If the feds wont get tough with illegals...

[dchakrab]

Originally posted by: blackangst1

Originally posted by: dchakrab
Do you honestly think it's as easy to get a visa now as it was when my father immigrated (70's)? Ask an immigrant. In Calcutta, for *qualified* applicants who have businesses here in the US sponsoring their visa and the financial resources to guarantee their sustenance here, the acceptance rate has dropped to about 13%. My father, on the other hand, came here to look for a job. You think it's getting easier?

Personal experience with friends in India tells me that Indians no longer want to come to the US because we're seen as a country hostile to immigrants. I have a friend who was accepted to every business school he applied to, and is rich enough to afford them all...and he chose London School of Economics. LSE, incidentally, is ranked below Wharton (at the U. of Penn) or Harvard Business School, or the Graduate School of Business at the U. of Chicago. He just didn't want to come to the US, and would take those as last resorts if he didn't get in somewhere else. Doesn't anyone else find this disturbing?

And no, we're not making it easier for them to enter the country. There is no healthcare, education, or jobs for immigrants that didn't exist in the 70's. Actually, we've made it harder...harder for them to get legalized if they were illegal when they entered, harder for them to be accepted by society, harder for them to be successful without being "whitewashed" in some sense.

My father was accepted by Americans when he arrived here. He had white and black friends, everywhere we lived when I was a child. These people were friendly. What was the result? To live and be affluent in this society, he had to speak English and live as an American, which he learned to do and insisted that I learn as well.

Fast forward to now. An immigrant, legal or not, is ostracized. They are forced to call only their countrymen their community. They have no incentive to improve their English because their communities are immigrant communities who are banding together as a defence mechanism.

We stopped doing this to the Chinese...stopped discriminating against them and calling them communists, eventually. And most Chinese immigrants now learn English, eventually, and learn to function in American society even though they keep a very strong cultural identity. Indians used to do that, too.

Indians nowadays don't always do that, though. My friend's mother is in the US, and has been here for years, but she lives and moves in a community where the languages she needs to know are Hindi and Punjabi, not English. She has *none* of the incentives to assimilate that my father and mother had when they immigrated.

Look at the larger picture of immigration...it's not just about illegal Mexicans mowing your lawn.

Dave.

I never said it was as easy as in the 70's....you brought that up. You make it sound like we are being unreasonable. Having immigrated my wife, I know the immigration process intimately. All this racism and hostility you speak of is BS. Our immigration laws are not unreasonable. The most difficult part of immigrating to America is not OUR laws, but the countries where they are immigrating OUT OF. Getting a visa requires not only work on the USA side, but also from the original country. The biggest PITA is the time involved. If getting an American visa was so terrible, and if we are so hostile, why do we have record numbers of LEGAL immigrants waiting for visas? Get your facts straight, sir.

The question is not whether we have record numbers of immigrants waiting to get in. The question is the quality of the immigrants who are waiting to get in. As someone else posted, we need to be attracting the best and the brightest, not someone to mow our lawns.

As far as I know, there is simply no research on this, so I'm speaking from personal experience. Yes, there is research documenting the numbers of people waiting to come to the US. No, that wasn't my point. My point was that I *know* a time when everyone and their cousin wanted to come to the US over anywhere else in the world. At that point, the US was in a position to pick and choose the best and the brightest, and our economy did incredibly well as a result. Many of those people settled here and were very successful.

Now, I find an increasing number of people in India have the impression that the US is not such a great place to go. I have a friend whose younger sister could have easily immigrated, since she has close relatives who are legal immigrants here in the US...but she chose to stay in India for college instead. I have another friend in India who chose college in Germany instead of the US, because she was better treated there than she was here. Her father was a senior engineer for Mercedes...he was very well qualified and very well educated, and he says that when he chose Germany, he was criticized, because everyone he knew was coming to the US. Now, a lot of those friends of his are returning to India, or moving to Europe or the Middle East to work, while he's perfectly happy with his house and his life in Germany.

Every criticism of my post seems to revolve around the question of illegal immigrants. I'm not sure I made this clear enough...I *don't* support illegal immigration into the US or into any other country. If we grant these immigrants amnesty now, it's just a one-time measure, not a one-time solution. It addresses a symptom, but not the root problem.

And yes, I do feel discriminated against in the United States, despite being born here. I've been heckled on a public bus in Chicago twice and accused of being an Iraqi, for example. When I was a child in southern Georgia, I fought the white kids *and* the black kids, because I was neither, so I had no friends.

It's hard to quantify because there's so little research on this, but based on personal experience I believe there's a distinct trend towards assimilating less and less. And yes, older Indians tended to not assimilate very well anyway...but an Indian who was coming to the US to work and settle here used to have very solid incentives to assimilate. I am still surprised when I meet people who don't speak English, but are living and working very happily as permanent residents in the US. Their worlds are so very different from mine, and the key difference seems to be in the communities they are active in, and the people they choose to interact with and are accepted by.

Getting an American visa is not "so terrible" ...but it is, perhaps, more terrible than it has to be. The point is not whether it's impossible...the point is that the best and the brightest minds in the world no longer wish to come here.

Outsourcing may play a part, but it is a small one. Many of the students I am talking about haven't even thought about jobs, because most Indians don't work till they're out of college. They're just thinking about getting their degrees. At any rate, I think outsourcing is both an indicator and a stimulant for the problem, since it results in even more incentive for qualified workers to stay or move abroad. We should be trying to attract qualified workers to the United States, not move those jobs out as fast as we can. And to do that requires an open mindedness that we seem to be losing as a society.

Dave.

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: babylon5
Our government should jail any business owners who hire illegals, AND guard our border.

But we're doing neither, cuz our government is guided by business interest. Unless the citizens start DEMAND it, illegals will keep arriving every day every year for a long time.

Well, sheeet, I think it might be time to grab some beef jerky and my gun and go hole up in my bunker in Montana...

 

[FallenHero]

Originally posted by: Ronstang

Originally posted by: Infohawk
Actually, the structure of our federal government prevents the states from getting tough. Keep in mind that the federal government handles immigration. Federal immigraiton law preempts state law. There have been a lot of state immigration laws that have been pushed aside by the courts because they are meddling to much with immigration, which is solely the domain of the federal government.

The Federal laws are not being enforced. If the states just started enforcing existing Federal laws I would love to see the argument from the Feds telling them they have to cease and desist.....FOLLOWING THE LAW. Even if they could fall on the excuse that those laws must be implemented by Federal law enforcement officials it would be fun to watch it play out on the news as the Feds tell everyone they DON"T WANT to enforce their own laws.

I would love to see that case go to court. Hell, I would order the transcripts and read them for a good laugh.

 

[dchakrab]

I'll also add that there is some depth to this problem that is simply being overlooked in these discussions. A great deal of this current protest is due to legislation that proposed to make it a felony to help an undocumented immigrant in anyway. This would entail (for example) every immigrant (or suspected immigrant...how would they know I'm a US citizen, after all?) showing extensive documentation before being allowed to take a computer class at a community center, for example. No one's increasing funding to community centers to allow them to document and record all of their constituents...but suddenly, they're guilty of a felony if one undocumented immigrants walks through the door and sits down in front of a computer.

Similarly, there are atrocities being committed at the border that we simply aren't aware of. A speaker at a fundraiser here in Chicago recently told us how two white American college students who volunteered to provide humanitarian aid to those crossing the desert border were arrested and are now serving jail terms under homeland security laws. There are no terrorists coming in through the desert, folks. The terrorists flew in on planes, set up their lives, and (as mentioned by someone else above) learned to fly planes and lived cushy lives till they were needed. Instead of worrying about them, or worrying about the absolute failure of our current airline security system, we want to patrol our border with Mexico more. A father recently couldn't get visas for his daughter *despite his wife being a legal immigrant in Houston* ...to reunite his family, he was compelled to cross the desert. Border security chased him down, and ran him and his daughter over. She died. He's now being charged with reckless endangerment and possibly manslaughter for her death.

There are real stories here that we're overlooking in our haste to label people "illegal immigrant". Even suggesting that vigilanteism is a solution is a joke. Do you think the Chicago PD would be thrilled if I went around with a gun looking for a thief to nab? Do you think my neighbors would feel safer? All that's going to happen is even more human rights violations on an epic scale, which we won't feel sick to our stomachs about because they're "illegals" and therefore deserve whatever they've got coming to them.

Dave.