Thinking Integrally about Immigration

The US public arena has been in an uproar about "illegal aliens" entering the country.  This is a political hot potato that has been tossed around with great anger during the last 18 months, coinciding with economic depression, job losses and reduced wages for citizens and immigrants.

The standard responses are to enforce immigration laws, to stop "illegals" at the border, and so forth.

What if we did something completely different?

To begin, allow anyone in who arrives at the door.  (We may choose to exclude known terrorists and those few categories of felons and disease carriers who are presently excluded, even if otherwise qualified.)

So, a person arrives at the border crossing.  All he needs to do is to identify himself, without needing documentation, and have his photograph, fingerprints, and DNA taken.  In return he gets a smartcard ID, and his photo and information are encoded on that card.  Unless he is one of the excluded categories above, he gets his ID card within minutes and can go on with his visit. 

All people entering the country would go through this process (though we may want to allow American citizens with documentation to bypass the process).  If he already has a card, it just goes through a card reader and his thumbprint is scanned for a match with the information on the card.

Should he not have a card, he simply goes through the process again.  It does not matter if he even gives the same name as before.  Once his information--photo, fingerprints and DNA--are in the system, they will be flagged when he comes through again.

What does this give us?  First, we will know exactly who is entering the country.  We will have fingerprints and DNA to match any crime scenes.  Further, with the DNA, we can now determine biological relatives, and thus highlight many criminal associations which are predominately formed from related individuals.  Having that information, we can trace activities of groups of individuals from their countries of origin, through their paths of migration, to their communities within the US.

This immediately substantially reduces the costs of border guarding.  Most money will just be for welcome centers where individuals will go through the ID process.  Remaining money can be used for projects to improve economic opportunities in the countries sending us many migrants.  These would include improved education, infrastructure, legal changes to encourage economic development and creativity, and so forth.

All of the information collected from the migrants will be available to US Federal, State and Local law enforcement, as well as for various medical and academic research programs.  Among the DNA possibilities, would be establishment and routine use of "near miss" DNA matching, now done in the UK, to allow law enforcement to see if crime scene DNA came from a relative of anyone in the immigrant database.  (Which would likely provide ways to track and apprehend the guilty party.)

While on the surface this shift to easier entry into the USA will seem to open the door to unpleasant rises in criminal activity, or other negative consequences of free immigration, its longer term consequences will be greater understanding of and control over criminal behavior.  This especially applies to criminal gangs, who will no longer be "under the radar."  Their associations will be highlighted through these new tools.

Lalia