Ramesh:

On the point about an establishment of religion, you are right. On the other point — that we should wish our government agencies to behave as we should wish ourselves and our acquaintances to (compassionate, charitable, generous, trusting), I am not convinced.

Any such government agency will be massively taken advantage of. Its overworked, underpaid, average-intelligence, political-pawn employees will easily be worn down and outfoxed by clever tricksters whose stake in the game — US residence, cash benefits — is much, much higher than the agency’s.

The reward for compassion by an individual is spiritual blessing; the reward for compassion by a government is large-scale fraud and the looting of state assets. This is especially true in the matter of immigration, where the pool from which the tricksters are drawn is the earth’s entire non-US population. Out of that six billion, there are millions who are smart and unscrupulous enough to game even an intelligently designed US immigration system. And, as was all too apparent from the Senate debates this past week, an intelligently designed system is not what we are going to have.

You don’t need to be a Randian yourself (I’m not one) to want your government to behave Randianly.

In response to an earlier post of mine, the Scottish blogger Martin Kelly has sent me some useful links about Britain’s dysfunctional asylum system. The system was intended to offer a refuge for oppressed and persecuted people from other lands; it has now deteriorated to the point where “asylum seeker” is a synonym for “foreign scammer.” See here, for instance, and click on some of Martin’s links, like “the scale of the UK’s asylum backlog.”

Martin also has some useful links on the document-fraud business, which is indeed thriving in the UK. See here for some details.

Like every other (legal) immigrant, I have spent dozens of hours grappling with the US immigration bureaucracy face to face. As individuals, the immigration employees I dealt with came in all sorts. Many were very pleasant and conscientious. I would have to say, though, that if you wish our immigration service to act as a dispenser of charity — well, be careful what you wish for.