September 18, 2013

It can't be that complicated

From National Review:
No Excuse for Amnesty First
By  Mark Krikorian
September 17, 2013 5:21 PM
 
One of the reasons the amnesty-first crowd has opposed making legalization contingent on the complete implementation of enforcement measures is that they think it would take too long. 
Whatever you think of that argument, its factual basis has been eliminated by a new report from my colleague Janice Kephart. She took a close look at the options for biometric recording of the departures of legal foreign visitors at airports and seaports and found that, contrary to administration claims, it’s both technically feasible and cost-effective. 
The Gang of Eight bill requires such a system to be in place a decade in the future, maybe, as a condition for the amnesty recipients to upgrade their legal status from green-card-lite to green-card-premium. Among the concerns of critics is that once all the illegals have been legalized (which happens shortly after Obama has his bill-signing ceremony) the various enforcement promises, including the one for exit-tracking, will fade away and be ignored. This is not an idle concern; the development of an electronic exit-tracking system has already been mandated by Congress eight times (I’d thought it was just six) and we still don’t have one. If you don’t have a reliable record of which foreign visa-holders have left the country, you can’t know which ones overstayed and became illegal aliens (overstays are believed to account for some 40 percent of the total illegal-alien population). 
Kephart found that off-the-shelf technology exists to do airport and seaport exit-tracking right now, without having to wait until the 2020s.

The new Apple iPhone 5s is coming with a fingerprint detector built into the button so you won't need to input a password.

It can't be that complicated anymore.

26 comments:

  1. The new Apple iPhone 5s is coming with a fingerprint detector built into the button so you won't need to input a password.

    They've had laptops with fingerprint detectors for years.

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  2. I don't trust National Review they like Ted Cruz that wants to up legal immigration from the 600,000 mark to over 1 million. Also Cruz wants to get rid of country caps so Mexico, China and India can have millions of people come here legality. Lots of the politically can not be trusted either. In fact Obama being against these controls will at least defeat the bill, the right wants to sneak something in.

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  3. Foreign Expert9/18/13, 8:39 PM

    every other country on earth does exit checking already ... can't be that difficult.

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  4. Might be that some folks value the high level of measurement error.

    Neil Templeton

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  5. Harry Baldwin9/18/13, 9:10 PM

    Isn't it amazing what big government can't do when it doesn't want to.

    As we learned this week, that would include keeping track of brushes with the law and severe mental problems when it comes to minorities in the military.

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  6. Charlesz Martel9/18/13, 9:10 PM

    I have a fool-proof method of finding illegal immigrants.

    Give every illegal an American Express card. Let them charge stuff. Wait 30 days.

    American Express will find them - GUARANTEED!!

    I've always been amused by the bald-faced lies of people who claim that tracking people via driver's licenses is technically impossible or difficult. Visa processes millions of transactions daily. How hard is it to maintain a database that would verify whether a DL is real or not, and whether the holder is legally in the country? Every retail establishment has a credit card reader. It's not that difficult a database programming job.

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  7. every other country on earth does exit checking already ... can't be that difficult.


    Ah, so that's what they mean by "American exceptionalism".

    Yes we can't!

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  8. Draconian fines for those employing illigal immigrants would help too.

    This stuff is pretty easy, the fact is that there is no political will in either of the US parties to conrol immigration.

    Nick South Africa

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  9. Here in Hong Kong we've had fingerprint scanners at immigration checkpoints for many years. We get in and out of HK by inserting a smart ID card into a reader, then having one finger scanned. Takes about 30 seconds.

    It certainly is not technical difficulty that's holding back a similar system in the USA.

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  10. Ex Submarine Officer9/18/13, 11:42 PM

    "I have a fool-proof method of finding illegal immigrants.

    Give every illegal an American Express card. Let them charge stuff. Wait 30 days.

    American Express will find them - GUARANTEED!!"

    Haha. This is similar to my old solution for running down Osama bin Laden, which was to job it out to my alumni association. No matter where I've moved over the decades, it seems like practically the first call I get after getting phone service hooked up is from my alumni association tracking me down...

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  11. Now that people stopped caring about G-men collecting their call data, facebook and google history, here are some more things people will pretend to be angry about for a short while:

    Apple will be collecting the fingerprint data in a central database, in case they need to reset the finger print detector after a repair, of course.

    They will have forgotten, or will have been just about, to tell the public about the said database, after they will be discovered.

    They won't get even a slap on the wrist.

    And the alphabet soup agencies will have been accessing the fingerprint data not only of Americans without a criminal or service record, but also everyone with the said device the world over.

    Of course every suspect thus determined will already have an active GPS tracker, for convenience.

    Of course there are more sinister things to do with such a setup, but as usual some will never believe those could have happened. The above predictions are not of those kind. These discoveries will be so public as to be the subject of a TIME magazine report "Privacy or Security?" only if anyone cared that much that is.

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  12. NOBODY finds you faster than your alma mater's fundraisers!

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  13. It is not about the lack of technology. It is about recalcitrant agencies and years of legal wrangling which would follow a command to build the fence first.

    And by the time they get around to planting that first post, the cutting edge tech you mention will be obsolete, yet installed anyway, because it is what was called for in the original specs.

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  14. DHS needs to be disbanded and the old INS and its methods revived.

    There is only one enforcement technique that works, workplace enforcement. That is what the old INS did. You have to get up off your chair, out of your cubicle and go to every crappy business and job site and check every worker you see. Issuing warnings first, and not chasing down illegals might be possible.

    Walls don't work, or in the words of movie Gen. Patton, walls are monuments to stupidity.

    Melilla is a small city on the north coast of Africa which is part of Spain. It is small enough for a compete perimeter wall.

    Hunderds of immigrants rush barrier into Spain's Melilla enclave

    Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=be4_1379458003#7xfHxgMq5DIWLxdR.99

    As far as your biometric boondoggle that is a bait and switch. It will not solve any problems. The one and only solution is workplace enforcement. To do disband DHS and bring back the old INS with one function.

    Why not just admit that everything Bush did from the border wall to DHS was just a jobs program for bureaucrats and never meant to reduce immigration.

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  15. The problem with this angle of discussion on immigration legislation alludes back to an immigration bill that was being debated back in 1996. The EL CHEAPO labor lobby deliberately loaded down the legislation with tracking and ID card legislation for everyone (not just immigrants) in order to drum up opposition to the legislation from certain libertarian-ish quarters that would not have been there otherwise.

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  16. I supported a bio check but the best way of getting rid of illegal immigrants is the job market. In fact the US Census shown the biggest declines in New Mexico, Illinois and Georgia for immmirgant Hispanics. Only Georgia did tough laws against them while the other two states are kind of soft. New Mexico is a poor state that doesn't have a lot of meat processing or construction. Illinois construction is not strong since it doesn't have much of a population growth rate. Georgia did the laws but people going to Georgia might have slowed down and less construction work there.

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  17. For 2012, states with the lowest poverty rates included New Hampshire (10.0 percent), Alaska (10.1 percent), Maryland (10.3 percent), Connecticut (10.7 percent) and New Jersey (10.8 percent). Not all of these states are statistically different from one another.

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  18. 8.8 to 12.8, this is poverty in Utah from 2,000 to 2012, its still lower than most states and lower than Texas at 17.9 percent but its growing because the Mormon church is trying to get Hispanics and Mike Lee conservative from Utah favors a guest worker program and Utah already has a state guest worker program for farm work and some maid work.

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  19. The problem with this angle of discussion on immigration legislation alludes back to an immigration bill that was being debated back in 1996. The EL CHEAPO labor lobby deliberately loaded down the legislation with tracking and ID card legislation for everyone (not just immigrants) in order to drum up opposition to the legislation from certain libertarian-ish quarters that would not have been there otherwise.
    I heard that Grover Norquist got business people and religious people and gun owners to go against it. Libertarians on the average think too much like Grover and at the best like Rand Paul.

    9/19/13, 9:34 AM

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  20. There are good reasons to be wary of a national ID program; it's not just a libertarian nut thing. It may be worth it if it were part of strict immigration control; but it seems likely that we'd get the ID program with a promise of strict controls that never comes, the same way we keep getting amnesty.

    There's no reason we couldn't have an ID program for immigrants alone, but they're already supposed to have a green card or something like that for whichever visa program they used, right? Seems like another case of failing to enforce the system we already have.

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  21. The foolproof way to do most things is to force/cajole/coerce someone with more power to do it.

    In this case, let's say that 80% of Congressmembers knew that not having entry/exit would mean they'd lose their next election. What do you think would happen? They'd do whatever it took to put entry/exit in place.

    So, what do you do? The standard answer - the one from Krikorian and NumbersUSA - is to vote, send FAXes, etc. That wouldn't work, would it?

    Here's how to actually make it happen: have experienced questioners (like lawyers) engage pols in debate at their appearances. Virtually all of those who ask pols questions can't engage them: they aren't lawyers or polished politicians. Pols are consistently able to dance around the weak questions that regular citizens ask. So, you find someone who can engage them and with the goal of discrediting them. Then, you put video of that happening on Youtube where Drudge can link to it and where their colleagues can see it.

    Please take a minute (or less!) and tweet @NumbersUSA and @MarkSKrikorian and ask them why they consistently refuse to do that.

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  22. The foolproof way to do most things is to force/cajole/coerce someone with more power to do it.

    In this case, let's say that 80% of Congressmembers knew that not having entry/exit would mean they'd lose their next election. What do you think would happen? They'd do whatever it took to put entry/exit in place.

    So, what do you do? The standard answer - the one from Krikorian and NumbersUSA - is to vote, send FAXes, etc. That wouldn't work, would it?

    Here's how to actually make it happen: have experienced questioners (like lawyers) engage pols in debate at their appearances. Virtually all of those who ask pols questions can't engage them: they aren't lawyers or polished politicians. Pols are consistently able to dance around the weak questions that regular citizens ask. So, you find someone who can engage them and with the goal of discrediting them. Then, you put video of that happening on Youtube where Drudge can link to it and where their colleagues can see it.

    Please take a minute (or less!) and tweet @NumbersUSA and @MarkSKrikorian and ask them why they consistently refuse to do that.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Pope Francis a hero in a way unlike the two previous Popes that thought birth control is wrong he thinks that should not be emphasized. Think, Mexico moves below replacement since you are not considered a bad Catholic as much because you use birth control. Mexicans in the US here about the new Popes thinking and even rural Mexicans in the US dropped below replacement.

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    Replies
    1. Can someone please interpret what he just wrote? It sounds like what he was trying to say was interesting.

      Delete
  24. Why do the amnesty once you've got the enforcement? and vice versa.

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  25. Walking into the Chengdu, China U.S. Consulate I was accosted by the idiot guards and made to give an iris scan. It's really really not that complicated.

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