Getting Immigration Right This Time
In setting immigration numbers, remember the Mustang and the Edsel
By Andrew R. Arthur on May 22, 2019
The great William F. Buckley once said: "Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on the head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but the people must want her and seek her out." It is important to remember WFB's wisdom as the White House fleshes out President Trump's latest proposal to reform America's legal immigration system, and plug the loopholes at the border. This is especially true as the administration determines how many new immigrants the United States actually needs on an annual basis.
What the president has announced thus far is more a framework, rather than a proposal, and there are many reasons that the White House may have chosen this particular timing. Reforming a system that was, quite frankly, imperfect when it was announced 54 years ago is not an easy task, particularly given the fact that the law has been amended, by my count, 145 times since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
Some of those amendments have been major, some of them minor, some were small tweaks to fix minor problems, some were major changes to address national crises, some were positive, some were negative, and some of them were so self-righteous and shortsighted that they helped create the disaster the border that we see today. It is doubtful that any of them were malicious, and likely all were passed with the best of intentions. As it relates to immigration, as we have seen, however, what seems like a good idea in the abstract has extremely negative impacts in the concrete.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Getting-Immigration-Right-Time
