Ineptitude and Confusion

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Outliers, notes that it takes about 10,000 hours of "practice" to become expert practitioner in almost any field. For most of us, this means that once we enter the work force, it takes about 5 years to develop expertise in our craft.

Most of us talk about common sense when it comes to preventing problems. But when it came to the "O Rings" on the Challenger space shuttle, did we heed the call of the engineer who wanted to call off the launch? Or, did we heed the needs of the politicians who wanted to send the bird up on schedule? Common sense gets thrown away when large institutions get involved with doing anything, as they have too many competing interests.

Right now, we're seeing the American right wing make a lot of noise about Obama not doing what America needs. Do they expect a "Superman"? And what about the "dittoheads" who parrot what Rush Limbaugh says? Could any of them do any better? It's a miracle that Obama has not crashed and burned, given less than 2 years on the job and the fires he has had to fight.

Both political parties are responsible for the mess we're in. The oil spill has shown how corrupt the MMR department became, because the United States has had no energy policy (except to buy it from risky areas such as the Middle East) and has had no intention of pursuing one. The law in Arizona shows what the lack of a real immigration policy has done to the United States - We depend on the illegal aliens who do much of the grunt work native Americans no longer do. When was the last time we went to a diner which didn't have illegal staff where the public didn't see them? What about many of our gardening services - I'll bet that many of their workers are illegally here as well. Do we want to kick them all out and end up paying more for these services? Most people will say NO to that. So what do we do?

Let's focus on immigration first. (I've covered Resource/Energy policy in a previous posting.) The people who want us to seal the border are correct. How can we have a serious immigration policy when we can't control who is immigrating to the United States? We need realistic penalties for those employers who hire illegal help. This also means that we need an easy (100% accurate) way to validate a prospective employee's right to look for work in this country. This is likely to be a big problem, but not an unmanageable one - I don't hear of any problems with US Passports being issued to illegal aliens. A similar document could be used as proof as our right to work here, and it could have biometric validation for safety.

But what about our dependency on the illegal work force? It would be inhumane to send these people home to countries where no work is available *and* it would disrupt much of the service sector economy we depend on these days. The conservatives are right when they talk of these immigrants as having broken laws. Why should they be first on line to be legalized? Once legal, why should they be first on line to become citizens? They have shown us a great disrespect by breaking the law for the first action they do on American soil.

I propose that any program developed as part of a real immigration policy consist of the following:

1. Building an effective border "fence" to keep people from crossing our Southern border illegally.

2. Create a foolproof way to validate that a person has the right to work here, and have meaningful penalties for those employers who hire illegals without appropriate due diligence.

3. For a one year period, create a temporary amnesty, where people illegally resident in the United States could apply for residency (not leading to US Citizenship for them or their children once legal residents). This application may not be done on United States soil, but must be sent to the United States from foreign soil. (In short, the illegals must go home to apply for legalization of their status.)

4. Only legal immigrants and their offspring may gain United States citizenship. (We may need to clarify this with an amendment to the constitution.) However, illegal aliens (and their children) who filed for legal residency (according to rules of #3 above) may only become American Nationals - they may carry American passports (like residents of some Pacific islands), work in the United States, travel freely, but NOT vote or hold public office. In short, they gain permanent green cards and American passports.

Even with these changes, this is the tip of the iceberg. We need the labor, and they need the work. All I'm proposing is a humane way of breaking the political deadlock and making political reality reflect the reality we all see every day.