Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!
- Make it very difficult for undocumented aliens to repatriate funds to their home countries. This would discourage many "breadwinner" aliens from coming here. Changes in banking regulations would be the place to start, and attractively cost-free to taxpayers. The details and logistics would be challenging, and care would be needed to avoid messing with legitimate business transactions, but I would think we could make it really hard to move small amounts of money into certain countries. By confiscating funds that people tried to send back to their home countries, the anti-repatriation reforms could be self funding, at least initially.
- A good argument can be made that the biggest immigration-related issue is not illegal immigration, but diminished assimilation. At the same time, one driver of illegal immigration is surely that the minimum wage in the U.S. is set above a market-clearing level: when all the minimum wage jobs are filled, there is still work left to be done and workers willing to do it, many of them undocumented.
So why not address both issues at the same time? Expand legal immigration. Install a lower minimum wage for non-citizens. Install standards for citizenship that encourage assimilation--such as an English-proficiency requirement. Make citizenship a more desirable status than it is currently, as it was in ancient Rome. This way, you would be giving immigrants a concrete incentive to assimilate. Of course, by becoming citizens they'd be pricing themselves out of the sub-minimum-wage job market, so you would need a constant supply of new immigrants to keep those jobs filled. - Take a close look at the 14th Amendment and current citizenship laws. Is it really true, constitutionally speaking, that citizenship must be extended to children born to anyone in U.S. territory? It's a pretty counterintuitive scheme. I'm not going to take the time to analyze this issue, or examine the legislative history of the 14th Amendment or the applicable statutes, but it is a pretty counterintuitive scheme. I think the 14th Amendment was meant to ensure that former slaves would have citizenship. I also think that when you are construing something that says:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside."
the canons of construction say to assume that the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is there for a reason and therefore should be construed as having a meaning and not as adding nothing at all. But I wasn't going to get into all that.
posted at 3:01 PM
3 Comments:
what does it really mean, Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp?
The New Colossus
Now, when I encounter an unfamiliar line that seems to be from a work of literature, I put it between quotation marks and run a Google search. I sometimes assume anyone in 2006 would do the same thing, but I'm probably wrong.
Anyway, this is the line the Statue of Liberty speaks immediately before the one that begins "Give me your tired . . . ." In both lines she is addressing "ancient lands," i.e., the places the immigrants are emigrating from. "[S]toried pomp" refers to all the grand and wonderful things those countries have been known for thoughout history--decidedly not including their huddled masses. The line in the heading is an imperative construction and that is more easily seen if you supply a comma between "keep" and "ancient," as I would argue the poet should have.
I see that many sources have a comma where I said there should be one, so I've inserted it in my title. Just shows that you can't always trust the #1 Google-ranked document. Shocking.
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