A "Modest Proposal" for Immigration Reform

Immigration reform, or rather lack thereof, is all the news these days. The long term issue is that you cannot have open borders and a welfare state; incoming people (see Optimal Foraging Theory) will simply swamp the system. And our border is all but open.

The short-term issue, however the rush of Central American "children" to the border, both in response to a well intended 2008 law the Wilberforce Act, enacted to prevent child sex trafficking, which mandates a hearing for all "unaccompanied" children who enter illegally from a country not bordering the US, and Preznit Obama's 2012 executive order not to deport people who had arrived as minors (which supposedly has an expiration date, but which nobody believes).  Coyotes in Mexico's drug cartels have used this in an advertising campaign designed to attract customers willing to pay over a year's income in hopes of getting into the US permanently.

Democrats are welcoming the immigrants and obstructing any attempts to control the flow, in hoping of legalizing them, making them citizens, in their long term goal of changing the demography of the US to a poor welfare dependent, minority dominated politic, to keep them in charge "forever." Needless to say, Republicans are not wild about enlarging the welfare state with poor foreigners, and even less wild about making them voters. They have largely abandoned any hope of making inroads with the largely Catholic immigrants as "social conservatives" because all evidence suggests that they are largely in favor of government intervention in their favor.

So, how to deal with the influx of "undocumented children"?  First of all, we need to establish beyond a reasonable doubt who is a child and who is an adult.  They are undocumented, remember. Most of the "unaccompanied minors" are older teenagers, some 90% of them. Some seem to have beards and gray hair. They don't have birth certificates to prove their age; many probably never had them to begin with. Forged documents are rampant in the immigrant community and cannot be relied on, and neither can the assertions of relatives, legal and illegal, who are already in the US. Their relative have committed child abuse by placing them in the hands of criminal human traffickers in an effort to get them into the US. They should not be released into the custody of such relatives (if, indeed, relatives they even are - see undocumented).

I propose we use the same method we use with horses (and used by Emily Deschannel Dr. Temperance Brennan), dental development.  Human being have a fairly fixed pattern of dental eruption. First permanent molars appear at ages 11-12, second molars at 11-13 years, and third molars (wisdom teeth) at 17-21.  Anyone with wisdom teeth is no longer a child and needs to be denied entry. A dental exam should also be able to see wear on the second molars, and decide how long they have been erupted. More than 4 years? You're an adult, and you're going back. Unfair to a few 16-17 year olds? Too bad. We try some teenagers as adults, too.

That ought to reduce the number of "unaccompanied minors" by almost a factor of 10. Now here's the core of my modest proposal:

We foster the remaining children out Mormons.  We are already paying families up to $7000 a month to foster as many as six immigrant children at a time.  Mormons like children. They have many of their own and foster more. Heck, the Romneys alone could probably take half of them. Let them collect the money. Mormons also have strong family values and a strong sense of independence from the federal government, having historically been on the wrong side of their attentions. According to Pew, 74% of Mormons are or lean Republican. The best chance we have of making good responsible citizens out of these children, is to foster them into good, conservative, self dependent homes until they reach adulthood, and not to hold them in government pens and apartments (however nice) teaching them the ease of dependence on the government.

This also would have the advantage of putting a majority of the children in Utah, where the added increase in population might help tip the state to one more representative in Congress, a likely Republican seat, and deprive one of the "Blue States" of one after the next census.