Apparently it is considered ‘progressive’ in Madison to believe that anyone and everyone who wants to come to the United States should be allowed to. No requirements, no exceptions, no questions asked. We are all one big, happy family of the world and who are the citizens of the United States of America to deny anyone the ‘right’ to come here? Furthermore any semblance of applying a process for legal immigration is backwards, and, dare I say, crazy, conservative talk. Who are the citizens of the United States of America to have a process for legal immigration? Oh, the inhumanity of it all!

Seriously, what is all the fuss about really? While I’m not an expert on immigration, and I would be first to say that the current process could stand some streamlining, the basic requirements to our current immigration seem to me to be the following:

Immigrants should have the ability or means to provide and support themselves financially. The simple fact is that are realities to life. Money doesn’t grow on trees. I’m sorry but our parents were right about that. How can any nation survive if it blindly lets anyone come without proven means to support themselves? This doesn’t mean they’re independently wealthy, just that they are willing and able to work. The alternative is that they come and go immediately on government welfare. I have personally signed to be financially responsible for more than one immigrant. This actually leads to a third way to meet this requirement – have a sponsor which will vouch for you financially.

Immigrants should have or get current on immunizations. Do you like the fact that many diseases of previous generations have all but been eradicated in the United States? This wasn’t by accident. It was by diligent effort and brilliance of the generations before us that they systematically improved our quality of life and eliminated these threats to our health and the health of our children. Again this doesn’t mean automatic barrier to entry. It simply means that a potential immigrant needs to have due diligence done on their health and immunizations current before coming into the United States. Again, everyone I have sponsored to come to the United States has also had their physicals and immunizations brought current. Conversely, every time I’ve traveled internationally, I’ve been asked to make sure my own immunizations are current. There is nothing sinister to promoting good, public health policy.

Immigrants should have background checks that screen for criminal and terrorist behavior or ties. This is just common sense. How many folks just leave their front doors wide open through the night to allow anyone who wants to come into their house to come in? How many times do we tell our kids to not open the door to strangers? It is a dangerous world and it boggles my mind why anyone would object to allowing dangerous criminals enter our country.  Just look at the recent shooting in Madison to see the results of what we're inviting into our community. 

You see the world gets a lot more complicated when you need to come up with real world solutions to real world problems. The rhetoric that anyone and everyone should be allowed to live wherever they want just doesn’t pass the smell test. Unfortunately the debate on immigration usually turns into the left saying that anyone opposed to illegal immigration hates immigrants. That simply isn’t true. What is true is that some conservatives, me included, believe that we should have some process for properly admitting people to this country. It’s not evil, nor draconian, nor the creation of police state. It’s just plain, simple, common sense.

There has been a lot of misinformation being spread about what it really means to be a legal immigrant to the United States versus an illegal alien lately.  In today’s Wisconsin State Journal we learn that “Local officials concerned that Hispanic immigrants will avoid census”.    Read beyond the headline though and we learn it’s really not ‘Hispanic immigrants’ they’re concerned about counting, its illegal aliens.  There is an interesting angle in this story where they say that our local political power will be determined by the number of illegal aliens.  You read that correctly.   It is true that the distribution of United States political power depends on the results of the census, that is true.  In turn this article is bemoaning that the number of illegal aliens won’t be counted correctly in the census.  Therefore the assumption is that our representation in the political system will be determined by the number of illegal, non-voting aliens in our community.  While a fascinating angle in its own right, what I find most interesting are the stories about individual illegal aliens that are intended to make their plight ‘personal’.

Time after time we’re treated with stories about how poorly our system treats illegal aliens or that enforcing immigration laws is twisted into a generic (and non-existent) hatred of immigrants.  For example, in this article we get to read about a young woman who married an illegal immigrant.  Hooray, good for the happy couple, right?  After all, they’re a happily married couple, and he has a path to citizenship now… but… wait… that would involve a fine and perhaps going back to Mexico for a year to become legal.  That’s just way too hard to expect a married man to go through.  He’d rather stay here illegally.  Would we see the same understanding for someone who, for example, embezzled money from his employer years ago, evaded the law, and now was too happily married to be arrested or that being arrested was too inconvenient?  We’re supposed to absolve this criminal of that crime because… well, I’m not sure exactly why we’re supposed to absolve him of the past crime. I think it’s ‘just because’ it would be nice thing to do.

Suppose instead we read about another couple (you won’t find this story in print) where the husband is a citizen and it’s his Hispanic wife who was a legal immigrant.  They also got married and then found she needed to go home for a year to meet a requirement on her original student visa (you see she came here legally).  They spoke to lawyers asking if anything could be done since they were legally married.  No luck there.  They also considered the implications of ignoring the law like the first couple.  That just didn’t sit right with them though.  So ten years ago she went to live with her family in Central America for a year and they put their life together on hold.  He stayed in Madison and worked to support his now divided family and visited her as frequently as his job and budget would allow (remember these two were a young, married couple, just out of college, not ‘rich’ by any stretch of the imagination).  This story has a happy ending though as they completed the immigration process legally and she is now a naturalized citizen with a wonderful family out here in rural Dane County.

Which story highlights the American dream more?  Illegal alien comes to United States, gets married, and then avoids becoming legal because it’s a hassle or foreign student comes to United States, gets married, preservers through INS and now is a citizen with the means to provide for her family here and abroad?  What does is say as a society when the main stream media highlight the first story and not the second?

Consider how the Tea Partiers are often stereotyped (via our local CapTimes):

 “An angry bunch of Americans have taken to the streets to protest government spending and the direction of the nation.  And judging from the massive media coverage, it’s as if we have been invaded by a foreign entity…”

It’s also not uncommon to read or hear them referred to as ‘racist’.  Perhaps the single, most damning piece of evidence I can offer to the contrary is the fact that there was such a movement on the left to plant folks into the Tea Party rallies in order to discredit the events.  If the Tea Party is so completely racist, angry, and uneducated then why plant folks within the rally to act racist, angry, and stupid?  It would seem if the former were true then there would be no need to do the latter. 

Now contrast this to the actual actions of protestors during and after the passage of a new law enforcing existing immigration laws in Arizona.   One example: 

“...opponents used refried beans to smear swastikas on the state Capitol, civil rights leaders and other demanded a boycott of the state, a petition drive began to put the measure to a public vote and the Obama administration weighed a possible legal challenge.”

Nowhere have I found any credible coverage of Tea Partiers defacing public property.  In fact, I’ve found more information suggesting they left the grounds generally clean and in more or less the same condition it was when they arrived.  Would it be fair to say we have an angry bunch of Arizonans or perhaps illegal immigrants protesting in Arizona?  Ironically in this case it would seem to be much more accurate to suggest there is a foreign entity invading - I wonder if we’ll see that on CNN or in the CapTimes?

Even with the great news out of Massachusetts this week, the debate of healthcare rages on.  In the context of that debate I ran across this interesting graph.  It’s one of those graphs that at first glance would seem to make the case that universal, government-run healthcare is good.  After all, there is the United States with that bad-looking, red line running off the graph.
It is an interesting graph, with healthcare costs per person on the left, average life expectancy on the left, and the width of the line showing the average number of doctor visits a year.  So, we in the United States spend the most money and have slightly below average life expectancy according to at least one measure.  Note that Japan has the longest life expectancy with an average of over 12 visits a year per person.
Of course Japan has universal coverage so what are we supposed to conlcude?  Universal coverage = longer life span.  Is that the reason for the increase in lifespan though, are there any other possibilities?  It would also seem a logical conclusion that perhaps more visits to the doctor contribute to a long life span to just use the data shown in this graph.   We don’t know if folks in Japan are averaging 13 per year, 25 per year, or more though.   While the graph doesn’t include these other factors - what about the impact on lifespan from lifestyle, heredity, environment, and crime rate?  It would seem reasonable to me that those all could also contribute to the results we’re seeing.

The big take-away for me from this graph is that the US is far outspending these other countries for comparable results – the right hand side of the graph doesn’t at all show that much variance.  For my money, this is where the debate should be focused.  How do we save money?  Reducing mandates on coverage, allowing coverage to be available across state lines, and tort reform to just name a few.  All of these are things being promoted like Wisconsin’s own Representative Paul Ryan – unfortunately not from our Representative Tammy Baldwin.