacement" rhetoric perhaps Mr York, and his fellow pundit, Power Line's John Hinderaker, protesteth too much.

I think that admitting tens of millions of illegal immigrants is a critically important part of the Democratic Party’s strategy for perpetuating its own power. There are several long-term tides that are running against the Democrats. Republicans have more children than Democrats do, and minorities that used to vote reliably Democrat are shifting toward the GOP. How can the Democrats retain their grip on power?

You mean a Republican or a Libertarian can't come up with a value proposition that might appeal to refugees from Communist China or Communist Cuba or Communist Nicaragua?

The editors at National Review get closer to a Democrats-caused-this-mess-and-their-policies-punish-productive-people argument, but they, too, founder on the reefs of Process Worship.

While the temporary protected status and work permits are only supposed to be given to those Venezuelans who arrived in the United States before July 31 of this year, the announcement of this policy is bound to cause a surge of further migration from Venezuela, and elsewhere, among those who hope to obtain, by hook or by crook, this temporary amnesty, and then amnesties to come as they establish their lives here. The sheer number of those applying for temporary protected status and work permits will mean months of administrative backlog and opportunity for those who get in now. The length of the work permit is almost invaluable as it gives “temporary” migrants time to settle down, marry, and have children who become permanent U.S. citizens and a further reason to extend their temporary status or grant them amnesty outright.

The constant stretching of our legal definitions of “refugees” or “temporary status” makes a joke of our immigration laws and invites more law-breaking, even as it sows distrust between citizens and their government that makes salutary reforms to our immigration system impossible.

Americans across the country are tired of dealing with the consequences of the chaos at the border in their communities. Republicans need to remind American voters that the Biden administration chose this disorder — and is choosing, as even Democrats beg for relief, to apply legally dubious Band-Aids that will only perpetuate the problem, or make it worse.

Yes, any supposedly one-time policy change brings a time consistency problem in train.  Yes, the current process is disorder.  Simplify. Work permits now. Student visas now.  Citizenship petitions in five years.  Immigration lawyers and pundits benefit by the current system; employers, whether of graduate assistants, farm implement operators, professors, or bowl balancers, get jacked around.