Immigration Parole, Not Amnesty | Cato Institute

Immigration Parole, Not Amnesty | Cato Institute: "Instead, unless they go the marriage route, even U.S.-educated scientists, engineers, and other professionals have to find employers willing to spend significant resources playing lawyer games with the Labor Department while the applicant’s life is in a state of suspended animation. The wait takes years, particularly for those unfortunate enough to be from places that export skilled workers, like India.

Unskilled workers — your stereotypical Mexican day laborer — don’t even have that. That’s why it’s so important that any immigration reform have a guest-worker component (which President Obama is resisting because union bosses oppose it). Give people the opportunity to earn an honest living and they’ll take it — and then you can deport the criminals."

"our immigration laws themselves undermine the rule of law"

"If you brainstormed a process for how foreigners enter the country, how long they can stay, and what they can do while here, it would be hard to come up with something worse than our current hodge-podge of often contradictory regulations."

"As long as we screen for criminal records, terrorism, and public health, America should stand for the idea of letting people in who seek a better life, in an orderly way: a funnel, not a necessarily leaky wall."