Immigration Reform Editorial

I recently read an interesting editorial in the new york times, "Reforming Immigration for Good" by Mae M. Ngai. In the article Ngai expresses his take on Obama plan to deal with immigration; allowing some 11 million immigrants citizenship in exchange for tougher border control. While he agrees with Obama's proposed plan to provide easier access to citizenship for immigrants to the United States; he argues that the rest of the plan will not help solve the problem.

Ngai agrues that many of these ideas have already been tried and have failed in the past and will do so again. For example spending billions of dollars on strengthening boarder control only reduced illegal immigration but did not stop it entirely. As Ngai puts it, border control made for "good politics" misleading the general population into thinking it was making a difference. When in fact "...only the Great Recession was able to reduce the net flow of Mexican illegal immigration to effectively zero."

Ngai states the solution to the problem isn't in strengthening border control but rather in how we distribute visas between immigrants from different countries. The author believes we should change the way we allocate visas based on the ideas "introduced by Senator Philip A. Hart, a Michigan Democrat, in the early 1960s." Hart's proposal of distributing the visas was based on the populations of the countries and the percentage of their population that want to immigrate.

I believe the purpose Ngai's argument was to better inform policy makers and voters on the inadequacies of the current system in place today. 

I agree with the author's logic in why he believes the distribution of visas is the source of the problem and how taking the "flexibility and fairness" from Hart's original plan and applying it to today's world could provide a better outcome than what is currently in place today and what Obama has proposed for immigration "reform". It seems ridiculous to me that small countries in Europe are given the same number of visas as Mexico or China where the number of people allowed to immigrate compared to their total population is a mere fraction of a percent.

Politics and me

I don't have any political experiance or any strong views on politics. I'm taking the class because I need a government credit. I also hope to gain more knowledge on how our government works and to formulate my own political views. I think its important as I become an adult to take an active role in making sure our system works. When I vote for the first time I want to be able to make my decisions knowing what is important and what to look for in a candidate.
I find politics to be themost difficult and boring above all other social studies classes. I much prefer to study world cultures rather than politics. However, I'm intrested in findng out how politics influences the culture of the United States and how the culture influences politics.