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Originally Posted by Rekna
.....The number one thing is we have to treat people with respect.
It is my belief that the greatest human trait is empathy, people who can put themselves into others positions and see things from their point of view. I ask any of you who are anti immigrants to ask yourself. If you were born in a poor and corrupt nation, were taught the importance of family way more than it is in the US, and your family (parents, grandparents, wife, children, etc) were practically starving, and you had a chance to give them a better life by sneaking into another country where you would work jobs that the other country didn't want to work. Would you not go? Or would you not at least feel pride for those who did?
I wish every person in America would vote only after seeing the issues from all points of view and not just the a strictly liberal or conservative view.
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What wage do you think dishwashers, farm, fast food, and retail workers, lawn maintenance workers, non-union construction workers, and workers in other low to medium skill service sectors would command, per hour, if the pool of illegals did not exist ?
There are no jobs that legal residents "don't want to work", only jobs filled with demand from willing, underbidding illegals:
Feds raided this New Bedford, Ma. defense contractor's factory and found 350 heavily exploited illegal workers:
http://www.projo.com/news/content/pr....25f7a41d.html
Local, legal residents then lined up at the factory to seek jobs replacing the illegal workers:
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http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/...gory=SPECIAL21
Lax immigration hurts the poor
By Steve Kropper | March 22, 2007
SUPPOSE SOMEONE offered to import 350 foreign workers to New Bedford to work for less than the minimum wage. Since the unemployment rate is over 8 percent, we would expect public outrage. The city needs jobs, not more unskilled laborers. So it is no surprise that citizens seeking jobs started lining up at the Michael Bianco plant after Immigration and Customs Enforcement uncovered 350 illegal immigrants.
Similarly, after the Crider chicken-processing plant in Stillmore, Ga., was raided in January, it boosted wages and hired US citizens, according to the Wall Street Journal.
These are positive steps to reversing lax immigration policies that sacrifice economic mobility simply because illegal immigrants will work for less. Neither amnesty nor mass deportation is the solution. Instead, illegal border crossing will decline as news filters back about tighter enforcement. And the illegal population will fall if enforcement is consistent.
Contrary to popular belief, illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. The victims may not have a voice, but they are low-paid, low-skilled American workers. Many are historically disadvantaged groups such as minorities and those with disabilities. . Some pundits use code words about the need to "control" wages. Whose wages? Carpenters? Child-care workers? House cleaners? Nurses? Why not teachers? The best way to raise wages for the poor is to restrict immigration. There are more illegal immigrants working in the United States than there are unemployed Americans who are looking for work or who have dropped out. Let's take care of our own first....
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In Georgia, there is a massive influx of illegal, mostly Mexican immigrant workers. Georgia is one of only three states that has no minimum wage law of it's own, it defers to federal law, because it's legislature is controlled by a strong business lobby, happy to profit on downward wage pressure from the illegal pool of willing workers:
http://www.dol.gov/esa/programs/whd/...ed.htm#Georgia
If you work for tips at, say a Waffle House anywhere in Georgia, (and there are probably several thousand, who do....) the recent minimum wage increase for non-tipped workers does not benefit you. Your base wage is still $2.13 per hour, the same it was in 1997. How much do you think a server can make per hour, in tips in a low priced menu environment? Do you suspect that, without the pool of competing, low cost labor, Georgia's legislature would find it neccessary to raise the tipped employee minimum wage to, say, where it is in Nevada, a state with no tip offset, where restaurant waitstaff make minimum wage, $5.85/hr now, or $3.72/hr more than in Georgia.
If many illegal workers were fortune 500 CEO's and CFO's, willing to work for a third of what American executives receive in compensation, how long do you think it would take for a "crack down" on the illegals?
It is generous of you to concede higher paying job opportunities to illegal workers, opportuinities that are not yours to concede, and do not hurt you.
Why do you think Mr. Bush supports an easy, non-punitive immigration policy? It is because it benefits his "base", handsomely. Their businesses profit nicely from a cheap compliant immigrant labor pool, and there is a ready pool of cheap domestic help available to make their living that much more pleasant.
I don't enjoy domestic help in my home, do you? Where would you ever get the idea that it is appropriate to give away the employment opportunities at market driven wages, of the least affluent Americans, rather than advocate for enforcing laws that would not artificially increase that labor pool and dilute wages and benefits, compared to conditions if the law was enforced?
Remember when this problem gained traffic. Reagan era amnesty for illegal workers was followed by a broken, 1986 commitment for the strict immigration law enforcement that accompanied the amnesty legislation.
I have to hold my nose to post the following opinion, but it is informative:
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...n19377277/pg_3
How I rethought immigration: one man's confessions
National Review, June 25, 2007 by David Frum
..... I also began to learn that you could hardly name a social problem without discovering that immigration was aggravating it to the point of unsolvability.
Health insurance? Immigrants accounted for about one-quarter of the uninsured in the early 1990s, and about one-third of the increase in the uninsured population at that time.
Social spending? The Urban Institute estimated in 1994 that educating the children of illegal aliens cost the State of California almost $1.5 billion per year.
Wage pressure on the less-skilled? The wages of less-skilled Americans had come under ferocious pressure since 1970. How could you even begin to think about this issue without recognizing the huge immigration-driven increase in the supply of unskilled labor over the same period?
Competitiveness? How could the U.S. remain the world's most productive nation while simultaneously remixing its population to increase dramatically the proportion of poorly educated people within it?
A 1997 study by the National Academy of Sciences found virtually zero net benefit to the U.S. economy from immigration. Immigration yielded benefits, true--but also costs in the form of lower wages and higher social-welfare burdens. Balance costs and benefits against each other, as a rational policymaker should, and you arrived at a favorable balance of $10 billion, less than a tenth of a percentage point in a $12 trillion economy.
And this favorable balance was composed in a way that would normally disturb a rational policymaker: The largest share of the benefits went to the immigrants themselves, and almost all of the rest to people at the top of society. Almost all of the costs were borne by people at the bottom.
As it happened, I myself was one of those winners. My green card came through in 1996. And by education and income, I belonged to the economic elite who profited so handsomely from the 1990s boom. Years later, my elder daughter would ask me to explain why immigration was so controversial. I tried to describe the debate as fairly as I could, explaining who was helped and who was injured. She absorbed my description, and then asked: "So Daddy, why are we against it?"
Of course I wasn't against it, not exactly. The right kind of immigration policy--one that opened the borders of nations such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia to moderate numbers of newcomers who knew the language, obeyed the law, shared national values, possessed useful skills, and paid more in taxes than they consumed in services--such an immigration seemed to me then and seems to me still a very good thing.....
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...n19377277/pg_4
.... At an elegant book party on a Connecticut lawn, one acquaintance smilingly explained her point of view: "How else will I get my flower beds done?"
Lord knows, I heard a lot of self-interest dressed up as public policy during my years as an editorial-page editor. But the flacks and lobbyists who pressed their clients' cases at least accepted some obligation to frame a convincing argument that what was good (for example) for the plastic-pail industry was good for America. With immigration, somehow the rules were different.
The class divide was widening in 1990s America; anybody with eyes could see that. Yet most of the ideas you heard for addressing this problem--trade protection, income redistribution--offered a cure worse than the disease. And immigration was worsening the inequality problem without offering any significant social benefit. The case for reform seemed more than overwhelming. It seemed compulsory....
.... Immigration was the greatest ideological qualm I had to overcome when I went to work for President George W. Bush. Who knew? Perhaps I might even be able to do some small measure of good. I knew the president's own convictions leaned toward open borders. But circumstances often push presidents in very different directions from those in which they at first intend to go.
And so it seemed to be happening in September 2001, when Vicente Fox paid his state visit to his great friend Jorge. The Mexican position on immigration was so aggressive, intransigent, and one-sided as to wreck negotiations before they could even begin. Days later, foreign terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Now, I thought, change would have to come. The attacks revealed immigration not just as a crucial economic and social issue, but also as vital to national security. The 9/11 hijackers would have been caught a dozen times over by a society that enforced its immigration rules. Soon afterward, Americans were reading about bombings in Spain, murders in Amsterdam, and car burnings in Paris.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...n19377277/pg_5
You might think that a trauma like 9/11 would have prompted a major rethink of its immigration policies by the Bush administration. You would think wrong. While enforcement was tightened in certain concentrated areas, elsewhere it actually relaxed. Immigration from the Middle East reached an all-time peak in 2005. Altogether, an estimated 8 million people settled in the U.S. in the first six years of the Bush administration, at least half of them illegally. In 2004, 2006, and now again in 2007, the president has attempted to push through legalization and guest-worker programs.
Neither the president nor his inner circle has ever cared to hear from dissenters on this issue. A hasty and careless economic calculus, a poorly considered political gamble, and self-righteous moral grandstanding have together pushed the president to the worst domestic political and policy error of his presidency.
It seems impossible that the immigration bill can succeed: A large majority of the American people claim to be following the immigration debate closely, and that majority opposes the immigration plan by a three-to-one majority. And when the bill collapses, it will take what little remains of the president's political capital with it. Did I say capital? No, that has long since been spent. It is his credit that he is now exhausting.
Out of this disaster, however, comes some hope. The national debate triggered by the Senate's catastrophic reform has accelerated the great rethinking of immigration on the part of many millions of Americans. The backroom deal that produced this latest law epitomized decades of collusion between the two parties to suppress open discussion of this vital issue. This time, at last, the collusion failed. Democracy has erupted. I'm ready to make my voice heard. How about you?
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The preceding piece is a fascinating spectacle of Bush's own former speech writer, the man credited with coining the phrase, "axis of evil", railing against Bush's immigration policy goals.
My advice is to leave this issue to Bush and his party, for now. If the presidency changes hands next year, there will be an opportunity for "reform" that will put the interests of the least wealthiest 20 percent of American workers first, instead of the interests of the top 5 percent, and the perceived interests of the illegal aliens "who only come here looking for work to try to better themselves".
Understand that your advocacy for them makes the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans the winners, the least 20 percent legal US residents the losers, and continues to lure the most ambitious and impatient young foreigners into the US. Strict enforcement of existing laws and realistic penalties levied against employers who hire and profit from illegals, would remove the incentive for illegal workers to be here. Deportation would not be necessary if illegals could not find or keep jobs because of their status.