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Townhall...
The Stupidest
Immigration Reform Idea You Haven’t Heard About
By Rachel Marsden
6/7/2011
As Barack Obama inches toward reforming the immigration mess in America
-- whenever that might be -- here’s a stunning example of political
rhetoric over substance.
The idea comes courtesy of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a serious
contender for the French presidency in next year’s elections. That is,
until she self-immolated with this doozy.
Le Pen sent a note to all 577 members of French parliament calling for
an end to dual citizenship. Her rationale? “The patent failure of dual
citizenship has reached various sporting events, after which young
French bi-nationals don’t wave our flag, but rather that of another
nation.”
Le Pen also questions whether France would have intervened militarily
in Libya if there weren’t so many Franco-Libyans on French soil, and
considers the disastrous implications of any future French military
intervention in Algeria, predicting a “potentially explosive situation”
on French soil because of the number of Algerians in France.
First off, people hoisting Third World flags at sporting events in
France aren’t necessarily dual citizens. They could be residents, or
illegals, or maybe even anti-imperialist French (in the same way that
Noam Chomsky, who never has anything good to say about America, is 100
percent American). Citizenship doesn’t automatically elicit national
loyalty or pride, even by birth.
In theory, French naturalization requires five years of residency, an
interview and careful selection. If France has failed to properly
select in awarding citizenship, then that’s the crux of the problem.
Fixing it by stripping everyone of every origin of any sort of dual
citizenship will hardly force integration. If anything, it’s a surefire
way to alienate immigrants. Personally, nothing would peeve me off more
than moving to a country, fully integrating and wanting to be
considered an equal in the eyes of the law, and being told that
officially I would always be considered second class. My response to
that, as a self-employed entrepreneur, would be to not give that
country a cent of my tax dollars and send it all to my country of
origin.
This is what politicians forget when they make stupid, sweeping
propositions regarding immigrants: Not all are looking for handouts.
Some of us come from countries with better handouts if we were really
interested, thanks. We are producers, entrepreneurs, wealth creators.
Rupert Murdoch is an immigrant. He became a citizen of America for
practical business reasons: so he could own TV stations. Highly
desirable immigrants often choose to pursue citizenship to avoid all
sorts of paperwork hassles and everyday barriers. In France, for
example, you can’t even get financing for a stereo without citizenship
or a 10-year permanent residency card.
If France ever started stripping bi-nationals of their French
citizenship or forcing them to choose -- and perhaps they can start
with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, an Italian-born
naturalized French citizen, and his father, who was born in Hungary --
it’s not like you could ever force them to forget where they came from.
The far right is proposing a superficial solution to a much deeper
problem. The answer is in revamping economic policy to attract
precisely the kind of immigrants you want.
Stop taxing businesses to death and instead offer them tax incentives
for hiring locally so they don’t have to import cheap labor for jobs
that locals won’t do (at least not without one day off out of every
three, and incessant whining). To this end, French kids need to be
better educated about the value of tradesmanship. A 2007 Ipsos poll
revealed that nearly 70 percent of the French would encourage their
kids to strive for a job shuffling paper in the civil service. The
rest, judging by the popularity of business-management programs, want
to sit around running things. That simply isn’t feasible, lest the
French managers all have to move to China, India or Africa -- or
continue to bring in workers from “undesirable” countries for labor
that needs to be done on-site.
Facilitating bi-citizenship, rather than threatening to strip it across
the board, could in fact help resolve economic and societal woes.
Making the process as easy as possible for the right kind of workers
would strengthen that country’s competitiveness in the global economy
and create more wealth and opportunity for others in the long run. And
chances are, those people aren’t the kind of boors who would feel the
need to wave a foreign flag while setting fire to cars in celebration
of a sporting win.
And if you’re curious about where this idea would place France in
relation to the rest of the world on the same issue: more restrictive
than America, which doesn’t strip dual citizens of their American
citizenship, but less restrictive than China and Russia (and Rupert
Murdoch’s native Australia), which generally only allow you to hold one
citizenship at a time. Even the most hardcore anti-subversion attempts
related to citizenship are silly, since someone can renounce their
citizenship of origin as needed, then reapply for it later. None of
this posturing amounts to a solution.
Read it at Townhall
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