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 osanna
Valdez has suffered a terrible, heart-breaking misfortune. Her husband
of 13 years was killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight
587 last Monday. He was taking a trip to the Dominican Republic,
the country of his birth. Ms. Valdez was born there, too. She is
an illegal immigrant in the U.S. Now she fears that if she accompanies
her husband's body to the Dominican Republic, she will not be allowed
back into the U.S.A. Antonio Hidalgo is in a similar fix. He lost
his 4-year-old daughter in the crash, and wants her buried in the
Dominican Republic. "I just want to get my baby home,"
says Mr. Hidalgo. He, like Ms. Valdez, fears that he will not be
allowed back in the U.S. if he leaves for the place he calls "home".
I picked up
these items from a story by Douglas Montero in New
York Post. Montero (who has now, apparently, managed to
extract his tongue from Fidel Castro's trastero, where it
was firmly lodged for the duration of the Elián González
affair) went on to introduce us to "community activist"
Fernando Mateo. Says Mr. Mateo: "These people ... did not want
to claim the bodies. They are terrified to admit that their wife,
husband, sister, brother and child are dead because they are illegal.
They were scared because they didn't know if they were going to
get arrested or deported." Montero continues:
Mateo sent
out an urgent plea to President Bush and local politicians to
enact an amnesty program for the illegal relatives of Flight 587
victims. To many, a "proper burial" means depositing
the remains of a loved one next to their mother, their father,
their grandparents. That's why the heartbroken illegal immigrants
are obligated to go home and risk giving up the life they have
established in New York. "These are the people who are trying
to put the pain aside and deal with the reality of tomorrow,"
Matteo said. "We have to do something for them."
A mean-spirited
person — the kind of person who writes for conservative magazines
— might want Mr. Montero to explain why, if these unfortunate
people have "established" a "life" in New York,
they still regard the Dominican Republic as "home." A
mean-spirited person with a particular dislike of government bureaucrats
might even suggest that the current, very pitiable, distress of
Ms. Valdez and Mr. Hidalgo is largely the fault of the U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Service. If the INS had enforced U.S. laws in
the first place, as
they are charged to do, these poor people would not be in such
tragic difficulties. I am, of course, not either of those mean-spirited
kinds of person.
Now let us
consider the case of Deena Gilbey, whose husband was killed in the
World Trade Center on September 11th. Mr. Gilbey was here on an
H-1 visa, which means that he had been admitted to the U.S. to work
at a specific job for a specific company. His wife is an H-4, which
is defined to be the spouse of an H-1. An H-4 is one of the lowest
categories of U.S. visa, with no right to take paid employment at
all. Both Gilbeys came here from Britain. The couple had been in
the U.S. for nine years, and would have attained permanent resident
status if the INS had not lost a set of papers the Gilbeys had filed,
obliging them to go back to square one of the application process.
Just days after Mr. Gilbey's death, the INS — yes, folks, that
same INS that had screwed up the Gilbeys' application for residence,
the same INS that had waved Mohammed Atta through its checkpoints
with a smile and a greeting — sent Mrs. Gilbey a computer-generated
letter telling her to pack up and leave, as she no longer had any
right to be here without her husband.
What do you
think of these cases? Of course, all of them have been taken in
hand by sympathetic politicians. Mrs. Gilbey's has actually been
resolved, by act of Congress, and she can stay here. The case of
the Dominican illegals has been taken up by New York's two U.S.
senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, and we can be pretty
confident that some sort of deal will be cut for them, too. (Though
in this case I'm not sure that "sympathetic" is the right
qualifier for Schumer and Clinton. "Politicians with an eye
on key constiuencies," might be closer to the mark.) My guess
is that most NRO readers will wish good luck to Mrs. Gilbey, but
insist that Ms. Valdez and Mr. Hidalgo be denied reentry if they
leave. Mrs. Gilbey, after all, followed the rules; Ms. Valdez and
Mr. Hidalgo ignored them — broke the law, in fact.
All these cases,
though, illustrate two key facts about U.S. immigration laws. First,
they are routinely bent, or changed ad hoc, by politicians for reasons
sometimes good (Mrs. Gilbey, for my money) and sometimes bad (the
Dominican illegals, as much as we pity their grief). Second, they
are administered with a maximum of incompetence and inefficiency.
Nobody much favors their absolutely inflexible application; and
nobody who has ever had to deal with the INS believes that agency
capable of it, anyway.
A good friend
of mine, a Chinese lady, was, like Mrs. Gilbey, an H-4 for several
years, with no legal right to work. She and her husband had no kids
for most of that time, and it is a very hard thing to ask an intelligent
and capable young woman to sit home doing nothing for years at a
stretch. It is especially hard to do so in New York City, where
"off the books" jobs are to be had for the asking, at
quite decent wages. My friend, who is now a citizen, worked pretty
steadily through those H-4 years, mostly for small businesses in
Chinatown, run by people who considered that they would be disgracing
themselves before the shrines of their ancestors if they paid more
than one percent of their income in taxes. Typical of the outfits
she worked for was a jewelry store on Canal Street that accepted
payment only in cash. They put the cash into a large safe in the
back room. When there were so many bills in the safe that its door
wouldn't shut, the store owners took a long-weekend trip to play
the tables at Atlantic City, carrying the money with them in bags.
If you say "taxes" to a merchant in Chinatown, he snickers.
In an atmosphere like that, it's awfully hard to maintain respect
for the rules. Was my friend doing a wrong thing? Yes, she was.
Would she have been deported if the INS's rules had been applied
with inflexible strictness? Yes, she would. Can I, in all conscience,
say I favor such inflexible strictness? I guess I can't.
Back in August
1988, Nicholas Colchester wrote a
famous editorial in The Economist, in which he divided
the world's systems into the "crunchy" and the "soggy."
Crunchy systems
are those in which small changes have big effects, leaving those
affected by them in no doubt about whether they are up or down,
rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. ... Sogginess is
comfortable uncertainty... The richer a society becomes, the soggier
its systems get. Light switches no longer turn on or off: they dim...
A crunchy policy is not necessarily right, only more certain than
a soggy one to deliver the results that it deserves...
The human tendency
— certainly my tendency — is to favor crunchiness
in theory, but a degree of sogginess in practice. Everybody wants
to see the rules firmly and fairly applied, but when confronted
with a Ms. Valdez or a Mrs. Gilbey, people — though different
people in different cases — start to scratch their heads and
say: "We-e-e-ell..." Hard cases make bad law, and any
experienced judge knows the virtues of a little measured sogginess.
(This is true in civilian life, anyway. Military law is another
matter — think of Billy Budd.)
U.S. immigration
policy is, I think it can be said without much fear of contradiction,
far gone in sogginess. It is so far gone that you can, like Ms.
Valdez, break the law without anybody minding very much. It is in
fact considered impolite, in respectable
circles, to refer to an alien who breaks the immigration law
as an "illegal alien." He is an "undocumented alien,"
a "day laborer," an "asylum seeker" — anything
but a law-breaker. Why things have got to this pass is an interesting
question. Probably a large part of the answer is just that in an
age of exploding Third World populations and easy international
travel, there are too many who want to immigrate, and not enough
intelligent people in the INS to manage the process rationally,
under any rules. And, of course, the thicker our kudzu-tangle of
laws, rules, regulations, and taxes grows, the easier it is for
people like my friend and her Chinatown employers, and Ms. Valdez
and Mr. Hidalgo — not to mention Mohammed Atta — to hide
securely among them.
Anyone remember
Jim Croce? He was a singer-songwriter of the early 1970s who specialized
in ballads about life down at the minimum-wage end of the working
class. One of my favorites was "Workin'
At The Car Wash Blues":
Well, I should
be sittin' in an air-conditioned office in a swivel chair
Talkin' some trash to the secretaries
Sayin', Here, now mam-ma, come on over here.
Instead, I'm stuck here rubbin' these fenders with a rag
And walkin' home in soggy old shoes
With them steadily depressin', low down mind messin'
Workin' at the car wash blues...
How strange
this song seems now! For it to make any sense, it would have to
be sung in Spanish. No English-speaking person works at a car wash
any more, Ally
McBeal notwithstanding. That's one consequence of our soggy
immigration laws. Soggy immigration laws mean no more "walkin'
home in soggy old shoes" — not for U.S. citizens, anyway.
Another, related, consequence is that all those Americans who, 30
years ago, would have been working at the car wash now have to be
found something else to do. This is accomplished on the best socialist
principles. The government creates make-work jobs for them: some
light paper-shuffling, some low-grade repetitive tasks indoors —
"sittin' in an air-conditioned office in a swivel chair"
— in a unionized government bureaucracy where nothing need
be done well, where the interests of those being "served"
come absolutely last (with the national interest, when it intrudes,
second to last), and where there is no penalty for incompetence
or failure. Oh, look! — we have arrived back at the INS.
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