It's dead...

But that's only the beginning.

The death is the unlamented passing of a secretively-written, poorly-thought-out, and little-understood comprehensive immigration reform package.

It appears that the American people view the standard political theory about illegal immigration as if it had been drawn from a poisoned well.

Now that the Congress has been convinced not to try their method, how do we find a method that works? How do we convince Congress to try it?

One problem is one of bureaucracy. The change in ownership of Immigration issues (at least, change in name of overseeing agency--from INS to ICE) combines with the long-known lack of holding facilities, trial judges, and enforcement mechanisms for illegal aliens to produce a very large problem. Usually, an agency-restructuring isn't the answer. But this agency has needed reconstruction for more than a decade. The latest facelift hasn't helped; it needs more enforcement and fewer desk-jockeys.

Curiously, there are sections of the border that have been fenced for years (hat tip: Baldilocks). Perhaps we could form a few prison-work-crews out of discovered illegal aliens, and set them to work on building more fences.

Even more important (especially in rebuilding the Immigration system) is to make legal immigration easy.

While in graduate school, I saw several students who had endless troubles with immigration agencies over their visa. These were the kind of immigrants that the nation should welcome--smart, self-motivated, capable of taking on high-value positions in their technical field (or producing good work in their academic field).Yet they faced more legal hassles than the recipients of the proposed Z-Visas would!

It is one thing to kill bad legislation. It is another thing entirely to produce good legislation.

I don't wish to downplay the heroic efforts of our fellow-citizens. But this even was just the opening act. The long slog is still ahead of us.

Two Wheels

A bicycle is a wonderful thing. When time allows, it can make travel in a metro region very exciting--or at the least, a source of great exercise.

It can also make the travel much cheaper.

The excitement of bicycle travel is partly in the physical exercise, partly in maneuvering in/around automobile traffic, and partly in discovering the ways in which geography interacts with road layout and neighborhood patterns.

Two kinds of geography limit the bicyclist: rivers and hills. If a hill can be avoided, the path is much easier--even if it is longer.

A river will often cut off a large number of possible routes through a neighborhood, forcing bicycle traffic onto main streets. Residential streets will often radiate outwards from school buildings; occasionally schools will have foot-paths which cross rivers or connect otherwise-disjoint roads.

The rivers and the hills, which mean less to car traffic, dominate bicycle traffic.

Time is also a large limiting factor. Aside from highway travel, most urban/suburban traffic moves at an average rate of 30-35 miles per hour. Most bicycle travel maintains an average rate of 10-15 miles per hour. Over a given distance, the bicyclist will typically spent between 2 and 3.5 times more time traveling than a driver. (Actually, an average speed of 15 miles per hour is hard to maintain for anyone who meets cross traffic, or stop-lights.)

These problems are minor ones if the major problem is lack of an automobile--or a desire for exercise. It is even amusing to discover the amount of travel that can be done upon two wheels, if the proper amount of time is set aside.

Perhaps the most interesting benefit is a closer connection to the world of nature. Wind, sun, and rain all affect bicycle travel. Bicycling is limited by (yet has an effect on) the physical stamina of the traveler.

In all, traveling on a bicycle is a fun, challenging experience. As an added benefit, it can also increase appreciation for the ease of travel by car or truck. At the same time, it heightens awareness of the ways in which distance dominates travel time.

To cut travel time in half, a driver or bicyclist must double his speed. Traffic patterns and stop-lights typically make this very hard for a suburban driver. Unless a person is bicycling at a walking pace, doubling of speed is hard on a bicycle. Facts like this ought to be readily apparent to all travelers; somehow the ever-present automobile makes it easy for drivers to forget.

People who are accustomed to traveling much more rapidly than they can walk are tempted to imagine that time and distance have been annihilated. This may lead to an expectation of almost-miraculous travel times. (A driver cannot drive 15 miles to the other side of the suburb in 15 minutes, unless his average speed is a mile per minute. If the route is not entirely highway, such a speed is impossible to maintain. Pretending otherwise is foolish.)

The number of things that can be learned from regular bicycle trips is large; at the very least, the rider will learn his own endurance and stamina. He may also learn a great deal about himself, as well as the local geography, weather, road networks.

A Lady

Four years ago, a purchase was made.

The purchase was an automobile; the seller a friend who was willing to part with the vehicle for much less than its market value.

Over time, the vehicle required some attention. The attention varied from a fan for the vent system to a new water-pump; from a new set of power-lock actuators to a replaced oil pan. More routine maintenance included oil changes, filter replacements, and new pads and shoes for the brakes.

Each repair seemed to make ownership of the vehicle more meaningful. The standard descriptions morphed from "my car" to "she". Long experience on the roads produced intimate knowledge of her strengths, weaknesses, and quirks.

More recently, the old companion has been showing signs of advanced age. The rust would have claimed her within a year or two. Wiring for both the power locks and the power windows failed for one door. The engine, which had occasionally missed on one cylinder while warming up, now had that symptom during the first five minutes of every drive.

Then the transmission trouble started. Whatever the length of her faithful service, she is a type of car which has very expensive repairs for its transmissions. When her automatic transmission began hesitating between first and second gears, and when it slipped during acceleration in second gear, I knew it was time to retire her from service.

One part of the cost of repairs is that I have neither the tools nor the knowledge necessary for the job. Another part of the cost is in the fact that this particular transmission contains many expensive parts, and is time-consuming for an experienced mechanic to rebuild.

The cost of the job is high enough that a better-condition used car could be purchased for the same amount of money.

So I will soon say farewell to the old car. She will be missed, but her time of service has ended.

Second Thoughts: Immigration

In the wild surge of opposition, commentary, and debate over immigration in America, it is necessary to begin thinking about what is desired, and why it is desired.

In my own ranting on the subject, I noted that the modern event that is often called immigration is very different from the immigration events that was common before the middle of the 20th Century. I am still not clear on whether the image of illegal immigrant that I used in the rant is more accurate about the public-interest groups that claims to represent the people, or the average illegal immigrant.

After all, it is not too hard to find a public-interest group that has lost its membership in the United States, while maintaining an image of representing a minority inside the country.

However, the framing of the debate appears to be missing a couple of fundamental points.

First, the people who come from Mexico into the United States to find work have a hard time doing so legally. Any attempt to fix immigration problems must involve making legal immigration easier, while making the illegal immigration attempts harder.

Second, the people who come into the country should be categorized in one of two ways. Either they are immigrants, or they are guests who would like to work.

Immigrants should be encouraged to assimilate into their new culture. We would love to have some of their traditions soak into the melting pot that is America. We would also love them to recognize that they are in a different culture, a culture that has some advantages over their home culture.

Guest worker programs may be possible, but they can also cause trouble. It would be good to keep guest workers from staying too long. It would also be good to keep the guest worker program clean of criminal influences. It is probably necessary to keep the guest workers from ever becoming citizens.

Third, a guest-worker program should be recognized as a subsidy for another country. (Any nation that attempts a guest-worker program should consider this; in America's case, we see a subsidy for Mexico.) That is a country whose poorest people see a better opportunity in crossing the border for jobs than in staying home and working.

This third reason could also be an argument for a temporary guest-worker program. Hopefully, the nation of Mexico could do something about its internal economy while receiving this subsidy from the United States. However, an exit strategy of some kind would be a good idea for the Mexico's Exported Labor Program. But such an exit strategy would never develop unless it was forced by outside forces--like a five-year time-limit on the American guest-worker program.

The immediate fear for many opponents of the recently-proposed immigration reform is that America's political class don't care that parts of the nation seem overrun with foreigners who have little respect for law and even less inclination to assimilate into American culture. My own long-term fear is a state of permanent subsidy of a broken Mexican government through an American guest-worker program.

But fixing that would first require a guest-worker program that passes muster with the general public of the United States.

Is there life outside of blogging?

Perhaps there is...though if it were so, blogging about it would be somewhat beside the point.

It's not as if the events of the blogosphere have passed me by. Today, I'm responding to this call with a message of encouragement to the Marine Corps.

Changes

The past week has been busy. A combination of work-projects, outside-of-work projects, late hours, and a weekend afternoon of fishing kept blogging to a minimum. (Strangely, a surfeit of possible blogging subjects has met with a small amount of blogging-time to produce an inability to blog...)

A significant change also fell during the past week; this change has been in the works for some time. Actually, the change had been delayed by a combination of seemingly-unrelated habits and forces.

This that I now go about my daily business armed. (Current armament: a small-frame Smith & Wesson revolver, carried concealed.)

The world does not look different to an armed man--except that he has more options available for dealing with certain kinds of trouble. He also has more reason to be circumspect in dealings with others. This is partly because politeness comes more easily.

The weapon is a small part of the change. The larger change is in mindset and awareness. More time is spent scanning the surroundings, evaluating people/vehicles passing by, and taking note of possible dangers.

One of the strange side-effects of this change is my awareness of relatively high-crime and low-crime regions in the Metro area. My current residence is relatively close to the border between Detroit and its suburbs. (The road that features as the title for this film is within 2 miles' travel. The neighborhoods on the Detroit side of the border have a distinctly different atmosphere than the neighborhoods on the suburban side of the border. That atmosphere is partly due to socio-economic differences; it is also partly due to criminal behavior and expectations of police response.)

One good thing to mention--now I have tasted the role of sheepdog, and it is much preferable to the role of sheep.