Everybody seems to have a plan on what needs fixing in this country, and how to do it. What are some of the more creative, innovative, awful, or just plain weird schemes you've heard? If you were in charge around here, what would you do differently?

I'll start with one I came up with just yesterday. Everybody seems to be upset, in some way, about illegal immigration. I think I've come up with a simple solution to the whole thing: Grant either citizenship or permanent residency to any illegal immigrant that turns in his employer to the authorities. Think about it. Right now, there is no incentive whatsoever for anyone involved in illegal employment to cooperate with authorities. With this one action, it would completely turn the incentives inside out. Within two weeks, we'd have thousands of violators identified and fined. No one would ever want to hire an illegal immigrant again. Businesses would actually have to push for letting more immigrants into the country legally, instead of working the (pretty sweet) deal they've been getting, in underpaying cheap foreign labor. So in the long term, more people will want to immigrate legally, and we'll want more legal immigrants when we really hit the labor shortage that will come when the illegals leave. The most cooperative and law-abiding of the illegal immigrants would get to stay in the interim. Everybody benefits. Except unscrupulous business owners, and who cares about them?

I like your plan, but of course it would be contingent upon thier legal history. If the only thing they did wrong was cross the border fine.
I also think we should get rid of Jus Solis. There is no need for it anymore. If one or more of your parents aren't American, you aren't American. It would get rid of the familes comming over with a pregnant minor and utilizing Anchor Babies.

I do think that it needs to be looked at and reformed, but I'm not sure we ought to get rid of it entirely. Otherwise you'd have the possibility of a stateless person. Suppose you have two people that are granted permanent residence (but not citizenship) into the US, and have a child. Theoretically, their home country might not recognize the kid as a citizen, since it wasn't born within their borders. The couple fully intends to stay in the US for the rest of their lives. So what would be the status of the kid? Permanent resident, citizen, illegal alien? In a case like that, I'd think that it would be kindest to grant the kid permanent residency or citizenship. Granted, that sort of thing would be a severely oddball case. But if it can come up, it will.

That would require some new laws, I think. I haven't been able to actually see the Immigration application forms - all the government sites seem to want to charge me $50 for it - but I'm pretty sure that there is a "Current Citizenship" question on the form. (I'll ask my friend P., who recently immigrated from the UK, to find out for sure). If all the fields aren't filled out properly, the application gets rejected. If you did away with Jus Solis entirely, the kid in my example literally wouldn't be able to complete the form, since they aren't a citizen of any country. (The kid at Virginia Tech wouldn't really be a comparable case, since he had South Korean citizenship to start with). The fix would be really easy - either create a new class of immigrant, or let them fill in "none" on the form. But the change would need to be enacted by Congress at the same time Jus Solis was revoked, or else weird situations like the one I mentioned will happen. There are probably other random situations where it would matter, too, but you'd have to get a legal expert to figure them all out.