Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Let's expand this idea!
I note that New York City is providing free tickets to the homeless to return to their places of origin - provided they promise never to come back. It's not heartless: they make sure that there's a family member or friend to accommodate them, and that they won't be dumped on the streets once they get there.
If this works so well that NYC is willing to invest its dollars in it, how about expanding it to deal with our illegal immigration problem? If illegals volunteer to return to their homelands, and undertake never to return (and we have some way of detecting them if they do - fingerprints, an electronically-readable implanted chip, something like that), why not pay for their tickets? Heck, we could even give them a little spending money! It'll still be a whole lot cheaper than using law enforcement personnel and facilities, and our court system, to accomplish the same result.
This bears further examination, methinks.
Peter
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4 comments:
On the other hand if a plane ticket is cheaper than housing (halfway, shelter, jail ...) and care. Why wouldn't the "place of origin" or even anywhere with an excess of homeless start shipping people back too NYC. I sense an opportunity for airlines and anyone looking for free airfare.
A modern version of exiling your undesirables. Seems Britain once did this with Australia?
Perhaps some good can come from this in a century or two---if we can find some loosely populated island to dump our unwanteds.
Not only Australia, but the colony of Georgia (which became the U.S. state after independence) was also used, in part, as a penal colony. Interesting historical twist, since the article notes that one of the states NYC is commonly sending the homeless back to is Georgia.
Archie
We already tried that. It netted a whopping eight volunteers.
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