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Security and Freedom
- Leave decisions to individuals, not government.
- Allow liberty to prevail over government control.
- Let the smallest level of government possible handle policy issues.
If I had my druthers, I would allow total freedom of travel. Preventing people from moving from one place to another is against my concept of freedom. Having said that, and before I get chorus of complaints, in today's world this is completely impossible. If we had a perfect world without hate, discrimination, greed, and war, maybe we could allow total freedom to travel, but we can't. Because we live in an imperfect world, we have to secure our borders.
Whenever there has been terrorist activity in this country, the first question always is: Who are they and how did they get here? If we had been keeping proper attention to aliens, we would know the answers. It would be easy to say, let's enforce our laws. But the truth is we haven't been enforcing our laws, because we have failed to properly fund INS. Now we have an estimated 12 million illegal aliens in our country. Another truth is that there is no practical, cost-effective way to find and permanently expel these people. We selectively enforce laws all the time, and we did not enforce this one; now we have to deal with the circumstance. And for humanitarian and economic reasons, expelling them is not a viable tactic, even if it were possible. Breaking up families and expelling people who have lived and contributed here for long periods of time is not the American way. And many of these people contribute to our economy and lifestyle, doing the jobs American workers do not want to do. Yes, we can seal some borders, but our borders are thousands of miles long, and it is equally impractical and economically not feasible to seal them all. Those who wish to enter illegally will find a way.
It really goes against my views, but I am afraid the only answer is some kind of national identification system. For those who say this is a reduction of freedom, they are right, it is. We must relinquish a bit of privacy and endure the disruption in our lives to assure security. And we really have come quite far toward requiring identification through back door programs such as picture driver's licenses. A comprehensive plan would reliably identify one as either a citizen or as a resident alien. Those who are not legal residents must be given the opportunity to become legal, either by some kind of work program or by adopting a course toward citizenship, or expelled if they have no legitimate reason to be here from this country's perspective. Soon, because legal citizenship and/or residence would have to be proven, those who were not, would be easily identified by all of us.
Moving forward, INS or some such agency would have to be charged with making immigration process fair and quick, keeping track of aliens in this country, and expelling illegal residents. It will require an increase in funding, but it will be more than worth the investment. We are spending billions on homeland security, and on many, many projects that are only tangentially related to security that would probably not be necessary, if we knew who everyone was and enforced real immigration laws and procedures. The savings would easily eclipse the cost.
Further Reading:
Coming soon...
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