DeSoto’s dryer, Part 4
[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]
This extended post has taken a tortuous journey:
“Follow the multi-part post! Follow the multi-part post!”
· Starting with illicit washer-dryers being smuggled into
· Leading to a breakdown of normal societal rules and a series of harmful externalities
· Reaching a tipping point where more than a fifth of the building’s inhabitants are rule-breakers, and most of the rest are tacit accessories.
· Detouring back in American history to discover that much of our frontier was so settled.
In both cases, at some point there came a broad rationalizing earned amnesty.
“I will henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
What then is the difference between an illegal washer-dryer and an illegal washer woman?
A nineteenth century washing machine
- Both make life easier for affluent New Yorkers (and others).
- Both are smuggled in large number by an underground network of vendors, facilitators, silent conspirators, and muted neighbors.
- Both operate outside normal legal and regulatory protections, and thus place at risk both themselves and their neighbors.
- If the figures are to be believed, with 11,000,000 illegal immigrants in a population of 290 million, the non-compliance is reaching unsustainable levels.
- As with installed washer-dryers, it’s logistically difficult to imagine repatriating all of them, especially as their children born here are citizens.
(This quite-possibly-too-cute metaphor has a very limited range, for objects are not people and people are not objects. Washer-dryers, no matter how stacked, are unlikely to give birth to smaller appliances. They do not rally on the Water Department steps claiming sewer rates are elitist, they do not chant “H-H-H-2-O, metering has got to go,” they do not protest that living in dark closets constitutes cruel and unusual installation, they do not demand free lint removal and government-subsidized belt and rotor care programs. Nor, on the other side, do they grow up to become heat pumps. And, in all seriousness, immigrants are generally (but not unanimously) estimated to be a net boost to our economy,
Still, the economic and political dynamics are more alike than different.)
Care to infer a correlation between population growth, economic growth, and immigration?
Historical analogy thus offers at least a basis for a rationalization, but if we adopt that as a postulated strategy, what principles should we apply?
- Sort the deserving from the undeserving. This is, of course, the rub: if pledging fealty gets you admission, everyone will pledge fealty. Some inspection of previous performance becomes essential. A demonstrated interval of several years’ consistent employment, or ownership of property (which has historically been used as a precondition of voting franchise). Similarly, one could imagine an apprentice-immigration, analogous to rent-to-buy, where the applicant signs up today for future amnesty at a date certain, and undergoes orientation/ monitoring during the waiting interval.
- Charge a fee to regularize status. Those coming in to the system could pay an entry fee for their rationalization. (In the case of illegal immigrants, this might be a combination of households
- License and tax. Once rationalized, illegal immigrants will have their earnings taxed formally.
- Eliminate free-rider benefits. Both viscerally and as a matter of equity, immigration should be an opportunity to work, not to featherbed.
I venture into this subject with great trepidation — it’s absolutely not my area and is furiously generating an enormous bonfire of punditry elsewhere — but it’s frequently on my mind, because where do enormous numbers of illegal immigrants live?
Immigrant family,
In slums or in affordable or public housing.
