Apparently it is easy enough for brick layers from Mexico to come to and work in the US. Apparently to enter the US, they wait until midnight and then walk across a low point in the river.

I have to believe that it would be easy enough for someone in Canada, with an SUV, just to drive across the border somewhere out in the woods.

Then once in the US, it can be illegal for someone to ask for proof of your legal right to be here.

All that said, there’s more:

Before 9/11, US immigration ‘policy’ mostly just wasn’t. That is, the US didn’t both have and enforce a clear policy. One reason was to encourage the immigration of Hispanics: The US Republicans wanted them to work but not vote, and the Democrats wanted them to vote but not work. Of course, the illegal immigrants couldn’t legally vote, but such a small detail didn’t always stop everyone! Indeed, some people would vote early and vote often!

After 9/11, the US enabled big, crude, clumsy bureaucracies to control immigration, that is, except for brick layers from Mexico! And drug dealers! And gun runners!

But there is another big part of the story: During the Cold War and the Space Race, technical workers in the US were doing well, making 6=8 times each year what nice new car cost.

Then US national security and high tech industry noticed the ‘severe shortage’ in people with technical qualifications, and the US NSF (National Science Foundation that funds much of US academic scientific research in fields other biomedical) set up a group of economists with the goal of lowering the incomes of US technical workers.

One of the steps resulting from the work of those NSF economists was to write into NSF grants that so many graduate students had to be supported. Then, hint, hint, can get grad students from Taiwan and India.

Suddenly US technical fields were flooded, note that word flooded, with young students from Taiwan and India.

Soon in both academics and industry, there got to be a caste system where native born, US citizens of Western European descent and with very high technical qualifications need not apply except for national security positions where US citizenship, preferably native born, was crucial.

Soon native born US citizen students who walked into a class in technical fields saw nearly all the students from Taiwan and India with poor American English skills, concluded that something was wrong, and left for maybe medicine, dentistry, or an MBA.

Continuing the problem, the job market was flooded with the students from Taiwan and India on H1B visas.

A LOT of very highly qualified native born US citizens with very high technical qualifications became absolutely, positively unemployable at anything, in any field, technical or not, above minimum wage. A technical graduate degree became less good on a resume than a felony conviction. Literally.

Eventually some US citizens screamed bloody murder at the NSF and H1B visa program deliberately destroying the careers, families, and lives of very highly qualified, native born US citizens in technical fields, citizens whose tax money had paid for the students from Taiwan and India to go to US graduate schools.

Also the H1B visa program put people into a state of near slavery where they could be exploited. Thus there was a dirty secret in the US labor market.

Screaming bloody murder or not, nothing changed. Then with 9/11, there was an excuse to change the flooding of the US technical labor market with people from Taiwan and India, and such immigration was severely limited along with the H1B program.

At this point whenever immigration policy is mentioned, always there has to be a suspicion that the policy is deliberately intended to ruin the careers of some collection of US citizens, including brick layers. Once burned, twice shy.

So, now US politics is relatively willing to say “No” to nearly any immigration for any purpose, except of course for brick layers, drug dealers, and gun runners from Mexico.

Or, as Churchill once said, “America always does the right thing after trying everything else.”.

-Jerry