Article in SF Chronicle
Tolerating illegal immigration is
discriminatory.

End immigration discrimination
James P. Driscoll
Thursday, June 28, 2007

U.S. immigration practices are biased. We maintain a double standard that gives immigrants who enter illegally better opportunities than those who obey our laws.

Legal immigration requires complex bureaucratic procedures and long waits, with no guarantee of success at the end. Illegal immigration merely involves crossing the porous U.S. border without getting caught.

We impose tight security on all who enter through our airports. Security along U.S. land borders, however, remains notoriously lax. Mexicans and Central Americans can readily slip across our southern border and millions have. But for most Asians and Africans, the only practical option is legal entry by air. Lax land enforcement opens broad immigration channels for Latin Americans that are inaccessible to Asians and Africans.

Asians and Africans have a more urgent need to immigrate because of noneconomic pressures than Latin Americans, whose homelands are comparatively wealthier, freer and less populated. For example, 5 million Burmese have fled their country’s oppressive regime to live in abject poverty as despised aliens in neighboring countries such as Thailand. Many speak English and would like to immigrate here, but biased U.S. immigration policy practices do not give them a fair chance. The same story holds for tens of millions of other Asians and Africans facing political, religious and ethnic persecution. We admit few of them as legal immigrants; instead, we leave our back door ajar for multitudes of illegal immigrants seeking not freedom but only higher wages.

The U.S. record of discrimination against Asian and African immigrants is long and shameful. In the 19th century, Chinese were brought in to build our railroads and then shot and buried in mass graves. For decades the Chinese Exclusion and the National Origins acts deemed Asian immigrants “racially undesirableâ€