Originally posted by: Xavier434
Originally posted by: Wheezer
Originally posted by: Xavier434
I really don't think that is a fair question. It is not black and white at all. I believe that everyone is essentially against illegal immigration. What people differ on is how both legal and illegal immigration is dealt with and how they feel it should be handled.
??????
huh?
It is black and white.
legal=enjoy your stay
illegal= gtf out and come back when you can do so legally.
what is so hard to understand?
the fact that you established a life here does not negate the fact you did so illegally...therefore everything that you "earned" and accomplished in these united states, no matter how good is fruit from the poisonous tree.
Assuming that after a year or two or ten that your illegal status somehow miraculously disappears and with a wave of a magic wand you are suddenly legal is ignorant to say the least.
Should have lived your live knowing that any minute someone would bust through your door and send your ass back to Mexico.
Do I feel bad? Only for the children that are victims of stupid parents, but not bad enough to say that they should stay....get them out too.
Not true. There is no way you will be able to convince me that separating families with children or throwing all of them out on the street inside a country that their kids have never set foot in before is the right thing to do. They are not trash. They are people. Illegal as they might be, a great number of them work very hard and are worth more to this country than many of the legal citizens that I have met.
The real solution is not to give them all the boot or arm our borders with walls of adamantium and armed with weapons that would make General Patton blow his load. The answer is to sit down and greatly improve the efficiency of the process which allows one to become an American citizen as well as come up with a reasonable plan which allows current illegals to become citizens without screwing over their kids which have done nothing wrong.
I am sorry if you don't like it and would rather see these women and children tossed out like garbage just so you can have your taxes wasted on something else instead, but no matter how much you may hate it I wouldn't expect that to change much. If you want real change then start thinking of real solutions that actually stand a chance in hell of becoming reality.
As stated in a previous post, I dislike the negative results of illegal immigration just as much as the next guy but I also draw the line too. My priorities and sense of right and wrong go way beyond something as simple as tax dollars. I am not some kind of monster consumed beyond hope by my own greed.
I think you might not be saying that when you hear the current statistics.
In California alone as of 2005, its estimated that illegals cost the state $10.5 billion[
1]
Currently California is suffering from a $15 billion shortfall. I'm not sure what illegals are costing the state right now, but I would wager it's more than $10.5 billion. Heck, we are spending over $1.4 billion to incarcerate them. Did you know that nearly 1/2 of those incarcerated in California are illegals.
Anyway, I do agree with you that the path to citizenship should be accelerated, but not from these type of workers. We need more engineers, doctors, scientists. Our current immigration system sucks. I knew a lot of people in university and work who had to go home because they couldn't get work visas and becoming a citizen required them to first go home and reapply and then wait their queue.
We train some of the best minds in our university and we let that intellectual resource go back to foreign countries that would utilize that knowledge to compete against us. That's counter intuitive. To give you a real world example, my dad's godson worked for Intel. A lot of his fellow classmates who were not as bright as him, but were bright enough got jobs here in the US. Then went back home to become millionaires, stealing our ideas and technical know-how to compete against us. The reason they did that was because they couldn't get visas to stay.
That's why you hear silicon valley lobby congress for 200,000 - 300,000 visas/year so they can import Indian/Chinese engineers. A lot of those guys are extremely bright and would love to stay in this country to contribute. I rather have 9 million Indian engineers who make a good living, pay a fair share of taxes than to have 9 million illegals from Mexico who most likely don't even have a high school education.
According to Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation, giving amnesty (eg. accelerated citizenship) will cost tax-payers at least $2.6 trillion [
2]. to give this some perspective, critics of the Iraq War claim that after factoring the initial cost, cost to future medical payments and benefits to soldiers, and interest from borrowing money it might cost tax payers $3 trillion--and that's an estimate from a group deeply opposed to the war so they are probably rounding on the high side.
According to Rector, most of the estimate 9-12 million illegals are without highschool education. Thus they will automatically be in the bottom rung of the income bracket and thus pay low taxes or no taxes at all--therefore not contributing. Assuming that the average age of these workers is 40 years old, in 20 years when they start tapping into Social Security and Medicare, this influx of new citizens will start hitting these services just at the time when they will become insolvent--thus exasperating the problem. He estimates that it would take nearly 300 years, assuming rapid upward mobility, for the decedents of a family of illegals to produce a net positive to counteract the net negative of the initial first generation. And also keep in mind that social security and medicare aren't doing too hot. Currently, entitlements are going to cost the tax payer $53 trillion dollars--that makes the Iraq War look like peanuts.
Anyway, don't forgot also that once you give the first generation citizenship, this guy acts as an anchor to let the whole village in. In the case of my family from Vietnam, my dad became a citizen for joining the Army. Anyway to make a long story short, from just my dad, he brought over 8 of my mom's brothers and sisters (plus their children) plus her father. My dad brought over his grand-uncle, 2 of his 3 wives, his children, my dad's sister and brother and their children.
When my dad sponsored them, he agreed to keep them off wellfare. However, what my dad failed to take into account was that these guy would start interacting with other refugees who were on wellfare. to make a long story short, my dad told them not to do it and they got angry at my dad for denying them free money. Even after my dad explained to them that they were not supposed to and why, they didn't believe him and thought that either he was trying to cheat them or deprive them--some of these jerks still hate him for this to this day.
Anyway, this all came to a head when my dad got called before a judge to explain himself about why he said he sponsored them and now they were "forced" to go on wellfare. What happened was my dad did not even know they went around his back. What he later found out was that there are activist in the community, some may call them "community organizers" that facilitate these guys to take advantage of our social services.
Even though this costs society as a whole, the activist don't care as it serves their narrow minded interests. In fact the more they take the more money they get the next year from the government. Anyway, lets fast forward some 30+ years and we find out that for the most part all the kids turned out okay. But only because my dad forced everyone to learn English and forced them to get a job.
Contrast that to my dad's brother-in-law's family. Once my aunt got citizenship, they sponsored her husband's side of the family and they went straight to wellfare and none of their kids amounted to much. But contrast this to my aunt's own family. They were able to raise two kids who went to college. And working together, my cousins started a clothing company and are now millionaires. Literally rags to riches--they were the boat people from Vietnam.
Anyway, as sad as the human cost of sending these families back to Mexico, if we are to save ourselves we need to learn to say NO. Now watch out for McCain and Obama. I don't trust those two not to do "comprehensive" immigration reform, which is just code word for amnesty.
We've done plenty of amnesties, vowing that this time it will be the last. In my dad's day, he remarked that the government did an amnesty every 10 or so years. This is bad, since my dad knows people who have applied legally and had they just gone underground they would have been citizens sooner.
As for solutions to this problem:
1) Put a permanent moratorium to amnesty. If we give them a glimmer of hope that such a thing will happen they are just going to flock up here and wait it out.
2) Create a federal database that matches picture ID to SSN so that employers can check their employees SSN to their IDs.
3) Enforce current immigration laws and punish those who hire them. Once you make examples out of a few of them, employers will start to curb their hiring practice and through natural market forces, the flow of immigration will decrease. And even cause those up here to maybe go back home or flee to Canada. HAHA!
4) Enforce the border. I'm not too convinced that a wall will work. Look at the Great Wall of China. The Chinese put a million men on the wall and the Mongols and Qing still got through. so rather than a wall, perhaps more border agents and give authority to locals to enforce immigration. I keep hearing how local townships put up anti-illegal ordinances that are easy to enforce, but get struck down in court as unconstitutional since it is the responsibility of the federal government to enforce immigration--not state.
Another thing people should also take into account is the state of Mexico. Right now Mexico derives nearly 40% of its revenues from oil sales, mainly to the US. They have an estimated 10-20 years of proven reserves let. Once they go dry, Mexico is going to suffer economically and there are going to be even more illegals fleeing north. So on top of the top 4 suggestions, we might have to intervene in Mexico to stem the flow of illegals.
While some people complain about sending jobs to Mexico, Mexicans are complaining about losing those jobs to China. Haha, the global economy.