TWENTY-ONE TOPICS FOR AN IMMIGRATION DIALOGUE
If you happen to stumble into a discussion about immigration, may I make a suggestion. Establish this as a ground rule: when person A states something, person B cannot use “but” in his or her response. Note: Ducking any foolish thought of prioritizing the points below, I have put them in alphabetical order.

*African-Americans until relatively recently were loathe to be critical in public about the actions of other African-Americans. Analogously, does it seem that immigration advocates rarely speak out when an undocumented individual commits a truly criminal act?
*Canada welcomes immigrants – if they have certain skills. The American system is almost the reverse, the statutory emphasis being on family reunification. Should the USA put more emphasis on skills?
*Crossing into the USA without documentation is a misdemeanor carrying a maximum sentence of six-months in jail. Many/most? plead guilty, avoid jail, and go back to their home country (to try again?)
*Do businesses want tighter scrutiny of the E-Verify system for validating the status of new employees?
*Does the average older American realize that his social security check is dependent on payments into the program, which means younger workers — which means that more immigrants, not fewer, are needed since the white population is not regenerating its numbers?
*How does ICE determine which countries participate in the diversity visa lottery system?
*How much of the blame for the criminal activity and political corruption in South and Central America should be shouldered by the USA? Is the response different for similar situations in, for example, Malaysia or South Africa or Turkey?
*If a parent, about to become illegal by walking into the USA without any documentation, loses temporary custody of his/her children – themselves illegal for the same reasons, what is their legal, not moral, claim against separation of the family? (Unaccompanied apprehended children number about 50,000 annually, 2/3 from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador [WSJ: 6-30-18])
*If a border wall was accepted as something to be constructed and DACA-holders immediately were placed on a path to become green card-holders, would immigration advocates accept the deal?
*If American schools treated blue-collar jobs as desirable alternative routes to a career, and were equitably supported in terms of both money and quality staffing, would seasonal employers have many more job applications and therefore not be concerned that the number (81,000) of H-2B visas available for Summer hires of non-Americans is inadequate?
*If I, an American from birth, rob my neighbor, will my church prevent the police from arresting me?
*Is the country’s most pressing employment problem finding more low-paid service workers, ranging from the agricultural sector to personal care and home health aides? At present, these job categories (as well as many in the higher paid but unpredictable construction trades) are heavily filled by immigrants.
*If I walk into France from Belgium and have a baby, is he or she a French citizen?
*Is the real problem/challenge behind constructing a logical immigration program that the USA is in a unique position, given its size, its job-creation capability, its historical pledge to be open to all comers? In other words, expectations of the USA are wholly different than the expectations of any other country.
*Let’s say you have a Russian, a Mexican, and an Indian who have overstayed their tourist visas? Should they be treated differently?
*Should the USA welcome all asylum-seekers from high crime rate countries, where presumably the applicants can prove that they meet all the asylum tests, perhaps most important being that they would be in imminent danger if they returned to their home country? Total seekers in 2016 were 180,000, compared with a typical annual admission count of 25,000 (WSJ 6-30-18).
*The American immigration system must be changed. Does it make sense to scrap ICE and start over?
*Were jet travel, the internet, and smartphones around during previous waves of immigration?
*What would happen if the tourist visa was shortened to three months, from the existing six?
*Which immigration policy group would be against hiring more judges and reducing what can be a multi-year wait to resolve one’s case? Right now, there are 334 immigration judges, juggling 2,000 cases apiece, with a typical resolution time of two years. The backlog is nearly 700,000 (WSJ: May 24, 2018).
*Would you prefer a completely open border? Would the neighboring states pick up the additional tab for education, healthcare, etc.? Would all states pay proportionately, based on their economies?

Bob Howitt, wkbj@att.net; 973-537-1814; not a PhD.

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Ah yes, it’s a wonderful idea, long overdue in fact. Wait, it’s actually simply business.

With the pool of affluent white high school graduates about to peak, those non-accountable entities known as colleges and universities now are trotting out their long-hidden (i.e., virtually non-existent) commitment to diversity and inclusion (t-shirts and bumper stickers available at full retail prices at the corporate bookstore on campus).

The headlines are there: “we, the esteemed keepers of the higher education torch, want to bring to our schools more high-achieving minority students.”

And so it happens, really good kids of color, exemplary of character and motivation, possessors of seemingly attractive high school GPAs, receive nice scholarship packages and enroll at e.g., Middlebury and Lafayette and Syracuse. (This essay is not about the tiny sliver relevant to the Ivy League, although many of the points made could be apropos.) In too many instances, they find the academic rigor of their intended major beyond their capabilities, a cold realization which hits immediately, as in the Fall semester of their freshman year.
Nobody relevant to the college/initial thought process about a major ever has had a heart-to-heart discussion with these students about the academic quality of their high school preparation, nor about what a particular job requires in terms of subject matter mastered. The students had gone to decent public or private Catholic schools. They had done well. The problem – an academically inadequate high school curricula/rigor – never surfaced until the student was hit in the face at college.

The various reactions which ensue include:
*significant slippage in self-confidence *downgrading of the major, e.g., from engineering to psychology *questions about whether the right college has been chosen *criticism of the college for not being more supportive *increased interest in a semester abroad, simply to be in a different environment *irritation at the quality and quantity of guidance counseling they have received at each step of the education letter *a desire to drop college and go home to the family which loves the student no matter what has happened*an emphasis on getting enough credits to finish (the phrase “get out” is sometimes heard) in four years, to have the diploma, even if the newly chosen major is not one with which the student is truly in love … and do not ask what career/job the student has in mind.

EVERY ADULT WHO CARES ABOUT THESE KIDS MUST FIGHT FOR BETTER EDUCATION IN THE K-12 PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM, WHICH INCLUDES CHARTER SCHOOLS. TO NOT DO SO IS TO BE DISENGENUOUS—YOU CANNOT ACCEPT THE CURRENT K-12 INADEQUACIES AND EXPECT LARGE NUMBERS OF “HIGH-ACHIEVING” MINORITY STUDENTS TO FLOURISH IN COLLEGE.

YOU CANNOT BE SILENT WHEN, E.G., ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE NAACP SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE VERY PUBLIC SCHOOLS (FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE PUBLIC!) WHICH ARE DISPROPORTIONATELY SUCCESSFUL IN GETTING MINORITY STUDENTS FULLY READY FOR COLLEGE.
TEACHING IS THE NUMBER ONE PROFESSION; K-12 TEACHERS SHOULD BE PAID MORE. HOWEVER, YOU CANNOT BE SILENT WHEN TEACHERS UNIONS SEEMINGLY SAY THAT THE DEMANDS OF THEIR CONSTITUENCY ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE SUCCESS OF STUDENTS.

YOU CANNOT BE SILENT WHEN THE ADULTS IN THE POLITICAL BACKROOMS ARE SCREAMING ABOUT ADULT ISSUES AND IGNORING THE DAMAGE BEING DONE TO STUDENTS.

If you truly want more minority students to be collegians who graduate — with majors they want and are good at, you must speak out about the quality of their high school academic and counseling preparation. To not do so is to give the lie to all your warm-hearted sentiments.

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