This is a growing problem, this illegal immigration thing. Rather, it’s a problem that’s been big for quite some time, but the scale seems more apparent lately. There are some big questions out there, and some pretty creative solutions, but if you know me, I don’t think they’ll work, or if they do work, it sacrifices too much liberty.

The crux of the problem is there is only so much money to pay for a certain amount of people. If a budget is done properly, then every dollar has a place to go. Assuming an air-tight budget (and this is a massive assumption!), but with more people receiving services than there ought be, this causes some problems.

The first draft of my solution is a state-issued I.D. must be shown when receiving state services. This doesn’t really work, because all it does is show there are X number of people receiving Y services that should not. While valuable information, it’s simply information for its own sake.

I wanted to come up with a something that hits home rather than fear of The Man. Also important is I didn’t want to provide a recipe for a totalitarian presence setting up checkpoints and asking for my “papers.” It’d be comical in a sardonic way, and certainly not funny especially if it were to happen to you, yourself.

And then it hit me: Economics. Don’t give the state or federal government any more power (they have more than enough as it is), and have the states simply adjust what they already have authority over.  Increase the state sales tax by 20% and have retailers provide a 20% sales-tax discount if a state-issued I.D. can be shown. This means citizens can buy what they’ve always bought for the same exact prices they always have, but those without I.D. have to pay for the markup.

This one solution attacks on more than one front:

1. It provides the much-needed extra coin to the state treasury to pay for the services that illegal immigrants use.
2. If goods are too expensive to buy, those without I.D.s will simply leave and go somewhere else – preferably back to their country of origin or, less optimally, another state in which this is not place. 

Of course there no plan is perfect, but the flaws present are not inherent to the plan itself. The extra money raised will likely not be used properly by those in power. This is a corruption issue that I can’t begin to think about solving. Another question to ask is “how do the retailers prove the I.D. is legitimate?” Add another step to the checkout process and, in states with magnetic stripes on their drivers licenses, swipe the card in the credit card reader to qualify for the discount. Again, if corrupt people decide to keep recordsof these transactions and attach them to some profile, that’s not the plan’s fault unless naiveté is a flaw.

Tags: economics, immigrant, immigration, INS, law, money, papers please, revenue, services, taxes, The Man, totalitarian, welfare, welfare state

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under Politics, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.