A Proposed Solution to The Crisis On The Southern U.S. Border.

I’m done playing games… Let’s talk. People have this terrible habit of defending the very actions that they would otherwise attack – based on who commits the act in question. If the actor is on our “team,” they get not only a pass, but, our full-throated defense; if the actor is on the other team, then they will be mercilessly attacked for the very same actions. That is really poor approach to peace talks between warring nations, but, when you’re talking about individuals defending and attacking sub-groups of people within your own country, it’s just idiocy. So, let’s dispatch with the playground politics and get to business. I’m a regular guy, offering a solution and I might even be worth listening to – and not just because I’m a professional mediator, with a particular skill set which has been honed for brokering agreements between hostile parties. Instead, the reason that you might want to listen to me is because I’m not running for office. I don’t ever want to run for office. I don’t want your vote, your support, or your money for my political party, or my favorite candidate. So, maybe, you can listen to my words, at face value, without feeling the need to accept or reject them because of the letter that follows my name. Do me a solid, though… Don’t filter my words through someone else’s talking points. Don’t outsource your brain power to someone who does want your money and your vote. Use your own brain and consider my proposal.

Final caveat: I’m not saying this idea is perfect or easy to implement. If you’re looking for that idea, you’ll never find it. If you do find it, then you are too myopic or naive to see that it is, in fact, not perfect. I’ll tell you right now that there are parts of my own proposal that I don’t like. It is designed to be a simple, effective compromise to a decades old problem.

Create a secure border through the creation of a nation-wide refugee processing facility along the southern border.

As a sovereign nation, we ought to have secure borders.¹  I don’t like the idea of building a wall. There’s a great deal of evidence that suggests that it won’t even work. If you doubt that, ask yourself whether you could find a way to go over, under, or around a wall, in order to save your own life, or the lives of your loved ones? The honest answer is, probably: “Yes, yes, I would find a way.” Are there villains and criminals that are coming across the border, too? Yes, of course there are. If there is a problem with the criminal actors, of course we need to deal with that problem. However, saying that they are all criminal actors shows a real ignorance to the nature of the problem. Most of these people are people desperately seeking a life for their families that is free of unrelenting poverty, street crime, and hopelessness – they also prop up our way of life by virtue of creating a permanent underclass.  So, instead of building a wall, we take that same land (albeit a wider swath of land), and we build a nationwide refugee processing camp, along the border, and you fence it in and guard it. I don’t care if you guard it with soldiers, or forest rangers or all the DMV employees that you know would have a bigger deterrent effect than a moat filled with crocodiles. Build homes to house these refugees while their status is being determined. Use 3D printers to build the homes, which will allow them to be extremely cost efficient. It will also allow families to remain intact. Find labor which they can do to cover the costs associated with providing for them.

Anyone that enters the refugee processing center does so of their own accord and knowingly submits to the rules of the center. At the same time, those same people are granted certain protections.

I’m not talking about giving them the same rights as US citizens. Instead, I’m suggesting the creation of a space that is analogous to the international arrival area of the airport: You aren’t going to be counted as being on U.S. soil, however, we are making certain promises and allowing your entry subject to certain conditions. If we find out that you’re a criminal, you’re going to jail, and the result of that will be the same as everyone else that went to jail: you’re not going to get to stay with your kids. However, if you’re not a criminal, your family remains intact. In time, I’m sure we could even find some ways to offset the expense of housing and processing all these people, and perhaps, to leave them with a skill set that will provide them opportunity in their own country, in the process.

Create a special visa program.

Don’t call it a guest worker program, because then you’ll get castigated (right G. Dubya?). The program limits the number of entrants, provides them with access to a limited number of jobs, in a limited number of fields (that is not a pun, and is not meant to represent an actual field, on a farm – but I refuse to change the wording to accommodate some idiot that will take me out of context). If you think that isn’t fair, then I offer this retort: if they don’t like the deal, then they can go home. It allows us to preserve our jobs for citizens, while keeping labor costs for the jobs that are currently performed by those here unlawfully in the same range. The workers will happily stay, because, that’s all they wanted to do in the first place. Everyone wins, accept the people looking to start political food fights. Those people lose… which means that, truly, we all win.

Create draconian laws that would create strong disincentives for circumventing the refugee processing centers illegally.  

However, the consequences of showing up to seek refugee status more frequently than would otherwise be permitted (pursuant to a set of rules that would have to be drafted), absent some major event (such as a natural disaster or the fall of a government), or, of breaking into or out of these facilities would be extremely harsh, as there would be no excuse to break into somewhere that allows you free access, and illegally crossing the border into the country when we are housing you shows bad faith. 

In conclusion…

As I said, there are aspects of this plan that I don’t like, at all. I don’t like the idea of a border that looks like the DMZ in between North Korea and South Korea. I don’t like the idea of a militarized border; both because of the optics, and because of what it would mean for our service-members. I don’t like the idea of the flood of people who it could bring. I don’t like to think of people in terms of their cost to us. I don’t like the idea of having to trust the government to properly implement, well, almost anything. However, it is a legitimate plan, and, right now, we’ve got nothing good happening.

If you want my political take on this issue? Sorry. I’m not ready to give it yet.

 

¹I’m not interested in rehashing the manner in which we came to be a country. Suffice it to say, at some point, there were not nations. No one laid claim to the land. Things were messy. Wars were fought. This is how things developed for millennia. My purposes, presently, are aimed at moving forward and solving problems. If you haven’t any interest in either of those two aims, we aren’t going to find any common ground, which is rather unfortunate for everyone involved –  including the human beings that you claim to wish to protect.

In Other Stupid News: British School Bans Shorts – It’s Skirts Or Trousers, Boys…

No… Really a British secondary school district implemented a “gender neutral dress code,” which obviously doesn’t take the common sense approach allowing little girls to wear shorts – don’t be silly. The policy just says that boys can either wear pants, or skirts. In other news, U.K. officials say men may now choose a career path of “barefoot and pregnant,” but, ladies must stay in the kitchen and out of the job market. Now, before I continue, I’d like to just stop and point out that, this, this is the moment that we all most of us, usually, go off the rails, because we know that every one has lost their god damned minds and we mentally attach whatever idiot idea to which we were just subjected, to a group of people which vastly exceeds the number of people that believe, support, or are responsible for, the aforementioned idiocy. Let’s not do that this time, ok? In fact, the British headlines belie the fact that, they too, can’t believe that the teenage boys are being forced to wear skirts.

Here’s the thing though – this is the kind of point-proving-stupidity that is the source of political and social regression. The idea of a gender neutral uniform policy isn’t a bad idea. After all, why should my daughter be forced to wear a skirt? She isn’t a doll for society to dress up and make into their image, and, she isn’t second to a boy by virtue of her gender. On the other hand, it should be obvious that the solution to leveling the playing field is to take the shackles off of the unjustly imprisoned, it isn’t to place shackles on everyone else, in the name of fairness (calm down, it’s just an analogy – I’m not saying that wearing a skirt is a prison sentence). If you are wondering how this leads to regression, it is in the inevitable backlash. The backlash will come, and things will revert to the way that they were, or else become even more conservative. Sociocultural pendulums are the inverse of the rational real world pendulum. They gain momentum with each swing. Then, instead of girls and boys both getting to wear shorts, and focus on their education, they’ll all be wearing burqas. Not really, but, you get the point.

Sidenote: culture has changed for adolescent males in a serious way over the last few decades. Many extremely heterosexual males will be 100% ok with wearing a skirt and either think that it’s hilarious or else simply not care. That isn’t the point, though. This isn’t able sexual orientation. This was a wasted opportunity to create a gender neutral policy that made sense and they blew it.