So I just read someone else's post and I commented but i think it deserves its own post. Mexicans are not illegal immigrants. I read "Find the Illegal Immigrant." Apparently its a game where there are immigration officers and immigrants and they have to find the one illegal who is marked with a badge (obviously refering to mexicans because they are the only people who are basically ever refered to as illegal, plus the post references that it is hispanics) How stupid! Americans are racist. We find 1 peron of a race or group and we label their whole group with that characteristic. Afican-Americans are uneducated and athletic. Asians are incredibly smart (especially in math and science). Hispanic are mexican. Mexicans are illegal. Jew are money-horders. Muslims are terrorists. Those from the Middle-East are muslim. We don't know enough about the people of the race or group if we resort to making stereotypes. I believe that making stereotypes shows how uneducated you are about the people you talk about. Mexicans are also not illegal, some are... but so are some from other countires as well. For those who say that mexicans steal our money, I want to recognize that they actually help our economy. And for those who say they steal our jobs, I want to recognize that they take the jobs that Americans are too proud to take. I dont support illegal immigration, I just think its wrong to label mexicans as it. If you believe that wed be better off without mexicans I advise that you watch the movie A Day Without Mexicans. Yeah its a funny movie, but it also has a really good underlying meaning and supports it with facts.
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But all stereotypes hold some truth.
Ever watch a college basketball game? 95% of the palyers are african american.
African Americans make up a large part of the poverty dmeographic, causeing them to get a poor education.
Asians averge much higher on all test scores than other ethnicities, especially on Math and Science.
Jewish people arent necesarily money horders but on average they are more likely to have a larger savings and have more investments.
Who blew up the buses? Who caused 9/11? I'm pretty sure they werent buddhists. The terrorists that we are fighting are Muslim extremists.
Mexicans make up a majority of illegal immigrants in this country, and hispanics make up the largest. Im pretty sure those Canadians arent sneaking across the border trying to find work.
They dont help the economy as they drain money from our schools and our welfare. Thats a hell of alot of money too.
They take jobs that Americans wont take? What did we do when there werent as many illegals in the country? Americans worked in the factories, fast food places, and lower level jobs.
Sure America is racist. But then again, Everyone is. If you arent in some way able to say stereotypical statements about a race then you are ignorant. We dont hold races back, so we arent really racist. We dont hate certain races.
We simply label them. Im a white male teenager. Wow I play guitar, like sports, like chipotle and drive fast. Anyone who uses stereotypes could have told you that.
So I am hispanic and I am tired of the jokes that im illegal because I am not. People have made comments about my family bing illegal and none of them are. I think that its true that alot of hispanics or mexicans take the lower not so nice jobs because guess what they are willing to work and don't have a problem. While some americans say " they are taking our jobs" well if americans really wanted those jobs then they would have them but they dont. its just that mexicans are willing to work for little of nothing, there are hard workers.
Good points from article but I also like Comment Number1
Visit my BLOG> http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/jodi41086
"Sure America is racist. But then again, Everyone is."
I'm postive that's not true
"If you arent in some way able to say stereotypical statements about a race then you are ignorant."
Um, no.
"We dont hold races back, so we arent really racist. We dont hate certain races.We simply label them. "
I don't think you know what racism actually means.
1.Racism is the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and/or that a particular race is superior to others. It can also mean discrimination or prejudice based on race.
2. Prejudice is an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts. A preconceived preference or idea.
3.Stereotypes is a conventional, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.
Since people like to throw these words around a lot, at least use them in the right context.
~Peace, Life, and Love~
Most illegal immigrants come from Mexico. We don't think that all of them do. At least, I don't get the impression that we do.
What did you do look it up to find out about racism, Because labeling a race is very much racism. Mexicans are hard working people who deservw respect which they don't get. I work in a field and have for 2yrs and I'm an America female, you think its easy and pays good then you need to think again, because it doesn't but it does pay my bills and puts food on the table. But those illegals as you call them work harder and longer than anybody. we had 2 other male americans and they quit because it was to hard and to much work... so now you tell me, Where are the Americans now huh?
IM glad that someone else spoke up about it. Im hispanic and I hate how people say that the illegals are taking all the jobs and then everyone gets mad. I would like to see male americans work like they do. its like the american males think they are better than doing hard work if its to hard they quit.guess what those "illegals" know what hard work is and they will work hard to make a living and support their family.
"Is someone who believe in the genetic superiority of one race over another."-Boortz
People get pissed when they are being invaded by Mexico. Many Mexican illegals advocate the reconquering of the 7 southwestern states. THey should all be deported.
Link:
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2007/february/0222_illegals_report.shtml
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."-C.S. Lewis
You complain about labelling groups and making generalitites and then go and say "Americans are racist"
That low-skilled workers are actually an economic negative. But wait...I forgot....our economy is held up by the atlian shoulders of our alien friends......or maybe they drain our economy by sending all their money to mexico.
Yippee ai a
yippee ai o
Get your ass back to mexico.
Yippee ai a
Yippee ai o
And remember the alamo.
"Let it first of all be emphasized that neither of these writers [Darwin and Marx] were of the first class. They were neither of them illuminating or creative thinkers; they were neither of them original; they were both of them inordinately lengthy, prosy, and dull."-Hilaire Belloc
...completely destroys your credibility as a rational commentator on these issues, Ransom, and in fact supports the perception that you are--all definitional disambiguation aside--a racist.
percivale
-------------------------
Arthur: Which is the greatest quality of knighthood?
Merlin: Truth. That's it. Yes. It must be truth, above all. When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.
(From John Boorman's Excalibur)
You just lack a sense of humor
Those damn aliens are a tumor.
But the libs want their votes
And we should always note
That libertarians believe
That lasseiz faire is what we need
Despite the fact that it has failed
And the working man it would derail.
But open borders is the best
Immigration shall never crest
Until decent wages disapear.
But then appears an ancient seer,
Telling us his ancient line
Acting out his ancient mime.
He demands communal property
Let workers unite in solidarity.
No! No! Some shall scream.
Work harder forget your dreams.
They shall be right but for the wrong reason
Why has reason gone out of season?
Libertarians and libs alike
Have different goals in sight
But the end shall be the same
Bloody marxism shall reign.
Q.E.D.
Sonnet for Ransom No. 1
A better poet you may never see,
than when I take the time to sit and write.
A master of the form I may not be,
but pen or sword in hand I am a knight
I joust with those who like you think to claim,
that ignorance and hatred are okay.
I stand between you and the ones you blame,
protecting them from all the lies you say.
And when we count the dead upon the field,
laid low by slashing arguments and facts,
you will have little choice except to yield,
your armor breached and reason shown to lack.
More than you it takes to test my mettle;
Challenge me my friend at your own peril.
...percivale
-------------------------
Arthur: Which is the greatest quality of knighthood?
Merlin: Truth. That's it. Yes. It must be truth, above all. When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.
(From John Boorman's Excalibur)
Thank you for writing that sonnet. Why do people have to act like that?I really do not understand why people can be so ignorant in a matter like this.
I couln't have said it better myself. you said everything, that I also believe in. everyone needs to have a little empathy.
I find it is far more common for the open border types to be calling the border/immigration enforcement types: racist.
Usually the way this goes down is that an enforcement type gives many of the reasons why they think our immigration laws should be enforced. This includes things like:
- respect for the rule of law
- we can't take all of the world's 5 billion poor
- people should come the right way
- rewarding illegal behavior begets more illegal behavior
- illegal immigrants have not been screened for health
- illegal immigrants have not been screened for criminal records
- illegal immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover costs
- English learners are overwhelming schools and wrecking learning opportunities for American kids
- Illegal immigrants are driving down wages for poor Americans
- Illegal immigrants are driving up taxes for the middle class
- Illegal immigrants only benefit wealth employers who pocket fat profits and don't pass on cost savings to consumers
- Illegal immigrants live very densely and degrade neighborhoods designed for single families
- Illegal immigrants are committing crimes
- and the list goes on.
At this point the open borders type usually calls the enforcement type a racist bigot who hates Mexicans and Hispanics. But in the whole list above, the words Hispanic and Mexican were not used once. There is a saying by conservatives that "when you see a liberal calling someone a racist you are usually seeing a liberal losing an argument".
Mexicans are not illegal. Illegal aliens are illegal. About 65% of illegal aliens are Mexican but that means that 35% of illegal aliens are from other countries as diverse as Ireland. I am half Cuban (Hispanic) and have a healthy chunk of Irish blood but I want the Irish illegals thrown out too along with the illegal Chinese, the illegal Eastern Europeans and the illegal Hispanics and every other illegal too!
Race, creed or ethnicity is irrelevant to the argument.
> There is a saying by conservatives that
> "when you see a liberal calling someone
> a racist you are usually seeing a liberal
> losing an argument".
As a Libertarian, I don't think I really qualify as a "liberal" in the sense that you suggest, but since I don't really agree with your position I'll take that bet, anyway.
You say that the anti-immigration argument "usually" proceeds in a calm and intellectual fashion, without ever lowering itself into the mire of racially motivated prejudice, but if you look at the arguments presented above in the responses to this blog, you will see several such references being thrown around by a few of ProU's known anti-immigration conservatives. When you hear commens like "get your ass back to Mexico," it is difficult to accept that your opponent's argument is genuinely based on dispassionate facts and figures. In my experience, there are a lot of conservatives who do indeed approach this issue from an intellectual, let's solve the problem instead of just showing our rhetorical asses, but for the most part those conservatives tend to be (like myself) Libertarians rather than Republicans.
I'm interested in finding out where you got the 65% statistic, but I think it's probably close enough (the figure I found was 58%). But, the error in your comment is in the misconception that all of the people illegally crossing our southern border are "Mexican." The reports that I found stated that this demographic correlated this statistic to illegal immigrants of Latin American origin, not just Mexican nationals. This might seem irrelevant, but it does lend weight I think to the liberal contention that the arguments against the normalization of the illegal population is at least in part based on perceived race. The inaccurate lumping of hispanic-looking people into the imprecisely tossed our term of "Mexican" is enough to give some of us reason to question the real motivation behind the aguments against normalization, especially when we see this same prejudice being directed at hispanic-looking people who are here legally and who may even be birth-right citizens themselves.
Now, on to your specific points...
> - respect for the rule of law
It is difficult to respect irrational, poorly-crafted laws that fail to respect the reality of the needs of our citizens and our guests. Personally, I don't think that our current system of immigration quotas is worthy of much respect. It is also difficult to respect a law that is enforced haphazardly, inconsistently, and whose agents are characterized by rampant corruption. We have an incredibly high rate of misconduct in our immigration agencies. In 2005, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service reported more than 2,500 cases where immigration officials were facing charges of accepting bribes, exchanging sex for status, and other forms of graft in exchange for immigration benefits.
> - we can't take all of the world's 5
> billion poor
I don't think that we're in any danger of doing so. And honestly, this kind of hyperbole doesn't help your case. It is also interesting to note that it wasn't so very long ago that we as Americans viewed ourselves as "a nation of immigrants." Tell me, have you ever heard these words before?
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
> - people should come the right way
Agreed. But, before that can happen, we have to reform our immigration process into something that at least resembles a rational policy. It is also interesting note, however, that only about half of our illegal population got here by "illegal" means. The other half applied for a visa in the standard fashion, was approved and immigrated legally, and then over-stayed their visa by failing to report and return when their legal status lapsed.
This is a good example of the kind of irrationality that seems to come with the myopic focus of many anti-immigration pundits on "securing the border." We could literally eliminate a full half of our problem by focusing our efforts on those people who in fact entered the country legally, and who we do have accurate information on. Rather than throwing money down a hole by building hugely expensive fences, we could much more efficiently trim the numbers of illegals in this country by reforming the horrendously inefficient and ineffective system that we now use.
> - rewarding illegal behavior begets more
> illegal behavior
> - illegal immigrants have not been screened
> for criminal records
- Illegal immigrants are committing crimes
While true to a certain extent, these three arguments are essentially part of one big red herring. Despite the dramatic rise in illegal immigration over then last two decades, our overall rates of most crimes (including most violent crimes) has been steadily dropping since the early nineties. Thus, while there may be some legitimacy to the argument that certain crimes have a estimated higher rate of instance in the illegal population (and most statistics of that sort are purely speculative, since we don't really have the means to gather accurate statistics on the illegal population), that problem is ultimately minor in the face of the systematically declining crime rates that we have been seeing for the past two decades.
> - illegal immigrants have not been
> screened for health
True enough. On this one I actually agree with you.
> - illegal immigrants don't pay enough
> taxes to cover costs
There is a marvelously simple way to address this particular concern.
http://www.fairtax.org/
> - English learners are overwhelming schools
> and wrecking learning opportunities for American kids
Again, this is true to some extent, but its also like going swimming in a pool, and then compaining because this one kid dove in and you got wet when he splashed you. The real problems with American primary and secondary education have almost nothing to do with the relatively minor issue of funding additional ESL classes.
> - Illegal immigrants are driving down
> wages for poor Americans
> - Illegal immigrants only benefit wealth
> employers who pocket fat profits and
> don't pass on cost savings to consumers
Wages are set by the employers, not the employees. One of the reasons that I don't really respect this particular argument is that it totally ignores the fact that this wouldn't be happening if American employers weren't acting complicitly in order to pay illegal workers significantly below the standard rates, and often below even the legal minimums. The way that labor supply and demand effects wages is a reality of capitalism, and as a capitalist nation it seems a bit hypocritical to scapegoat cheap labor when management knows it is acting illegally. If our employers weren't willing to break the law for their own profit, then there would be no benefit to hiring illegal workers (why take a chance hiring an illegal, if there's no profit in it), which would in turn lead to less illegal immigration as the opportunities to find employment without proper documentation dried up.
> - Illegal immigrants are driving up
> taxes for the middle class
There is a marvelously simple way to address this particular concern, too. :)
http://www.fairtax.org/
> - Illegal immigrants live very densely and
> degrade neighborhoods designed for single
> families
Degrade? How do you mean? What is it that illegal households do to a neighborhood that legal households in the same socio-economic bracket do not do?
- and the list goes on.
Personally, I agree with the findings of the Cato Institute--one of this country’s leading conservative (Libertarian) think tanks--when it points out that the direction that our policies are currently pointing would actually be detrimental to the ultimate goal of seeing fewer illegal immigrants in this country. The kind of enforcement that is being suggested by the anti-immigration cap is of limited effectiveness in preventing new illegal entries, but it does have a measureable effect on immigration in that it makes the prospect of an illegal immigrant going home after working for a few years less likely to happen. According to the Institute, the number of illegal immigrants who return home after a short stay has dropped from approximately 45% in the 1980’s, to less than 35% today, and the length of the average stay has dropped from 1.7 years to over 3.5 years. And, they link those figures to the current trends in punative enforcement.
Now, don't get me wrong. I do think that illegal immigration is a big problem in this country, but I disagree with the idea that the best way to fix that problem is to round up all the illegals and just ship them back "home.” In my personal opinion, a great many (perhaps even a majority) of the illegal aliens currently in this country would have come here legally, if that option had been reasonable and rationally available to them. As such, I don’t see the real benefit in using a punative approaching to solve a problem that has been caused primarily by bad policies rather than by the nefarious schemes that many conservative pundits would have us imagine.
But back to the issue of race, its great that you don’t see the issue in terms of black (or rather brown) and white, but 35% of our illegal population is still a pretty big number, and I don't see a lot of "get your ass back to Canada" blogs or "stop illegal chinese immigration" demonstrations on the news. Now, with all that being said, you don't strike me as being particularly motivated by the perceived race of an illegal alien, but I think it is a bit disingenuous to suggest that racial prejudice doesn't play a big part in the rhetoric and focus of the current debate.
percivale
-------------------------
"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
Thanks for the detailed reply. You managed to do it without calling me a racist or a bigot which I appreciate and think was far more useful than your original rant. I'll continue the debate.
> but if you look at the arguments presented above in the >responses to this blog, you will see several such references >being thrown around by a few of ProU's known anti->immigration conservatives
I don't doubt that many who are opposed to illegal immigration are racists. The world is filled with racists and they exist on both sides of the debate. Just look at the hate crimes that are being committed by some (not all) Hispanics against blacks as they racially cleanse the formerly black neighborhoods. I think a few black college students got executed gangland style just last week. And before you get too high on your horse about people using sterotypes you might want to look in the mirror and consider the hypocrisy of this statement from your original post: "How stupid! Americans are racist." Talk about sterotypes! I won't call you a bigot though because I recognize you were merely making a generalization. Generalizations rely on sterotypes and are an extremely useful way in which we communicate. It would be almost impossible to debate without them. I also don't think every one of the posters who you cited above who expressed their anger about illegal immigrants is a racist either. They are just sick of seeing the laws flaunted and the most visible manifestation because they are the vast majority are Hispanics.
The racist argument is bogus and irrelevant to the debate. It is most often used to silence debate and to intimidate our politicians and law enforcement to not pass popular laws or to enforce the laws we already have.
>You say that the anti-immigration argument "usually" >proceeds in a calm and intellectual fashion, without ever >lowering itself into the mire of racially motivated >prejudice,
I did not say this. I said it was more common for the open borders types to accuse the enforcement types of racism and I then explained how it usually happens. Even President Bush recently got in on this act and implied that most of his base was bigots motiovated by hate.
>I'm interested in finding out where you got the 65% >statistic, but I think it's probably close enough (the >figure I found was 58%).
Your number is possibly better than mine. Almost all statistics on illegal immigration are bogus. We don't know if there are 12 million or 35 million.
>It is difficult to respect irrational, poorly-crafted laws >that fail to respect the reality of the needs of our >citizens and our guests.
"Guests" is an odd euphamism for people who broke into our country. Do you generally consider people who break into your home "guests"?
It is fine to think the law is not what it should be. I agree. I am actively working to get it changed so that it is more restrictive. The greencard lottery should be eliminated. Employment based immigration should be expanded and should focus on high skills immigrants rather than importing low skilled people who will join the ranks of the poor and burden taxpayers. Family reunification should be made almost automatic for the core family (spouse and minor children) and should be eliminated for all other categories like parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles. It sounds like you might have different legislative priorities which is your right.
But when you say you don't respect the law and give the strong implication that it therefore does not need to be obeyed or should not be enforced you are describing an anarchist, not a libertarian.
We experimented with amnesty in 1986 and it in fact made the problem much worse. We had about 3 million illegals then and we have 12 (or 20?) million now.
The law needs to be respected and enforced until if and when it is changed via the legislative constitutional process.
>The real problems with American primary and secondary >education have almost nothing to do with the relatively >minor issue of funding additional ESL classes.
I agree there are many problems with our schools but it does not seem to be a question of funding for ESL or anything else because we keep throwing money at them and they keep getting worse. Our public schools are not all equal. Many suburban and rural schools are quite decent. The real failures are in the inner cities. This is where the illegal aliens happen to be but these schools were already bad. It is impossible for me to rationally believe that if one starts with a bad school and then fills it with students whom over 50% are English language learners that it is going to do anything but get much much worse. It is not funding, it is the overall learning environment where English speakers among other thing get deprived of teacher time and where racial strife overwhelms order. Wealthier people flee these school districts and our native born poor get shafted. Their children don't get an education and are therefore trapped in poverty for another generation.
>Wages are set by the employers, not the employees.
Nonsense! Wages are set by supply and demand. Have you ever heard of a labor union? When labor markets are tight, labor has much more to say in the wages (and non wage benefits) they are paid. The modern American Middle Class has its origins in the post World War II period when labor markets were extremely tight as a result of the war and a long hiatus in the mass immigration that happened earlier in the century and was almost completely terminated in the 1920s. Prior to that point in American History when immigration was very high labor lived with much worse conditions. Read about the Guilded Age which was a particularly bad time for ordinary Americans. As a result of mass low skilled immigrations many of the poorest Americans are returning towards those conditions.
Almost every first world economy is blessed with tight labor which encourages capital investment aimed at driving up productivity and higher wages which are the keys to a high standard of living. Almost every third world economy is cursed with abundant cheap labor which results in primitive production methods, low investment, low productivity, low wages and a low standard of living.
I fully favor punishing employers that hire illegals harshly. They not only hurt American employees but they unfairly compete with businesses that try to follow the law while taking a cheap labor subsidy from taxpayers to support their below market compensated workforce.
>Despite the dramatic rise in illegal immigration over then >last two decades, our overall rates of most crimes
>(including most violent crimes) has been steadily dropping >since the early nineties.
So what? You seem to think that some level of violent crime is acceptable?
The drops in crime you cite are mainly due to tough enforcement and particularly greater incarceration of criminals. If our immigration laws were enforced, these drops in the crime rate would be even greater. Every crime committed by an illegal is a crime that could have been prevented if our immigration laws were enforced. Every victim of a crime committed by an illegal is a person who should not have been victimized.
And you called my argument a red herring while presenting this ridiculous swill?
>There is a marvelously simple way to address this particular >concern.
>http://www.fairtax.org/
I like the Fair Tax too.
But the Fair Tax gives a "pre-fund" to low wage earners that makes it progressive just like our current system. Low wage earners effective end up paying ZERO taxes and they will continue to consume social services like education, healthcare, justice, foodstamps, social security and many more. When we import immigrants who have very low levels of education we are practically guaranteeing that they and a large percentage of their children will be low wage earners who burden taxpayers and consume more from the treasury than they contribute. The Fair Tax does not change that. Low skilled immigration is a cheap labor subsidy for business and the Fair Tax is not the marvelously simple solution you imply.
And since you are a self-admitted libertarian, I might as well anticipate and address your next argument too. You will probably argue that the problem is not the immigrants or the free movement of people but the social welfare state that forces other people to be taxed to support the immigrants. Fine, I will concede this point. I fully support your effort to rollback our socialist state and will help you in the attempt. AFTER YOU ACCOMPLISH THE ROLLBACK OF SOCIALISM, I will THEN support open borders.
I have a lot of sympathy for libertarianism but one of the things that is increadibly stupid about it is that in its idealistic form it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Suppose libertarians were to gain power and fully implement their socialism free government and open borders utopia? The flood of poor illegal immigrants that would follow would guarantee that in the very next election cycle we would be right back to socialism as these people voted themselves benfits and handouts from the treasury. They vote overwhelmingly for socialism in their home countries so why would they ignore the siren call of socialism when they got to your libertaian utopia? Its crazy stupid to think they would.
>Degrade? How do you mean? What is it that illegal households >do to a neighborhood that legal households in the same socio->economic bracket do not do?
Do you read the newspapers because there have been lots of stories about this? They rent a house in a neighborhood filled with single family homes and then pack it with multiple families or lots of unrelated people. When a suburban block suddenly has a house designed for a single family of 4 or 6 with 20 people living in it and a bunch of beater cars parked in the yard, everybody else in the neighborhood takes a financial hit as property values tumble and people flee. A blue collar neighborhood gets transformed into a barrio. That is neighborhood degradation.
> I don't doubt that many who are opposed
> to illegal immigration are racists. The world
> is filled with racists and they exist on both
> sides of the debate.
Fair enough. I for one have a great distain from invidious bigotries, and have no problem calling people out when I encounter bigoted attitudes, regardless of their political affiliations.
> And before you get too high on your
> horse about people using sterotypes
> you might want to look in the mirror
> and consider the hypocrisy of this
> statement from your original post:
> "How stupid! Americans are racist."
> Talk about sterotypes! I won't call
> you a bigot though because I recognize
> you were merely making a generalization.
Ummm...excuse me? Please double-check the author of these posts. That statement was not made by me.
> Generalizations rely on sterotypes and are
> an extremely useful way in which we communicate.
> It would be almost impossible to debate
> without them.
I disagree. Stereotypical generalizations are only useful to those who wish to avoid having to think and experss themselves in a rigorously intellectual fashion. Generalizations can be useful, but when they are used in order to avoid the uncomfortable truths that would if considered weaken the argument that one wishes to advance, that use can appear to be less than genuine.
> I also don't think every one of the posters
> who you cited above who expressed their
> anger about illegal immigrants is a racist either.
> They are just sick of seeing the laws flaunted
> and the most visible manifestation because
> they are the vast majority are Hispanics.
Again, please check the authors of the blog and the posts that follow it. I only made that reference in regards to one poster, who is someone that I have a lot of experience with and whom I think the appellation most definitely applies. I cannot speak for that judgement issued by others to others. I can only note that there were several comments made in the various posts above that do seem to lend credence to the argument that perceived race is a focus for the anger that you describe, and your own comment seems to agree with that observation. It really doesn't matter why one decides to focus his or her anger at a particular race. I have personally seen the anger that should be directed at all illegals directed at hispanic-looking people regardless of their legal status. When one takes that attitude, any of the perhaps otherwise legitimate arguments that one may have is lost behind the repulsiven inhumanity of racial prejudice.
> The racist argument is bogus and irrelevant
> to the debate.
I can agree that it should be irrelevant, but since there is a noticeable (and I think significant) number of people who are basing their judgement on this issue more on perceived race than on the actual causes and practically possible solutions, it does not behoove us to pretend that some other motivation is driving a great many of these debates.
> It is most often used to silence debate and to
> intimidate our politicians and law enforcement
> to not pass popular laws or to enforce the laws
> we already have.
The same could be said of the ultra-conservative argument that everyone who prefers an "open border" type policy are essentially "unpatriotic" or "anti-American." And, we hear that refrain just as often, I think. There are pundits on both sides of the aisle, and the responsible voter needs to be prepared to sift through the rhetoric and consider the real issues without reliance on this sort of crap. That being said, I personally tend to stop listening to anyone who I perceive as having crossed over into the mire of racially-motivate rhetoric. Once someone has shown themselves willing to treat other people differently because of their race, I simply do not trust their judgement enough to give any real credit to their pretension of objectivity which so often follows.
> I did not say this. I said it was more
> common for the open borders types
> to accuse the enforcement types of
> racism and I then explained how it usually
> happens. Even President Bush recently
> got in on this act and implied that most
> of his base was bigots motiovated by hate.
To be honest, that attitude seems to be far more common that you suggest, though perhaps that is because the outspoken hate-mongers tend to be more active in the blogosphere. It seems very rare that one encounters an anti-immigrant blogger who can discuss the issue without either resorting to racial epithets or relying on extremely questionable facts and statistics.
> "Guests" is an odd euphamism for people
> who broke into our country. Do you
> generally consider people who break into
> your home "guests"?
Someone who breaks into my literal home is doing so with the intention of doing me real harm...either by stealing my possessions or visitng violence upon my person. That intent is not present in any of the illegals that I have ever personally encountered (and I have worked in several industries that have a high incidence of illegal employments...food service, lawn care and more lately in computer technology). I don't think the real issues at hand are intelligently served by attempting to paint all or even the great majority of illegals as if their intentions are more nefarious than they really are. Most are fleeing dramatic levels of poverty, and are just seeking a better life for themselves and their families. What they are doing may not be right, but it isn't as gruesome or evil as you try to make it out to be.
> It is fine to think the law is not what
> it should be. I agree. I am actively
> working to get it changed so that it is
> more restrictive. The greencard lottery
> should be eliminated. Employment based
> immigration should be expanded and
> should focus on high skills immigrants
> rather than importing low skilled people
> who will join the ranks of the poor and
> burden taxpayers. Family reunification
> should be made almost automatic for
> the core family (spouse and minor children)
> and should be eliminated for all other
> categories like parents, grandparents,
> siblings, aunts and uncles. It sounds like
> you might have different legislative
> priorities which is your right.
I don't know why you would think that my "legislative priorities" would be different than what you suggest. The only really variance that I would offer from the points that you just listed is that I don't thing that one necessarily has to be highly skilled in order to be a good, productive citizen. I would prefer a system that gave preference to people who arranged from a job before their immigration rather than arriving unemployed, regardless of their actual skills. America needs hard workers in all of our industries, after all.
> But when you say you don't respect the
> law and give the strong implication that
> it therefore does not need to be obeyed
> or should not be enforced you are describing
> an anarchist, not a libertarian.
First of all, I never said that the law shouldn't be obeyed, but merely pointed out why it is so easy for many people to justify ignoring it. I can sympathize with that position. Have you ever broken the speed limit? If you have, then you have broken a law that probably didn't seem to make a lot of sense to you, or at least seemed less important to you than getting to where you were going a little more quickly than you "should." Illegal immigration is just an admittedly much more dramatic example of the same mind-set.
Secondly, the gulf between anarchy and libertarianism can at times seem to be little more than a crack in the sidewalk. There are a lot of laws on the books that I think are contrary to the legitimate purpose of our (or any) government, and I'm not ashamed to say that my compliance with those laws are directly proportional to whether or not I think I can get away with avoiding the ones that I feel are overstepping the rational bounds of my personal freedoms.
> We experimented with amnesty in 1986
> and it in fact made the problem much worse.
> We had about 3 million illegals then and we
> have 12 (or 20?) million now.
And, why is that, do you think. It seems to me that the Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986 failed because it was nothing more than a lip-service solution. It looked great on paper, but after the initial amnesty the executive branch never really took to enforcing the mandates of of the law. The situation then was very similar to what we are seeing today. A democratic majority in Congress was pressing a law that was ultimately supported by a republican administration. Everyone earned a lot of votes, patted themselves on the back, and then just dropped the ball. That's why we're in the mess we are today.
> The law needs to be respected and enforced
> until if and when it is changed via the legislative
> constitutional process.
That's a lovely (and very naive) sentiment. If you can figure a way to acutally make that happen, you'll be an American hero.
> > Wages are set by the employers, not
> > the employees.
> Nonsense! Wages are set by supply and
> demand.
That's true in a honest free market, but then the U.S. economy hasn't really been an example of the free market for a long, long time. Since we enforce a minimum wage, any wage that dips below that demarcation happens solely because the employer has knowingly entered into an illegal arrangement with an illegal employee. The 1986 IRCA criminalized practices of that sort, and the burden of the law in that situation is clearly defined as resting on the shoulders of the employers.
> Have you ever heard of a labor
> union? . . . Read about the Guilded
> Age which was a particularly bad
> time for ordinary Americans. As a
> result of mass low skilled immigrations
> many of the poorest Americans are
> returning towards those conditions.
I don't really see the relevance of your comparison, since the minimum wage laws that the employers are violating were instituted on a federal level during the mid-to-late 1930's precisely to regulate the very problems you mentioned. If the employers weren't willing to circumvent the law for profit, or if the executive branch was willing to enforce the existing laws to make this kind of criminal enterprise less attractive to employers and employees alike, then the problem would quickly evaporate. It seems backwards to me to lay the blame for illegally low wages at the feet of illegal immigrants. The people who accept these wages are being taken advantage by a motivation that is far more devious and intentionally criminal that the conditions that make these low wages attractive to the undocumented worker.
> So what? You seem to think that some
> level of violent crime is acceptable?
Wow. You really love to try to put words in my mouth, don't you? I am merely pointing out that the realistic concerns over the way that illegal immigration effects crime rates are a far cry from the alarmist nonesense about spiraling out of control crime rates that one hears so often in these debates.
> The drops in crime you cite are mainly due
> to tough enforcement and particularly greater
> incarceration of criminals.
Tougher enforcement is a major factor, certainly, but most the sources that I have have seen (including the annual reports on crime rates from the DoJ and FBI) indicated that the primary reason that crime rates have been dropping is a direct result of a stronger economy. Basically, when the economy is strong, and when there are more secure jobs (especially in low-income communities), incidental crime rates drop as a natual result. The fact is that even in the Hispanic demographic (that as you have pointed out includes a visible majority of our illegal population), the violent crime rate is currently dropping at rate of about 3.9% per year. In fact, the mid-Western U.S. (where most illegal immigration occurs) was the region which has recently seen the most dramatic overall decline in violent crime rates, at roughly 19.7% per annum.
> If our immigration laws were enforced,
> these drops in the crime rate would be
> even greater. Every crime committed by
> an illegal is a crime that could have been
> prevented if our immigration laws were
> enforced. Every victim of a crime committed
> by an illegal is a person who should not
> have been victimized.
That's very pretty rhetoric, but that all it really is. There really isn't any objectively supportable evidence that I am aware of that would indicated that illegal immigrants impact the crime rates of our general population in any meaningful way. Your argument in this case attempts to use anecdotal examples in leiu of actual data, and that line of reason is of course logically flawed.
> And you called my argument a red herring
> while presenting this ridiculous swill?
Well, after this comment, I feel perfectly justified in taking off the kid gloves. The simple fact is that your opinion in this debate seems to be completely lacking in objective support, and its purpose seems to be directed at generating more problems rather than solving the ones that we have. The only differnece between most illegal immigrants and most legal immigrants is whether or not they have waited through the line in order to get the rubber stamp or a system that is so moronically inefficient that no rational citizens could in good conscience defend.
Like all forms of arbitrary prohibition, systems of this sort at doomed to failure because they operate under the illusion that any government has the power to combat the undeniable force of the human desire to live free and to prosper. You insistence on painting the vast majority of first generation illegal immigrants as shadowy criminals shows and utter lack of objectivity, and your characterizations are wildly inflammatory with show very little real understanding of a group of people that are living a dream that the spoiled elites of conservative right have utterly forgotten. If you want to be taken seriously, then you need to drop the chip from your shoulder and demonstrate that you have a better understanding of how and why illegal immigration happens. I have known a great many illegals in my day, and almost to a man (and woman) their dedication and work ethics were head and shoulders above the average American worker. The do more, and do it for less and we would do ourselves a much better service by trying to find a way that more of these people can get here and live here legally.
> But the Fair Tax gives a "pre-fund" to
> low wage earners that makes it progressive
> just like our current system.
Ah, but most illegals are only "low wage earners" because they are paid lower rates for their work than they would be paid if they were legal. If employers were forced to pay the legal rates to these workers, and if those workers were taxed accordingly, we would in short order have a rather dramatic surpulus of funds that would totally eliminate this concern.
> the Fair Tax is not the marvelously simple
> solution you imply.
I disagree, but that is a debate for another blog.
> And since you are a self-admitted libertarian,
> I might as well anticipate and address your
> next argument too. You will probably argue
> that the problem is not the immigrants or the
> free movement of people but the social welfare
> state that forces other people to be taxed to
> support the immigrants. Fine, I will concede
> this point. I fully support your effort to rollback
> our socialist state and will help you in the attempt.
> AFTER YOU ACCOMPLISH THE
> ROLLBACK OF SOCIALISM, I will THEN
> support open borders.
It seems a bit...childish...of you to concede the point but then refuse to act accordingly unlessl you get what you want, first. That is the mentality, of course, which poisons your entire arugment. You want what you want, but you aren't willing to do what it takes to get it. It really seems that you don't want to solve the immigration problem, but rather just to bitch about it.
> I have a lot of sympathy for libertarianism
> but one of the things that is increadibly stupid
> about it is that in its idealistic form it contains
> the seeds of its own destruction. Suppose
> libertarians were to gain power and fully
> implement their socialism free government
> and open borders utopia? The flood of poor
> illegal immigrants that would follow would
> guarantee that in the very next election cycle
> we would be right back to socialism as these
> people voted themselves benfits and handouts
> from the treasury.
The problem with utopias is that they're never based in the real world, and your description of a libertarian government is a rather overly (and no doubt intentionally) simplistic model of the country we would be if my party actually gained majority control. Libertarians believe in less government, not no government. One doesn't need to be an anarchist to see that our current system of immigration is an inefficient, over-regulated, under-enforced morass of pointlessness. A simpler, more realistic system is what we need...one that can actually be enforced, and which recognized the reality that our economy will force upon us whether we like it or not.
> They vote overwhelmingly for socialism in
> their home countries so why would they
> ignore the siren call of socialism when they
> got to your libertaian utopia? Its crazy stupid
> to think they would.
If that is the case, then why are they so eager to leave there home countries to come here?
> Do you read the newspapers because there
> have been lots of stories about this? They rent
> a house in a neighborhood filled with single
> family homes and then pack it with multiple
> families or lots of unrelated people. When a
> suburban block suddenly has a house designed
> for a single family of 4 or 6 with 20 people living
> in it and a bunch of beater cars parked in the yard,
> everybody else in the neighborhood takes a
> financial hit as property values tumble and people
> flee. A blue collar neighborhood gets transformed
> into a barrio. That is neighborhood degradation.
Ah, I see. You are confusing the word "degradation" with "devaluation." Even so, can you support this argument statistically, or are you once again relying on anecdotal incidents as the basis of your opinion? Do you think that if perhaps these people were being paid a fair wage, that they would be able to live in more "normal" (if there is such a thing in the U.S.) arrangemetns? Or is this perhaps just one more example of the unfortunate conditions that our irrational and uninforceable policies create?
Ultimately, the bottom line is a very simple one. People are going to immigrate into this country wheter we like it or not. We can either recognize that and enact wise and effective legislation that directs those imigrants along a path to becoming a part of the Great American Melting Pot, or we can behave like irrational and mean-spirited children and suffer the consequences of having a mssive, alienated population at large within our borders who feel that they owe us for nothing except the contempt that we have shown them.
percivale
-------------------------
"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
I have known a great many illegals in my day, and almost to a man (and woman) their dedication and work ethics were head and shoulders above the average American worker.
Somewhere in your last post do you think I could find a diatribe about stereotypical generalizations? Or how about a diatribe about "anecotal incidents as a basis of your opinion"?
You are stacking up the best and the most motivated of the third world workforce against what mostly amounts to the bottom end barely employable of ours. In America, people who end up as hotel maids or meat cutters probably did not do too well in the education the taxpayers made available to them. Despite their inate abilities, very few illegal workers are fit for much besides unskilled labor because their country of origen and their parents never saw fit to educate them.
Yes the illegals are probably better workers but are we better off with them working and the bottom end of our native born workforce living off taxpayers and as you argue quite eloquently elsewhere committing crimes or would we better off if we put our own people to work. There are a lot of unemployed people who don't show up in the unemployment statistics.
Ah, but most illegals are only "low wage earners" because they are paid lower rates for their work than they would be paid if they were legal. If employers were forced to pay the legal rates to these workers,
Most illegals are already working in the legal workforce using fraudulent or stolen social security numbers and are earning in excess of the minimum wage. The minimum wage is not enough to turn the Fair Tax Pre-Fund into anything but a negative tax contributions much like the EITC results in negative tax contributions. Just like with our current system low wage earners will get welfare disguised as a tax refund. Even if there was no pre-fund, making the Fair Tax totally regressive, low wage earners would consume more in services then they pay in taxes.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation recently calculated that each low skilled family (Americans, not illegals) consumes about $30,000 in services per year while only contributing about $10,000 in taxes resulting in a net $20,000 drain on the treasury at all levels of government. If you turned the illegals into Americans and implemented the Fair Tax they would barely be earning $20,000 per year let alone paying that much additional in taxes. It does not matter what the system of taxation, importing low skilled third world labor burdens taxpayers because these new citizens will consume more taxes than they contribute.
We don't need to import more poverty.
Ultimately, the bottom line is a very simple one. People are going to immigrate into this country wheter we like it or not.
It may not be possible to shutdown illegal immigration completely and probably not worth the cost to try. But I am not willing to concede that the problem needs to anything close to the thousands of illegal immigrants that are currently flooding into our country on a DAILY basis.
Before I make that concession I will need to see a real effort at enforcing our borders and our laws. There are currently about 38,000 cops in New York City. In pitiful contrast, there are only about 12,000 Border Patrol agents on our 2000 mile border with Mexico and only about 5000 ICE agents trying to enforce our immigration laws in the entire USA interior.
The bottom line is that we could enforce our laws if we tried but to-date we have not even made a credible effort. If we made an effort, we could slow illegal immigration to a trickle. Even the tiny bit of additional enforcement that has occurred under President Bush has caused border aprehensions (and presumably crossings) to drop 40% and there is a great deal of ancedotal evidence in the newspapers that the token increase in workplace enforcement is starting to cause a reverse flow of immigrants towards their countries of origen as they find that jobs are no longer available and self-deport.
"We don't need to import more poverty."
...Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
-Inscription on the Statue of Liberty
...think about that and the comment you made, personally I find it interesting :)
-----------------------------------------------------
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/npsm18
> Somewhere in your last post do you think
> I could find a diatribe about stereotypical
> generalizations? Or how about a diatribe
> about "anecotal incidents as a basis of
> your opinion"?
The difference of course is that I always note when I am speaking in anecdotal terms (i.e. "in my personal experience," etc.), and I am always prepared to back up my opinions with hard facts if those facts are reasonably available. When used in this fashion, an anecdote becomes an illustration of the underlying facts.
> You are stacking up the best and the
> most motivated of the third world workforce
> against what mostly amounts to the bottom
> end barely employable of ours. In America,
> people who end up as hotel maids or meat
> cutters probably did not do too well in the
> education the taxpayers made available to
> them. Despite their inate abilities, very few
> illegal workers are fit for much besides
> unskilled labor because their country of
> origen and their parents never saw fit to
> educate them.
Your ability to make unfounded assuptions is truly staggering. Perhaps you didn't read my previous comment very closely, so I will repeat it for you...
"I have worked in several industries that have a high incidence of illegal employments...food service, lawn care and more lately in computer technology."
On a side note, I have always found it a bit odd the way that some people denigrate certain jobs as "unskilled." A job as a waitron or a chef in a high-end full service restaurant may not require an advanced education, but it certainly isn't "unskilled" labor. The same goes for lawn irrigation and land-scaping. Yoiu might think that digging a twenty-foot pipe trench is a task for "unskilled" laborers, but I would be willing to bet a shinny nickle that if I gave you a such a trench to dig, and asked my friend Ernesto to dig an identical trench beside you, he'd be sipping his sweet tea and taking a siesta before you were even half-way through.
But more to the point, it was my third example that most noteably invalidates your comment. I currently work in a programming position for a major medical billing clearinghouse. The work is extremely technical. Our company at one time employed a rather large number of illegal aliens...all highly skilled, highly paid programmers who were here on expired work visas. This eventually became problematic, and my company took steps to help all of our illegal workers to renew their status, but for several years we were in a position that would have devastated our company if those workers had been suddenly rounded up and "sent home." By offering our illegal employees incentives to "get legal" we were able to achieve 100% legal status in our workforce, and in the end that process benefited everyone involved. The punative strategies that you seem to favor would have resulted in nothing but costs...cost to incarcerate, cost to deport, cost to the economy when a multi-million dollar company folded, leaving hundreds of legal citizens suddenly without work.
> Yes the illegals are probably better workers
> but are we better off with them working and
> the bottom end of our native born workforce
> living off taxpayers and as you argue quite
> eloquently elsewhere committing crimes or
> would we better off if we put our own people
> to work. There are a lot of unemployed people
> who don't show up in the unemployment statistics.
The bottom line is that you can'y make lazy people work, so yes, I would rather have a hard-working illegal alien living and working in my community than a native-born citizen who is nothing but a lazy bum. I also find it interesting that your solution to the burden you feel that the taxpayers are suffering due to illegal immigration is to advocate for a policy of deportation whose burden would far exceed the costs of any other available solution. Currently, illegal immigration costs this country about $10 billion per year, and will continue to cost us that (or more) every year until we do something meaningful about the problem. Amnesty would roughtly triple that cost to $30 billion per year for about five years (give or take), until the legalized population normalized and began to pay into the system the same as any other citizen. Deportation, on the other hand, would cost about $41 billion per year, for approximately the same five-year period. So once again I fail to see the consistency between "solution" you suggest and the outcomes you desire.
> Most illegals are already working in the legal
> workforce using fraudulent or stolen social
> security numbers and are earning in excess
> of the minimum wage.
Once again, it seems that your rush to hyperbole has led you to a false conclusion. At least half of the illegal aliens in this country are here on expired work visas, and each one of them has a valid social security number that was assigned to them when they received their original visa. Of the other hald, at least a significant portion are working as "day laborers," which of course are paid in cash and require no social security number in order to be paid. Are there some illegal aliens using fraudulent social security numbers and identities to work? Certainly. But most? Certainly not.
> The minimum wage is not enough to turn
> the Fair Tax Pre-Fund into anything but a
> negative tax contributions much like the
> EITC results in negative tax contributions.
> Just like with our current system low wage
> earners will get welfare disguised as a tax
> refund. Even if there was no pre-fund,
> making the Fair Tax totally regressive, low
> wage earners would consume more in services
> then they pay in taxes.
This is factually incorrect, and it is obvious that you really don't understand the Fair Tax plan all that well. The pre-bate is based on the amount of tax that a family woring at the poverty level would be required to spend in order to meet the most basic necessities of life. In other words, a family at or below the poverty level still has to buy food and clothing, pay rent and utilities, etc. The pre-bate merely negates the tax burden for those expenditures. I also have to wonder if you really comprehend how low the poverty line is. For a family of five, the poverty line is about $25,000 per year, so the amounds we're talking about. And, it isn't "regressive" at all, because under the Fair Tax, everyone would get the same pre-bate, regardless of income level. For the family of five mentioned above, that works out to about $560 per month, which is (again) a lot less that we are paying those same people now. As it stands now, those people pay no tax at all and receive a check for their basic expenses (a net loss for the taxpayers). Under the fair tax, they do pay the taxes, but receive the money back below a certain line (which at worst results in a net of -zero- (no loss to the taxpayers at all). Also, the Fair Tax is essentially a user fee, based on consumption. And in our society, everyone consumes. Plus (and this is the real kicker), the effective income of almost everyone will increase singificantly, because there would no longer be any monies witheld from your check each week.
> Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation
> recently calculated that each low skilled
> family (Americans, not illegals) consumes
> about $30,000 in services per year while only
> contributing about $10,000 in taxes resulting
> in a net $20,000 drain on the treasury at all
> levels of government. If you turned the illegals
> into Americans and implemented the Fair Tax
> they would barely be earning $20,000 per year
> let alone paying that much additional in taxes.
> It does not matter what the system of taxation,
> importing low skilled third world labor burdens
> taxpayers because these new citizens will
> consume more taxes than they contribute.
Again, you really don't seem to understand the way the Fair Tax works. The fair tax is a revenue neutral change for the government. The government will collect and spend the same amount of money that it collects and spends now. What the Fair Tax does is make the process by which that is done A) more efficient (totally eliminating an entire level of bureaucracy that is dedicated solely to the calculation and preparation of income tax liability), B) more fair (it ensures that everyone pays taxes in the same manner...i.e. based on consumption), and C) more secure (under the Fair Tax, there is virtually no way to avoid paying your taxes, since the tax is paid up front at the point of consumption). What the Fair Tax does not do is change any of the basic axioms relating the basic concept of taxation. The lower end of the economic spectrum will always pay less taxes than the upper end, regardless of the system, since the simple fact is that people with less money have less to take. The Fair Tax is still a form of wealth re-distribution, but so are all tax systems. The Fair Tax simply minimized the impact of that unfortunate reality, and eliminates unecessary road blocks that divert funds towards away from the general welfare for which they are intended and that are currently expended for no other purpose that to maintain the existence of the bureaucracy.
> We don't need to import more poverty.
We don't "import poverty." As you rightly pointed out, very few illegals are actually working at jobs that earn less than the minimum wage. The only kind of worker that increases "poverty" in this nation is the worker that doesn't work, and since it is the jobs that we offer that is the primary lure for illegals who enter our country, it seems unlikely to me that poverty is a long time concern. One of the reasons that many hard working illegals remain at the lower end of the economic scale is that advancement upwards in most industries is not possible without legal status. A hard working and dedicated alien that starts work in an entry-level position is essentially trapped there unless he or she can obtain legal status. If these workers could obtain that status, it is unlikely that they would remain in entry-level positions.
> It may not be possible to shutdown illegal
> immigration completely and probably not
> worth the cost to try. But I am not willing
> to concede that the problem needs to
> anything close to the thousands of illegal
> immigrants that are currently flooding into
> our country on a DAILY basis.
Those thousands of immigrants come here because here is where the jobs are. If the economic conditions were not sufficiently attractive, they wouldn't be coming. You can pout and deny the economic reality all you want, but if there wasn't an excess of jobs that most Americans were unwilling to take, then the availability of those jobs simply wouldn't exist. Granted, the natural economic relationship of labor supply and demand is exaggerated by the payment of lower than standard wages, but I don't think that the disparity is a great as some people suggest.
> Before I make that concession I will need
> to see a real effort at enforcing our borders
> and our laws. There are currently about 38,000
> cops in New York City. In pitiful contrast,
> there are only about 12,000 Border Patrol
> agents on our 2000 mile border with Mexico
> and only about 5000 ICE agents trying to
> enforce our immigration laws in the entire
> USA interior.
In regards to this, I agree. It doesn't matter what laws we enact if the policies they dictate are not enforced. However, I will point out once again that there is credible research from the CATO institute that indicates that under the currently existing system, border enforcement would actually be counterproductive to the goal of lowering the number of illegal aliens in this country. An immigrant who is living in undesireable conditions will be more willing to risk breaking the law in order to get here, but will be less willing to do so in order to return home. The Cato Institute was able to demonstrate a direct correlation between the likelihood that an illegal alien will stay in this country that would otherwise have left willingly, to the increase in border enforcement that has (suprisingly enough) been becoming more and more rigorous since at least the early nineties.
> The bottom line is that we could enforce
> our laws if we tried but to-date we have
> not even made a credible effort. If we made
> an effort, we could slow illegal immigration
> to a trickle.
I agree that the effort to date has been pitiful, but I disagree in that I don't think that the existing polices really can be enforced in a reasonably affordable manner. The system currently in place is simply too inefficiently designed and its irrationally draconian restrictions make actual enforcement rather unlikely.
> Even the tiny bit of additional enforcement
> that has occurred under President Bush has
> caused border aprehensions (and presumably
> crossings) to drop 40% and there is a great
> deal of ancedotal evidence in the newspapers
> that the token increase in workplace enforcement
> is starting to cause a reverse flow of immigrants
> towards their countries of origen as they find
> that jobs are no longer available and self-deport.
The anecdotal evidence might suggest this, but the hard data does not. You have made repeated note of the ever increasing numbers of immigrants that are appearing within our borders, and that contradicts any suggestion of any significant "reverse flow" in the illegal population, and the Cato study clearly showed that illegals are staying longer and are less likely to return home than every before (in the last several decades, at least).
percivale
-------------------------
"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
For a family of five, the poverty line is about $25,000 per year, so the amounds we're talking about.
For discussion purposes, that number works for me. A fairly typical illegal immigrant family has on average slightly over 3 children.
There are 2000 hours in a work year. $25,000 / 2000 hours is $12.50 per hour which is about TWICE the minimum wage. To earn that much money we are talking about a very well paid unskilled worker or a two wage earner family. If two people are working then they are either being irresponsible in their parenting or somehow foisting the cost of childcare on taxpayers. Either is in one way or the other an expensive proposition for society. Poorly supervised children turn into highschool dropouts and gang members. There are abundant statistics that prove in fact that this is all to often the outcome we are getting.
Under the fair tax, they do pay the taxes, but receive the money back below a certain line (which at worst results in a net of -zero- (no loss to the taxpayers at all).
Wrong. They don't receive the money back under a certain line. Every family gets the same pre-fund with the only variable being family size.
How about if they were earning $5.50 per hour which is slightly above the current minimum wage? 2000 hours x $5.50 = $11,000 per year. They would probably spend and be taxed on every dime of that $11,000 but they would get the same pre-fund as somebody who was earning, spending and being taxed on every dime of $25,000 per year. They would get a larger pre-fund then they paid in taxes and would effectively be paying negative taxes or alternatively getting welfare disguised as a tax refund which is very similar to the way the EITC works in our current system. Apparently it is you who does not understand the Fair Tax
As I said in my previous post, it does not matter if we have the current system or the Fair Tax, when you import poverty, taxpayers lose.
We don't "import poverty." As you rightly pointed out, very few illegals are actually working at jobs that earn less than the minimum wage. The only kind of worker that increases "poverty" in this nation is the worker that doesn't work,
What you don't seem to understand is that the minimum wage and even a substantially higher wage is still poverty. Using your figure of $25,000 per year as poverty, that works out to $12.50 per hour which is on the upper end of what unskilled workers earn and is more than TWICE the minimum wage.
Most of America's poor are hardworking people. They are still a burden on taxpayers because they consume more tax dollars than they contribute. If we expand the population of hardworking poor people by importing unskilled workers from the third world we will put increased downwards wage pressure on our existing poor making them poorer and the new people will be poor too and also requiring services from the government.
We will essentially be importing poverty and the taxpayers will have to pick up the additional tab.
...since the example that I used came more or less directly from the U.S. Census' Bureau's web page that explains how the poverty line is determined...
How the Census Bureau Measures Poverty
(Official Measure)
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/povdef.html
If you want to be an ass, that's fine, but it really just makes you look silly when you obviously don't have a solid grounding in any of the areas you like to complain about.
As for this...
> Under the fair tax, they do pay
> the taxes, but receive the money back
> below a certain line (which at worst
> results in a net of -zero- (no loss
> to the taxpayers at all).
>
> Wrong. They don't receive the money
> back under a certain line. Every family
> gets the same pre-fund with the only
> variable being family size.
You aren't reading my comments very closely, and it really just sounds like your determined to be difficult regardless of the facts at hand. The "line" that I was talking about was the poverty line, and it is the same for all families with similar characteristics. The poverty line in the U.S. is based primarily on family size, which is why I noted the number of family members in my earlier example...duh.
As for your rather creative assumptions about the number of incomes that make up the $25,000 figure I (and the U.S. Census Bureau) used, the example provided assumed three incomes, not one or two, with both parents and an elder family member contributing (and two children that do not).
As for you assumption that most illegal immigrant families have three or more children, can you support that with hard data, or this too (like so many of your opinions) simply more speculation on your part?
Finally, the reason that most low income families comsume more in services than the contribute is because our government has become so ponderously inefficent. The Fair Tax is a perfect example of how the cost of bureauracracy can be minimized, to the overall gain of all of our citizens.
You are carrying on about the Fair Tax, but it is really quite obvious that you haven't taken the time to adequately familiarize yourself with what it entails and the way it works. That lack of dilligence seems to pervade a great many of your opinions, which are far more angry than they are intelligent.
percivale
-------------------------
"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
I read your comments closely enought to realize that now you are saying something completely different.
Now you say:
You aren't reading my comments very closely, and it really just sounds like your determined to be difficult regardless of the facts at hand. The "line" that I was talking about was the poverty line, and it is the same for all families with similar characteristics. The poverty line in the U.S. is based primarily on family size, which is why I noted the number of family members in my earlier example...duh.
But in my previous post I was responding to this comment which you made:
Under the fair tax, they do pay the taxes, but receive the money back below a certain line (which at worst results in a net of -zero- (no loss to the taxpayers at all).
The second half of which is simply not true. The Fair Tax pre-fund is designed to result in "no-loss to the the taxpayers at all" for a family of five spending $25,000. But in fact, as I pointed out in my previous reply, if that family of five only earns $11,000 (slightly above minimum wage) they still get a refund as if they were earning $25,000 so in-fact the taxpayers are not ending up with a net of zero as you claimed and contrary to your claim the taxpayers are experiencing a loss because they are giving out a refund larger than the taxes they take in (negative taxes aka welfare disguised as a tax refund).
You claimed that I did not understand the Fair Tax but your claim of "no-loss to the taxpayers at all" demonstrates that it is you who does not understand the Fair Tax.
As I stated before I like the Fair Tax. I also rather doubt it will ever become law. The elites have too much of a vested interest in the current system.
The more important point is that regardless of whether we have our current tax system or the Fair Tax System when we import poor people, taxpayers are going to be taxed to support them. It is a cheap labor subsidy for employers who are the main beneficiaries of unskilled immigration.
As for your rather creative assumptions about the number of incomes that make up the $25,000 figure I (and the U.S. Census Bureau) used, the example provided assumed three incomes, not one or two, with both parents and an elder family member contributing (and two children that do not).
Fine, lets run with that assumption. The Fair Tax calls for collecting something like a 27% (or 30% depending on how you calculate it) sales tax. 30% of $25,000 is $7500 dollars of taxes. But the Fair Tax gives this family a pre-fund designed to give them all of that money back so they get a check for about $7500 and effectively pay ZERO tax.
But EACH of the two younger children costs the taxpayers $8000 each per year to educate. That means that this family will require a $16,000 subsidy from taxpayers just to educate their two children and that is before we consider their impacts on healthcare, the legal system, foodstamps and other welfare programs, the need to build infrastructure to support the larger population, etc, etc, etc.
Importing poverty is a bad deal for taxpayers!
As for you assumption that most illegal immigrant families have three or more children, can you support that with hard data, or this too (like so many of your opinions) simply more speculation on your part?
Here is one of many many sources documenting high Hispanic fertility. Fertility for the foreigh born Hispanics is higher than the native born hispanics and of course a very large percentage of the foreign born are illegal.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9805E0D71338F9...
Average fertility in America is slightly below the 2.1 children replacement level and Hispanic fertility is 50% above norm so three children is just about right on the nose.
Finally, the reason that most low income families comsume more in services than the contribute is because our government has become so ponderously inefficent.
I agree with that totally. When you get that problem fixed and when you finish rolling back the welfare state I will be much more supportive of allowing low skilled poorly educated people to immigrate. Until those problems are fixed it is crazy to import even more poverty to burden taxpayers who are struggling to support the poor that we already have.
> The second half of which is simply not true.
> The Fair Tax pre-fund is designed to result in
> "no-loss to the the taxpayers at all" for a family
> of five spending $25,000. But in fact, as I pointed
> out in my previous reply, if that family of five
> only earns $11,000 (slightly above minimum wage)
> they still get a refund as if they were earning $25,000
> so in-fact the taxpayers are not ending up with a
> net of zero as you claimed and contrary to your
> claim the taxpayers are experiencing a loss because
> they are giving out a refund larger than the taxes
> they take in (negative taxes aka welfare disguised
> as a tax refund).
>
> You claimed that I did not understand the Fair Tax
You don't.
> but your claim of "no-loss to the taxpayers at all"
> demonstrates that it is you who does not understand
> the Fair Tax.
You are attempting to argue a different point entirely that the one my argument suported. Let me dumb it down for you. The cost of services, is an entirely differnt issue from the way that tax revenues are collected. If you given me $0, and I give you $100, then I suffered a net loss of $100. If you give me $100, and I give you back the same $100, then I have suffered a net loss of $0. The first example explains how the current system of taxation works. A very low income family pays $0 in taxes (or almost $0), but then receives a substantial amount of money back from the government. Under the fair tax, that same family does actually pay the tax, and then only receives back the same amount (or very near to it) that they actually paid in. Now, the Fair Tax isn't perfect and yes you can find a minor disparity in the calculation if you look to the extreme far ends of the income spectrum. But lets be honest, a family of five that only makes $11,000 is not typical, even among very low income families, and even in that scenario that family would be paying far more in taxes into the system than they are now to offset the servicies they receive. To date, I have never seen a suggested tax system that does not redistribute wealth to at least some degree. That is after all what all taxation is about, but the Fair Tax minimizes it more than any other alternative currently on the table, which I think you will have to admit.
But, we are getting somewhat off-topic, since the majority of illegal aliens who are coming here are coming here to work, and I think it is irrelvant to the actual topic of this blog to argue against a tax system that would compel even illegal workers to pay the same taxes as everyone else, especially since tax avoidance was one of the issues you originally complained about.
> As I stated before I like the Fair Tax. I also
> rather doubt it will ever become law. The elites
> have too much of a vested interest in the current
> system.
I disagree for one simple reason. Under the Fair Tax, even the elites end up with more money in their pockets at the end of the day than they do now. There are no loosers under the Fair Tax (except perhaps for certified public accountants and other professionals whose jobs related directly to the preparation of income tax forms). Money makes the world go 'round, or so they say, and even the "elites" of this country can (and I think will) be led by their capitalist little noses towards the well of the Fair Tax.
> The more important point is that regardless of
> whether we have our current tax system or the
> Fair Tax System when we import poor people,
> taxpayers are going to be taxed to support them.
> It is a cheap labor subsidy for employers who
> are the main beneficiaries of unskilled immigration.
The difference, of course, is that under the Fair Tax even the illegal worker will be unable to avoid being taxed, and will in fact be paying into the system at the same rate as everyone else. The absolutely worst case scenario under the Fair Tax would mean that the deficit between taxes and services would be less that it is now.
> Fine, lets run with that assumption. The Fair Tax
> calls for collecting something like a 27% (or 30%
> depending on how you calculate it) sales tax.
On a side note, remeber that currently the taxpayers are already paying those percentages, which are imbedded in the costs of goods due to the labor expended in pursuit of tax compliance by producers, distributors, etc.
> 30% of $25,000 is $7500 dollars of taxes. But the
> Fair Tax gives this family a pre-fund designed to
> give them all of that money back so they get a
> check for about $7500 and effectively pay ZERO tax.
Ah, but the Fair Tax doesn't just give this money back to the low income family, it gives it to all similarly situated families. And more to the point of illegal immigration, and to quote the Fair Tax website...
How does the FairTax affect illegal immigration?
Unlawful residents will be paying a rate of 23 cents on every dollar spent since they are not eligible for the FairTax prebate. The only way to get the prebate and not pay taxes on the purchase of essential goods and services is to become a lawful resident. In this way, the FairTax helps promote legal immigration by ensuring that only lawful residents receive the prebate. It also ensures that unlawful residents contribute to the cost of providing services they receive.
http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_askanswer_immigrat...
Granted, this requires that we actually adopt some sort of practically enforceable system of immigration control, but then that's an entirely different issue. Under the Fair Tax, illegals pay into the system tax system, but do not receive the pre-bate.
> But EACH of the two younger children costs
> the taxpayers $8000 each per year to educate.
> That means that this family will require a $16,000
> subsidy from taxpayers just to educate their two
> children and that is before we consider their
> impacts on healthcare, the legal system,
> foodstamps and other welfare programs, the
> need to build infrastructure to support the
> larger population, etc, etc, etc.
A couple of points to consider. One, is that the children of illegal immigrants are not necessarily illegal immigrants themselves. If they were born within our borders, then they are American Citizens with all the rights associtated therewith, and I see no rational reason to punish them for a crime that their parents may have committed. That's a cost that I'm willing to see my taxes go towards. As for welfare, food stamps, and the like, the current impact of illegal families on services would be significantly lessened (if not totally eliminated) by normalizing these people and getting them to participate in the legal systems. And as for infrastructure, that's an investment that is inevitably linked to population growth of any kind.
> Here is one of many many sources
> documenting high Hispanic fertility.
I find it interesting that depite the fervor with which you denied the relvance of the criticism of racism in this debate, when I asked you a question about the fertility of illegal immigrants, you responded back with an article about hispanic fertility. In fact, almost all of your criticism seem to apply only if we look at perceived demographic of illegal hispanic immigrants.
> Fertility for the foreigh born Hispanics is
> higher than the native born hispanics and
> of course a very large percentage of the
> foreign born are illegal.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9805E0D71338F9...
Well, I'm going to have to call you out on a bit of hypocrisy, here. I've been reading your comments in a few other related blogs, and in one of them, you criticized your opponent thus...
Your Research is flawed and deceptive
Submitted by jackbenimble on Tue, 08/21/2007 - 5:47am.
The studies you cited are for LEGAL immigrants. While you pretend they include illegal immigrants the only thing these two separate groups have in common is that they were not born in America. Otherwise they are very, very different. . .Muddying the waters between legal and illegal immigrants is a common tactic of the open borders types. . .Illegal immigrants have very little in common with legal immigrants. . .To equate legal immigrants to illegal immigrants does a huge disservice to legal immigrants who make enormous positive contributions and who honor and respect our society by following our laws and doing things the right way.
http://www.progressiveu.org/192153-illegal-immigration-drunk-driving-and...
Now, it really sounds to me that you are taking exactly the same tactic that you criticized in this other blog. Nowhere in the article you studied does it even mention the legal status of the women studied, and I think it is rather disingenous to "muddy the waters" in this fashion. One difference in particular that I think your comment misses is that a great many illegals do not intend to stay here for their entire lives (the average stay of an illegal immigrant is not a little over four years), and especially in the case of border jumpers I think that there is an easily identifiable motivation for not having a kid to carry back and forth with you. Now, I'm sure that doesn't stop some of these people from having kids, but I do think it makes it less likely that they would voluntarily become pregnant than their legal counterparts.
> I agree with that totally. When you get that
> problem fixed and when you finish rolling
> back the welfare state I will be much more
> supportive of allowing low skilled poorly
> educated people to immigrate. Until those
> problems are fixed it is crazy to import even
> more poverty to burden taxpayers who are
> struggling to support the poor that we already
> have.
I still disagree with your use of the term "importing poverty." Poverty is an economic condition, and it doesn't travel with you. Poverty only gets "imported" if the immigrant gets here and then does nothing to improve their own situation. And, since the primary motivation for immigrants (illegal or otherwise) tends to be to do just that, I find phrase to be a little less that honest and accuate. But even so, if we were to stop all new illegal immigration tomorrow (which is of course, impossible under the current system) we would still be faced with a rather large population of illegals that are already here, and your plans don't really seem to address that reality in any practical way.
The data we have reviewed seems to indicate that punative immigration enforcement is not only ineffective in the overall scheme of things, but is actually counter-productive (not to mention enormously expensive).
percivale
-------------------------
"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
The poem written by Emma Lazarz was added to the Statue of Liberty many years after we received it as a gift from France. The original intent of the Statue of Liberty never had anything to do with immigration. It was intended to celebrate our system of government and devotion to liberty.
Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty later became a symbol of immigration as LEGAL immigrants were FORCED to be processed through Ellis island where they underwent various screenings. Many immigrants were refused entry and sent back to their countries' of origin. One of my great-granfathers, who later became US Surgeon General, was a health inspector there.
It is amusing that you have now twice cited the symbol of our LEGAL and controlled immigration system in support of continued immigration anarchy.
Part of the system of government that the Statue of Liberty celebrates is a Republic that features rule by the people for the people. Essentially it is majority rule tempered by a Constitution that limits the powers of government and protects the rights of the minority. The right to immigrate was never one of those protected rights because the founders specifically gave Congress the right to regulate immigration and charged the Federal Government with protecting the borders.
The majority back when that poem was written may have favored mass immigration of poor people. By the 1920's that sentiment had clearly changed and immigration was nearly shut completely off. In about 1965 the policy shifted again towards more generous immigration. Now, it appears that public sentiment is perhaps shifting towards a less generous approach to immigration at least until the public sees some committment to enforcement. Changing our immigration policy is the right of the citizenry in our form of government which is celebrated by Lady Liberty. Our immigration policy should be designed for the benefit of Americans and not immigrants.
We don't have to be governed by a poem! Emma Lazarz's poem was never even introduced, let alone ratified as an amendment to our Constitution. Your argument is not very impressive.
As far as importing poor people goes, times have changed. When that poem was written our economic system was pure capitalism. There was no social security, no welfare, very little public schooling, and practically no income taxes. Immigrants were expected to work or starve. Many could not hack it and it was common for them to return home. That is completely different than our current social welfare state. Perhaps then it did not matter if we imported poverty. Now it makes absolutely no sense because when you import poverty, taxpayers get stuck with the tab.
"It is amusing that you have now twice cited the symbol of our LEGAL and controlled immigration system in support of continued immigration anarchy"
Ahem, excuse me but I never stated my stance on immigration but thank you for jumping to conclusions. I know the history, the quote stands for our ideals (and we have several of them)I know that we are not governed by a poem.Try do think deeper into things before you go off on a rant (so it seems).
Once again i did not state my stance on immigration that particular line you typed caught my attention.I'm always open for debate but I never said my stance on the immigration issue (as I stressed for the third time):)
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http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/npsm18