Immigration in the UK

Now I know that the US is all a-flutter over immigration matters these and rightly so. Why can't the US have a decent, orderly and humane answer to immigration? The current system is a creaking shambles. But instead of coming up with a reasonable way forward, why is the Republican party falling all over itself to see who can come up with legislation that cattle-cars 11 million people South of the Border mas pronto?

I've been watching with interest but not saying much. To be fair, I'd be happy to see the right wing Republicans tie themselves into knots over this one...you guys are pissing off what could be a nice little electoral earner for you. I'm generalising here, but Latino culture is aspirational, conservative and deeply religious. All that stuff y'all claim to be.

Over on this side of the pond, we have our own problems with immigration - like the US, the UK has very little opportunity for unskilled labor to enter and work in the country legally, which means some people come illegally despite this being an island nation with securable borders. We have issues of cultural clash here, too - and it's not usually about the quarter of a million Americans resident in the UK. But there's one thing that I think definitely works well - and that's the free movement of labor within the European Union.

Like NAFTA, we too have a free trade zone. But in the EU, it's really a free trade zone, not just for goods, but for services and labor as well. Well, sort of.... Accession country citizens (new to the EU, like Estonia or Poland) have to wait a certain amount of time before they can go and work in Germany or France the same as any other EU citizen could. I believe that only the UK and Ireland have truly extended the free trade zones to include labor from new countries. And it works. I think it really works. Sure, my neighbourhood is now full of young Poles who have extremely dubious taste in music (down with Baltic pop!), but they're working, they're contributing and it's mostly without trouble.

Why can't the US have free exchange of labor with Canada and Mexico? I'm not sure that there would be many more people coming to live and work in the US, and if there were they would probably be the higher skilled. But even better, current illegals wouldn't have any reason to abuse other parts of the system and employers would have no reason to pay under the table. During economic downturns, transnationals would have every reason to go back to Oaxaca or Ottawa, safe in the knowledge they could come back later. As it is now, I know Mexican illegals (who have steady jobs and pay taxes, by the way) who can't go home, can't visit their aging parents, because their life is in Tennessee, their children were born in the US. If they go to Mexico they risk a perilous journey coming back.

Sure, there would be still be issues about Guatemalans and Hondurans and other parts of Latin America, but that's something that could be sorted out more easily.