A LONG TERM SOLUTION TO THE IMMIGRATION ISSUE

I am originally from Jamaica, and have a green card. I have never applied for citizenship in this country for several reasons. The two most important being, that if I were a citizen I would feel obligated to become even more involved in politics than I am, there is so much wrong here, in my opinion. The other being, that it is clear that individuals who are of African descent are second class citizens here, and if I applied knowing this was true, I would be validating and accepting that status, something that I find impossible to do. I feel constrained to stating that I have very ambivalent feelings about this issue, and do not have a clear position on this issue.

I know from experience how convoluted and thorny an issue this is. Entire soccer teams from Jamaican have granted temporary visas to play in this country, and have never returned to Jamaica. As I stated in one article published on the web site voiceofpeace.net, the American Embassy uses the granting of visas to Jamaicans as a means to increasing their influence with parliamentarians in my country, and this had the effect, the very negative effect of establishing beachheads of Jamaican posses in the USA.

This is obviously an issue that a lot a people feel deeply about, given the size and virulence of the demonstrations this issue has precipitated, if only we had demonstrations as big in support of withdrawing the troops from Iraq or impeaching this rogue President, in my view, much more important issues in the long term.

I would venture to say that more draconian penalties are not the answer, nor is the answer opening the floodgates to illegal immigration. I would say the answer is, and I wonder how realistic this answer is, in confronting the real underlying cause of these waves of immigration, poverty.

I would never have left Jamaica, given a choice, but I had to because my penchant for telling the truth had resulted in me antagonizing some very powerful politicians who had the power to keep me unemployed for five years, resulting in my abject poverty.

I think the solution is to find a means to overcome poverty. This would be much easier in the US, than in Jamaica or Haiti, or South Africa, or Tanzania, because this is the richest country in the world. I have attempted to tackle this problem, in both locations, and it would be immeasurably easier here, I think, to do it here because of the extremes of hunger and privation elsewhere that clouds objectivity and the application of the higher mental processes.

I think to overcome poverty we need to cooperate, not compete. We need to exchange motivating with overt and covert forms of coercion for motivating with positive reinforcements. We need to create open ended systems of reward for all the actors in the drama of production for investors, managers and workers. To do this we need to reduce government spending and curtail the role of government. We need to ignite the creativity of every individual, and harness these energies to the national plow, for the common good.

In any competition since a small percentage of the population are so far ahead at the start, the rich, the gap between these individuals and the rest must keep growing wider and wider, with those at the bottom, who were born into poverty falling further and further behind.

Just as importantly, we must take a rational view of the situation, as against an irrational self centered opportunistic view; we must act on the best facts available to us, not on what would suit our interests, or the interests of our ethnic or political group. The fundamental problem is between the rational intellectual approach, that produces our successes in the arena of science and technology, and the irrational approach rife with interests and biases that lames all our efforts in the social arena.

The best American export to the rest of the world would be a theory that is practical and workable about how to overcome poverty, this is what would keep the immigrants at home, a functioning democracy.