Alien Already in America Illegally, with a Job. You already have the job-- it is just illegal. Tell your boss to apply to make it legal. He knows and values you, so he is happy to do it.

Alien Already in America Illegally, without a Job. Get an illegal job. This is is not too hard, since you are already in America and can interview in person. Then tell your new boss to apply to make it legal. He knows and values you, so he is happy to do it.

Alien Waiting Outside America. Look at the Help Wanted ads in American newspapers for businesses which have bothered to go through the process of applying for permission to hire a foreign worker. Then try and get the job in competition with a billion Chinese.

John Derbyshire seemed to be making the point that American immigration policy has long shown a striking contrast:
1. It is easy to come to America illegally, the punishments are trivial, and the government doesn't seem to mind.
2. It is hard to come to America legally, and the government puts up all kinds of silly paperwork barriers, whose only rational purpose would be to discourage legal immigration.

That's why our immigration bureaucrats are contenders, along with the CIA, BATF and FBI, for most incompetent division of government--- they combine excessive laxity with excessive strictness in a way unique to America. (Though I think this is a common pattern worldwide, e.g. DeSoto's Peru, where it was practically impossible to start a legal business because of all the paperwork, but the government tolerated openly illegal businesses.)

Where Derbyshire is wrong may be in his implicit assumption that the Bush plan makes it easy to convert from being illegal to being legal. Here is what looks like an Achilles Heel:

American Workers Come First: Employers must make every reasonable effort to find an American to fill a job before extending job offers to foreign workers.

Here is a better plan along the same lines. Allow any foreigner to come to America if they can prove they have a job. Proof consists in the payment by the employer to the government of social security and income tax withholding, perhaps with an extra "foreign worker tax". When the foreigner doesn't have the job any he must leave within 2 months, or have all his property confiscated, including especially the clothes on his back, and be deported. (We'd let him keep the clothes till he reaches his home country, so Americans wouldn't have to see the nudity.) When the foreigner leaves, he gets back his share and the employer's share of his social security taxes. If he dies in America, he never gets any social security or any refund of his taxes.

This last part is the key to the plan. The foreigner must be given an incentive to leave, or he won't. We are not good at negative incentives--- the clothing confiscation--- but we are much better at positive incentives--- the tax refund.

Whether we want to discourage permanent immigration at all is a separate question. I used to worry that unrestricted immigration would corrupt America-- that letting in 30 million Mexicans would mean that America would become more like Mexico, with a corrupt government and people, superstitious religion, and so forth. Now American morals and manners have become corrupt enough anyway that I wonder whether the 30 million Mexicans might not be a good influence on the rest of us. If so, the assimilation argument is turned on its head--- our aim should be to Mexicanize the decadent Anglos rather than to Americanize the brutish Mexicans.

[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.01.12b.htm . erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

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