Common Sense Solutions for Fixing
America’s Broken Immigration System
Complaining About a Problem Is Easy. Developing Solutions and the political will to enact them is more challenging. But the fact is, the solutions to fixing our broken immigration system are relatively straight forward.
Through our educational efforts, AIC Foundation seeks solutions for America’s dysfunctional immigration policies. Foremost among them is our failure to control our border and maintain interior enforcement against illegal immigration. Equally dysfunctional is an excessive level of legal immigration, averaging more than a million a year for the past 20 years—the highest sustained level in our history.
Our massive level of immigration, legal and illegal combined, causes many problems. They include, social disharmony and division, wage suppression, overcrowding and congestion, stress on infrastructure, and environmental degradation.
Our goal is to promote public discussion of these problems, so that we can have immigration best suited for our country’s needs. We are not anti-immigration or anti-immigrant. America can reform its immigration policies so that they benefit both the native-born and the foreign-born alike. Some of the specific reforms we envision are:
1) Secure our border and promote measures to prevent people from residing illegally in the U.S. Those measures include a mandatory verification system for employers to let them check the legal status of people they hire; an entry/exist system to determine whether foreigners who arrive on temporary visas go home; involvement of the IRS and Social Security Administration in detecting illegal residents; greater cooperation of local and state police with the federal immigration law enforcement.
2) Limit the total legal immigration to approximately 250,000 a year, giving priority to immigrants with needed skills and other valuable attributes. Toward that end, we should eliminate the policy of “chain migration,” which gives priority of admission to relatives of immigrants, who in turn petition to bring in their relatives, and on and on. This policy ensures a high level of immigration, even as it makes family connections the leading criterion for admitting immigrants. We should also tighten the selection of asylees and refugees to exclude economic migrants and others who do have a well-founded personal fear of persecution.
Immigration is a crucial topic, but one that our country doesn’t always approach wisely. We need to balance our sentiments about “a nation of immigrants” with prudence and a sound consideration of our country’s legitimate interests. Promoting education and dialogue on this basis is AIC Foundation’s foremost objective.