Trappin wrote:
Propose a better, more efficient and less 'horrifying" method of tracking people visiting on visas.
Well, the "horrifying" parts were speculation on the part of other people. He just said he'd hire the CEO of Fed Ex to come up with a system. Other people went down the whole "He's treating them like packages" and "He's proposing we put bar codes on them" paths. I'd assume he was just talking about having a coordinated system/database/whatever to consolidate information about where people with visas are at any given time using normal methods (cause they do things like rent homes, buy things, have jobs, pay taxes, etc). Right now, we don't make any effort to even pay attention to them at all, nor associate their activities with the fact that they are here temporarily (in theory). And when their visas expire, it's not like anyone checks up on them. They just expire, and then at some future point if someone happens to run into them, and happens to check their status, then maybe something might be done.
I happen to agree that this is the least problematic side of the issue to deal with though. The real problem isn't folks who overstay their visas. We know who they are, have some documentation on them (even if it's not shared well), and they presumably went through at least some process to check to see if they are like wanted criminals or terrorists or whatever prior to letting them in. The problem is with
undocumented aliens. These are the folks who sneak through the border without ever going through any sort of checkpoint. We don't know who they are, where they came from originally, what they're doing here, or anything at all about them (including how many there are). They are a problem because while I'm sure most are just here looking for work, some are certainly engaged in criminal enterprises of various sorts, and some may be involved in even more nefarious things. And even those who are here just to work present a problem in that because they had to enter illegally, they had to have some kind of help from someone else to do so. Today's illegal border crossers are not brought across for a few hundred dollars by a mom and pop coyote operation who have a cousin on the other side with a van. They're brought across by organized criminal cartels who charge a stiff price for doing so, often resulting in the illegal being indentured to them as a result. The best result of that is a portion of the illegals earnings going to further fund the cartel (they're not doing this out of a desire to help people live better lives after all), with the potential for a "company store" type situation where the illegal can basically never earn his or her way out from under their thumbs. Worst results are some pretty horrific examples of effective human slavery, prostitution, trafficking, and forced criminality to "pay off" their debts.
I know that this issue often comes off as being "anti-immigrant", but for many of these people, they'd be far far better off if our nation had a well enforced and consistent policy on this rather than the jumble of rules, only haphazardly enforced, that we have now. Thinking you're helping people just trying to find a better life for themselves by looking the other way on this isn't really helping at all. It's rarely a case of sunshine in the land of the free for the people who sneak across the border illegally. It's more often a case of long term suffering that they'd never have entered into if they'd know what was going to happen. Spend some time talking to some of the law enforcement guys dealing with human trafficking and you'll never look at the immigration issue the same way again. This is not about "us vs them". It's about "them being taken advantage of by the other them, and us sitting on the side lines because we don't want to look like we're anti-immigrant". It's a terribly simplistic view of the issue IMO.