Robert Scoble just put out a thought-provoking video on his personal blog detailing the frightening bi-polar personality of US immigration policy.

The three participants of note in the discussion Robert chronicles are Aye Moah, a brilliant Burmese UX designer who came to America based purely on her ability to do maths, Ronald Mannak, a European tech entrepreneur, and Chamillionaire, an American rapper-come-entrepreneur.

[Aye] grew up in one of the poorest countries on earth. She shouldn’t have many opportunities. Yet here she was, talking with me at a Silicon Valley party after the Always On conference. The route she took? She went to MIT. How did she get in? Was one of the top-scoring students in Burma. One of the top 10, in fact. Then she scored a perfect 800 on the SAT. That’s a cool story alone.

Ronald Mannak is an entrepreneur who lost everything he owned. In Holland if your company fails and you’ve taken venture capital you are personally liable for the losses. So, Ronald owes the Dutch government $200,000 and lost everything, even his fridge, he told us.

Robert uses the three individuals to compare and contrast the three cultures’ approach to entrepreneurship and immigration. Obviously, there are pockets of the United states that want to be much more liberal towards our federal immigration policy, and certain areas (like, quite famously at the moment, Arizona) that are doing all they can to make sure those who aren’t American feel as unwelcome as possible.

As Aye notes, it’s certainly working.

“I flew in from Boston, and stopped over in Phoenix today,” Aye explained. “Today is when the law the everyone has been talking about went into effect, and it was kind of freaky. Everyone was holding blue passports out. I lost my boarding pass, and I had to go get a new one. I wondered if I was going to run into trouble because I can’t carry an American passport. It’s not something that you freak out about, but it’s a tense undercurrent that you feel.”

The law she notes is Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which amongst many other things, increases the lattitude with which law enforcement officials can operate when it comes to enforcement of immigration status. The state’s new law allows law enforcement officials to literally detain random citizens for no other reason than to check the status of their citizenship, violating obvious consititutional rights in the process.

Unlike the instance of the PATRIOT ACT’s instances of civil liberty violations, it’s taken no time at all for documented isntances of flouting the law to surface, as was documented by the guys behind CheckpointUSA.

On November 26th, I was stopped & seized for about the 50th time since the beginning of 2008. The seizure took place at an internal suspicionless Homeland Security checkpoint along Southern Arizona’s SR86 near mile post 146. SR86 is an East-West public highway located over 40 miles North of the border and never intersects the border at any point.

During the stop, Agent Gilmore admitted he knew who I was & all three agents told me I wasn’t being detained. Nonetheless, these facts didn’t stop the agents from refusing to allow me to go about my lawful business, choosing instead to escalate the encounter by requesting that I move to secondary inspection for more intensive scrutiny absent my consent or any articuable suspicion.

Arizona can hardly be blamed for it’s somewhat draconian actions. The state capital, Phoenix Arizona, has been famously dubbed the ‘kidnapping capitol of America,’ and has estimated to have the second highest number of kidnappings, per capita, than any other city on the planet. There is some dispute amongst immigration apologists as to whether that’s a valid claim to make (or if that fact is even knowable, given how much crime goes unreported in Phoenix and other contenders for that ‘prize’), but these quibbles miss the point: American sovereignty and the very fabric of society is eroding in some US border states. Justice, law and order are increasingly difficult to maintain in many border towns not limited to Arizona, but notably California and Texas as well.

Essentially, border towns are all being expected to fill the void in the lack of federal intervention in the United States’ endemic illegal immigration crisis. The insane state of affairs at the federal level are creating insane (and more often than not, unconstitutional) solutions at the state level, all of which serve to create more and more hostile environments for young and brilliant entrepreneurs in and out of the tech sector.

On the one hand, we’re inviting the world (by virtue of our student visa programs) to come on by and learn (often for free) in our institutions of higher education, but in general don’t invite them to stick around after they get their diplomas to contribute to our economy (by virtue of our negligent policies on immigration and work visas).

US Government Personified, That’s Almost Textbook Bi-Polar

How does one go about solving the problem of immigration?

That’s the billion peso question. Our representatives from bottom to the top seem content to continue to kick the issue around as nothing more than a political football, which has been the problem for the last couple decades.  While our leaders play semantics with issues like amnesty, ten foot fences (and eleven foot ladders), The Minute Men and whatnot.

Meanwhile, the most legitimate solutions I’ve heard proposed come from what in recent years have been the most marginalized segments of the US political spectrum: the libertarians.

Rather than start quoting something from Rand or Ron Paul here, I’ll turn to a discussion started by one of the more respected voices in libertarian ideology – the CATO Institute.

They’ve had a fairly constant message as long as I can remember on the issue of immigration, and when pondered logically, their solutions tend to make the most amount of sense, particularly on an issue that tends to be dominated by raw emotion and business interests on both sides of the table.

In their book entitled Cato Handbook for Policymakers, 7th Edition, they go into great detail in the chapter on immigration as to what the solution would be (specifically with regard to guest worker programs and the H1B Visa), but boil their solution down to four bullet points.

– Expand current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas;

– Repeal the arbitrary and restrictive cap on H1-B visas for highly skilled workers;

– Create a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration; and

– Refocus border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.

These four points address nearly every issue relevant to the economic and security concerns about illegal immigration. The whole problem the the United States immigration problem stems from the fact that demand for a certain thing, that is citizenship status in the United States, far exceeds supply as mandated by the federal government.

The vast majority of those who would emigrate to the States are law abiding and potentially productive members of society. Because we don’t allow them in on a permanent or legal basis, our government creates a black market for residency as well as second and even third class citizens. Consequently, those that break the law and emigrate illegally are forced to equal footing with those with truly malevolent intent.

Unalienable Versus Inalienable: Smackdown at the Continental Congress

Within the annals of US history, there are two terms which are quite similar, but distinctly different – the concepts of unalienable rights and inalienable rights.

Unalienable: incapable of being alienated, that is, sold and transferred." Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, page 1523

Inalienable rights: Rights which are not capable of being surrendered or transferred without the consent of the one possessing such rights. Morrison v. State, Mo. App., 252 S.W.2d 97, 101

I mention this because in the most prominent of the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the second paragraph opens with the following sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

To that end, we can assume that the founding fathers (as well as most of America who cares to interpret constitutional intent) believe that while the United States has no jurisdiction to enforce the Bill of Rights to citizens of foreign powers, at our core we believe that all of humanity is entitled to basic human rights. That means it doesn’t matter what side of an arbitrarily drawn political line in the sand you were born – the theory is that if we have you in our jurisdiction, we believe you have rights that cannot be taken away or surrendered.

The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness isn’t something you can give up, like the right to remain silent.  It isn’t something that can be taken away  or curtailed for bad behavior or mental disorder, like the right to bear arms.

It’s something you’re born with, and ostensibly something we as a country are eager to protect so long as you get within our jurisdiction at your earliest convenience.

Our societal dysfunction on the issue and political unwillingness to solve the root of the problem creates classes of citizens in this country that don’t have these rights in a practical sense. We’re all aware, thanks to stand-up comedy’s ready tropes about migrant workers, that these second class citizens sell us our fruit and mow our lawns. Increasingly, though, these sub-citizens are also responsible for our information infrastructure – our databases, our networks, our algorithms.

It’s not wise to continue to send the message to these people that they’re unwelcome here – because eventually they might all take the hint and start creating that infrastructure and intellectual property elsewhere while the United States gets left in the dust.