In 1729, Jonathan Swift, an Irish cleric better known for his work Gulliver’s Travels, wrote an essay entitled,

“A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick”

 It is more commonly known as A Modest Proposal.  Swift, seeking a way to deal with the starving people and abject poverty of Ireland, came up with a unique, if controversial, idea.

Since one can always learn from the past, I submit this Immodest Proposal for your consideration  in dealing with the Extraordinary Danger posed by the invasion of our country by those illegally crossing our borders, stealing all the good jobs, raping and pillaging (even if they are caught) because of our “catch and release” policy.

Here is An Immodest Proposal for Preventing the Poor Immigrant People from Being a Burden to America and For Making them Beneficial to our Economy (although I hear it is already perfect.)

It seems our efforts at stemming the tidal wave, nay tsunami, of people crossing our border under the mistaken idea we welcome these teeming masses yearning to be free has been only failure.

We have tried kindness and understanding, and still they came.

We put the National Guard on the borders, and still they came.

We built a wall (and rebuilding it as soon as part of it fell into Mexico,) and still they came,

We snatched their children holding them as hostages to discourage others from coming, and still they came.

It’s time we turned these lemons into lemonade. For what level of desperation must they feel to face not only our indignation and revulsion for their daring to embrace the dream of freedom but to ignore every effort we’ve made to stop them?

I have the perfect solution.

Instead of catch and release, we catch them and then lease and re-lease them to do all those jobs Americans are not willing to do.

We can lease and re-lease them to farms, at costs far lower than minimum wage, and thus lower the cost of agricultural products.

We can lease and re-lease them to cities and towns to clean the highways, collect trash, maintain the sidewalks, sweep the streets (at night to be out of sight of most citizens) thus reducing taxes and improving our living environment.

We can lease and re-lease them to companies who need massive amounts of labor to fill all those newly created jobs (after all Americans have first dibs, of course) and the lower labor cost will reduce the price of all those Amazon orders.

The cost savings will translate into lower taxes, put more money in the hands of “real & true” Americans, and eliminate all those pairs of sneakers hanging from telephone lines which is a blight on our land.

We can take some of them and use them to care for the children too young to work and supplement our own daycare facilities to lower day care costs.

Some might claim, this is slavery. I disagree.  We did not ask them to come here. We’ve made a tremendous effort to discourage them, yet still they came. It would be reasonable to conclude their ignoring our objections to their coming here amounts to volunteering.

We might even put a light at the end of the tunnel.  Say after ten or twenty years of toiling for our mutual benefit, they would be entitled to either a path to citizenship or a free ticket home.

Absent concurrence with my suggestion, we could always revert to Swift’s original idea. More difficult to sell but would accomplish the same honorable purpose.