Just curious about everyones point of view about illegal immigration? Do you agree/disagree with the idea of sending all the illegals back t their countries? I am an American-Mexican and I am torn between the fact that America is a country founded by immigrants and obeying the law. I feel bad because these immigrants come to our country for a better life and more opportunities. However, I support my country and its' laws. Yet my mother was an immigrant but now is an American citizen. It's like closing the door behind you, even when you see how many others want the same opportunities as you do. And the thought that a human being can be considered illegal scares me. I think that are middle-class Americans depend on the "slave class", which are the illegal Mexican workers. This idea helps more things becoming accessible to middle-class Americans. But I think the biggest misconception is that these illegals are taking jobs from Americans. I do not think that is true because Americans do not and will not do the work these illegal immigrants do. Then again I do think that the illegal immigrants are being taken advantage of and work underpaid. I wonder if there are people like me who see both sides and I do not know what the solution should be. This is a major issue in the Hispanic community, espeacially with the Mexicans. I am interested in opinions of all nationalities.
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I favor rigorous enforcement of our employment laws and I believe that it should be mandatory for every employer to electronically verify the social security number of every employee that they hire and that if they do this they should be immune to prosecution but if they fail to this they should be subject to harsh penalties if an illegal alien is found in their employee.
I think the focus of our enforcement should be against employers and that we should largely ignore the illegal aliens. When there is a workplace raid there is no need to round-up the illegal aliens. They should just be sent home and told not to bother and show up for work tomorrow because their job is gone. There is no need for the taxpayer to incur the expense of deporting them and there is no reason for the government to engage in activities like separating families and detaining women and children that will inevitably be portrayed as negative and cruel in the media. Just take away their opportunity to work and let them figure out how to deal with that situation.
Instead of harrassing illegal aliens, the government should bring the full crushing weight of the Federal Government down upon the employer. It should start with dehabilitating civil fines. If it is a second offense, then somebody should be facing the real possibility of prison time. And then it should proceed to a line by line tax audit and all the accounting costs and legal fees that an employer will incur as a result of that effort. If an employer is willing to break the employment laws they are probably also breaking the tax laws too. Employers should be terrified of the the consequences of being caught with an illegal alien on their payroll.
If we make life tough on the criminals that are breaking our employment laws, the problem will take care of itself. Criminal employers will fire their illegal employees in droves. They will transform themselves from criminals back into law abiding businesses. There will not need to be very many of they type of enforcement actions discussed above if the consequences for the few are harsh enough. Compliance with the law is achieved by fear of the consequences of getting caught breaking it.
Most illegal aliens will find themselves unemployed. Lots of them will decide to leave America for the same reason they came: to find work and provide for their families. We are already seeing this work quite well in Arizona and Oklahoma as a result of their tough new laws and several more states are following suit. I read the other day that they think 100,000 illegal aliens have already left Oklahoma and that law has only been in effect for a few months and has never actually been enforced. And the Mexican government is starting to complain about the influx of returning illegals from Arizona and again that law has only been in effect from January and has never actually been enforced. Employers are unwilling to have illegals on the payroll if they even think there will be enforcement.
Quite a lot of illegals aliens will find themselves on street corners seeking day labor. Again we should tackle this problem by targeting the employers. We could use an approach much like is used to combat prostitution. We dress up a few Hispanic Federal Officers up like daylabors and infiltrate them into the crowd. When they are hired and payed in cash then an employer suddenly finds themselves facing tax evasion charges at both the State and Federal level and facing legal fees and fines far in excess of the savings from cheap labor. It only takes a few of these actions to make employers very fearful of hiring a daylaborer. When nobody will hire them, the daylaborers dissappear.
Pretty quick with some enforcement against the criminals giving the illegals jobs, the problem is solved and not a single illegal alien had to be rounded up and deported. They would just seemingly evaporate as they went home at their own expense.
The only illegals that should be deported are those that have encounters with law enforcement. Every contact with law enforcement at every level should include verification of legal status. Any illegal alien thus detected should be turned over to ICE for deportation. I pay taxes to the police for law enforcement and I expect them to enforce all the laws and not be selective about it and particularly they should not be giving one class of people special treatment.
As far as human beings being illegal goes, they are criminals. They break our immigration laws. A first offense is a misdeameanor and a second offense is a felony. And when they work, they are either working for cash in the blackmarket economy which involves felony tax evasion or they work using a fake social security card which is a felony or using a stolen social security number which is also a felony and is far from a victimless crime. No human is inheriently illegal but when a person commits a series of felony level crimes I have no problem calling them illegals or criminals. And remember that bank robbers are just trying to improve their lives and feed their families too. Poverty or the desire for self improvement is not a justification or an excuse for committing crimes.
The reason Americans are not buying into the idea that illegal aliens only take jobs that Americans don't want is because they can see with their own eyes that it is not true. Only a small percentage of illegal aliens are doing farm stoop labor. That might be a job Americans won't do but it is the only one. Most illegal aliens are doing jobs like construction that Americans most definately will do and which have been the traditional blue collar entry level jobs to the middleclass. Not only are illegal aliens taking these jobs away from Americans, they are also depressing wages so that rather being lower midddleclass jobs these are now poverty level jobs based on the third world cheap labor model rather than the first world well paid labor model.
This statement is extremely insulting to American workers. I live in a part of the country where we have very few immigrants, legal or illegal. Who do you think washes the dishes, cleans the hotel rooms, sweeps the floors, frames the houses, hangs drywall, cuts meat, does the agricultural work, runs the greenhouses, etc? Regular Americans, mostly white in this part of America are doing these jobs. A lot of these people are my friends and a most of these jobs are still middleclass because the wages have not yet been wrecked by an overabundance of cheap labor. I suppose once the wages are driven down far enough that THEN, Americans will refuse to take these jobs.
I am glad to see that you are supportive of the rule of law. You should not be concerned about "closing the door" because it is wide open for legal immigration. America has the most generous LEGAL immigration policy in the world and in fact accepts more legal immigrants than ALL of the other countries in the world combined. And, our policy is particularly generous to Mexicans who comprise 14% of our legal immigrants which makes them the single largest group by more than double any other nationality. Even though China has 13 times as many people and lots of them are better educated and more apt to benefit our economy, only 7% of our immigrants come from China. India has 10 times as many people as Mexico and many of them are extremely well educated and come with the added benefit of being English language speakers but only 6% of our immigrants come from India. So, as you can see, the door is comparitively wide open and maybe unfairly so for Mexicans.
Since you are interested in opinions of all nationalities, I'll tell you that I am American. My mother was born in Cuba and became an American legally long before Castro came to power.
Nearly EVERY American is descended from at least one illegal immigrant.
If someone has the initiative to leave poverty in their native land and sneak across a border they have shown a large part of what it takes to succeed in America. More , in fact, than many accidentally born here.
About 3 years ago 46% of the Hispanics in Arizona voted for Proposition 200 which was a tough voter initiative cracking down on illegal immigrants. I imagine that they were more likely to be related to an illegal immigrant than most. Decent people want the laws enforced and poor people at the bottom of the workforce suffer the worst from the results of illegal immigration.
The main people who don't want illegal immigration stopped are society's elites. Rich Republicans want cheap labor, Democratic leaders want more poor people to vote Democrat, the Catholic Church wants to fill pews emptied by the child abuse scandals, labor union leaders (not the rank and file) want more dues paying members. A very large percentage of ordinary Americans want our immigration laws enforced. There is no area of American politics where there is a larger disconnect between our leaders and ordinary people.
I totally agree with you, and I do agree of that fact that hiring illegals does bring the cost of labor down for Americans. And yes it is not the Americans fault that the Mexican government has failed them, there issue should be with their own government. Excatly how they protest in our American streets, as if they have a right to be here, they should all go back to Mexico and protest the government that has failed them. Thank you for your comment.
~Kristine
Sending a person back to a country where they will likely suffer greatly and die is pretty much murder. x.x
The UN has never reported any significant problems with starvation in Mexico. I go there frequently and people are poor but life is not that bad. And if there were starvation, it certainly would not be on our conscious because Mexico is a relative rich country and is also a major food exporter.
On the otherhand, because America's immigration policy is so proportionately overweighted towards Mexico, it means we are unable to take immigrants from countries that are much worse off than Mexico. Of the world's 6 billion people, 5 billion of them are poorer than the average Mexican. Ultimately, because there is so much misery in the world, it should be obvious that these problems cannot be addressed through our immigration policy. For each poor person we allow to immigrate, thousands more are born into desperate poverty that is much worse than anything in Mexico. We cannot even begin to dent this problem with immigration and these people can only be helped in the location where they were born.
The USA is extremely generous about immigration and a substantial portion of the people we allow to immigrate are people who would suffer and die if they were sent home. These people are called "refugees" and very few Mexicans qualify because the circumstances in Mexico are nowhere near that desparate.
No Mexicans are starving? You MUST be joking, right? Half of Mexico lives in poverty (living off less than $2 per day), 20% in extreme poverty (living on less than $1 per day). There's a high percentage of kids working on the streets. The porportions of rape are high and abusers typically get away with it, even in cases of substantiated reports of child rape/incest resulting in pregnancy. Police repression, torture, etc, are all common.
Here is the "Where we Work" page from the World Food Bank which is a NGO associated with the United Nations that addresses world hunger.
WFB - Where we Work
There are 77 countries on that list. Mexico is conspicuously NOT there. I'm sure there are people in Mexico who would like more or better food but starvation if it occurs in Mexico is not a notable problem or the World Food Bank would be involved. But I don't disagree that there is some severe poverty in Mexico and that it is crime ridden shithole. I never asserted otherwise. Fortunately, a dollar goes a long ways in Mexico. I was just in La Paz on the Baja a few weeks ago and even in the high end stores where ex-patriots shop you could buy a kilo of corn tortillas for 70 cents. Tortillas are the staff of life there and a kilo is going to feed at least two people for a day.
Most people would forgive somebody who was starving the theft of food. But simply being poor is not an excuse for breaking the law. We don't tolerate law breaking f from our own native born poor and, because starvation is not the situation in Mexico, we don't need to tolerate law breaking from them either. And if they are really all that poor, how do they come up with $2500 to pay a people smuggler? That is about the going rate for a coyote and $2500 will buy a lot of tortillas and beans.
Mexico has the world's 13th largest economy. It has vast mineral wealth. It has thousands of miles of gorgeous temperate coastlines. It has a strong agricultural sector with excellent potential for improvement. I see no reason why the taxpayers of the USA have any responsibility for the well-being of Mexicans who have violated our laws when the Mexican Government has not taken appropriate steps to help their own people. For example, the Mexican Government could create vast numbers of great jobs by opening up their coastlines to foreign ownership. The resulting buiding boom would create construction jobs, an ongoing service economy and a tax base that would allow Mexico to build infrastructure and educate their children. Mexico could tap its vast mineral wealth for the benefit of its people by opening up this sector of their economy to private investment. Instead, because the State oil company PEMEX is incompetent, their oil production is in decline at a time when the Mexican people clearly need some help.