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WE DON'T NEED ANY MORE FUCKING ILLEGAL MEXICANS!!!! THAT IS THE BOTTOM LINE!! END OF DISCUSSION!!!
As American citizens,we value granting citizenship to others,less on their work ethic or wealth, but more on their loyalty to the USA,our traditions,and customs. Deportation is Justice served.
Native American, do you work and pay taxes? If there were no illegal alien children in the US school system, we could close schools, layoff teachers, staff, and reduce needless spending. Any teachers desiring to teach foreign students are welcome to leave the USA and work for the foreign nation who will pay them what they deserve. I don't think it fair, that I should pay for the education and care of other than American citizens. Education and teachibg jobs are portable and can migrate to fill the need to educate the illiterate, no need to import illiteracy into the USA, as it only statistically, drives down the USA report cards. That's my dos centavos, y tu?
Immigration law should reflect our dynamic labor market
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.
Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.
The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.
Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs � in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism � that require only short-term, on-the-job training.
At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs � those without a high school diploma � continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.
Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration
In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.
Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.
Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.
When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.
We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.
For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.
The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.
Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.
In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.
As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
Immigration law should reflect our dynamic labor market
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.
Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.
The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.
Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs � in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism � that require only short-term, on-the-job training.
At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs � those without a high school diploma � continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.
Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration
In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.
Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.
Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.
When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.
We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.
For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.
The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.
Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.
In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.
As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
Brittancus I SEE THAT You are still writing the same old crap about poor migrants, We Know that YOU ARE A MINUTEMAN BEING PAYED TO WRITE THESE ARTICLES> I SEE THEM ON ALL The different newspapers. I have this question for you, when are you leaving my nation ? YOU ARE HERE ILLEGALLY!!!
Actually these poor UNDOCUMENTED migrants are better Citizens than you because they pay TAXES.
Undocumented immigrants paying more taxes than you think
Eight million Undocumented immigrants pay Social Security, Medicare and income taxes. Denying public services to people who pay their taxes is an affront to America�s bedrock belief in fairness. But many �pull-up-the-drawbridge� politicians want to do just that when it comes to illegal immigrants.
The fact that Undocumented immigrants pay taxes at all will come as news to many Americans. A stunning two thirds of Undocumented immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes.
Yet, nativists like Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., have popularized the notion that illegal aliens are a colossal drain on the nation�s hospitals, schools and welfare programs � consuming services that they don�t pay for.
In reality, the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified Undocumented immigrants from nearly all means tested government programs including food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare-funded hospitalization.
The only services that illegals can still get are emergency medical care and K-12 education. Nevertheless, Tancredo and his ilk pushed a bill through the House criminalizing all aid to illegal aliens � even private acts of charity by priests, nurses and social workers.
Potentially, any soup kitchen that offers so much as a free lunch to an illegal could face up to five years in prison and seizure of assets. The Senate bill that recently collapsed would have tempered these draconian measures against private aid.
But no one � Democrat or Republican � seems to oppose the idea of withholding public services. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law that requires everyone who gets Medicaid � the government-funded health care program for the poor � to offer proof of U.S. citizenship so we can avoid �theft of these benefits by illegal aliens,� as Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., puts it. But, immigrants aren�t flocking to the United States to mooch off the government.
According to a study by the Urban Institute, the 1996 welfare reform effort dramatically reduced the use of welfare by undocumented immigrant households, exactly as intended. And another vital thing happened in 1996: the Internal Revenue Service began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don�t have Social Security numbers to file taxes.
One might have imagined that those fearing deportation or confronting the prospect of paying for their safety net through their own meager wages would take a pass on the IRS� scheme. Not so. Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers.
No doubt they hope that this will one day help them acquire legal status � a plaintive expression of their desire to play by the rules and come out of the shadows. What�s more, aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks.
Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they�ll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for. Last year, the revenues from these fake numbers � that the Social Security administration stashes in the �earnings suspense file� � added up to 10 percent of the Social Security surplus.
The file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year. Beyond federal taxes, all illegals automatically pay state sales taxes that contribute toward the upkeep of public facilities such as roads that they use, and property taxes through their rent that contribute toward the schooling of their children.
The non-partisan National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families � most of whom are illegal � are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume. Yes, many illegal migrants impose a strain on border communities on whose doorstep they first arrive, broke and unemployed.
To solve this problem equitably, these communities ought to receive the surplus taxes that federal government collects from immigrants. But the real reason border communities are strained is the lack of a guest worker program.
Such a program would match willing workers with willing employers in advance so that they wouldn�t be stuck for long periods where they disembark while searching for jobs. The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don�t want here in the first place.
With the Senate having just returned from yet another vacation and promising to revisit the stalled immigration bill, politicians ought to set the record straight: Illegals are not milking the government. If anything, it is the other way around.
Demand reinstatement of E-VERIFY? YOUR JOB IS IN PERIL!
WHO KILLED THE E-VERIFY IN THE STIMULUS PACKAGE? Thought the whole idea of the Stimulus bill was to support, the millions of unemployed AMERICAN WORKERS. Instead Speaker Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid in secret and no discussion killed E-Verify. It would have stopped illegal aliens getting jobs. Instead shows you that Politicians are still puppets of big business and the special interest lobbyists. E-Verify costs pennies instead of $ Billions to function?
THE SO CALLED US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, PANDERS TO FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS!
HOW MANY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS COULD BE SAVED, IF US TAXPAYERS WERE NOT FORCED TO PAY FOR EDUCATION, HEALTH CARE AND OTHER GOVERNMENT BENEFITS, INCLUDING AN OVERCROWDED PRISON SYSTEM.
ALL THIS TO BENEFIT PREDATORY BUSINESSES WHO HIRE ILLEGAL ALIENS OVER AMERICANS.
Voice your anger at the politicians, by calling the Capital switchboard at (202) 224-3121 MAKE THEM SWEAT!
OH! YES! AND BUY AMERICAN!
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