I heard in the news that California shot down drivers licenses (or some benefit) for illegal immigrants. Since they are here against the law, it makes sense. My question is how this issue came up at all?
I’m assuming the DMV is not setting a trap: They’ll grab them when they show up at the DMV place and deport them.
There must be a logical reason we’re not deporting them as soon as we find out they are here.
Lest I get bashed as an un-feeling racist or something, I’ve had a recent epiphany from a friend of mine here. She works in a clinic where they get the occassional illegal immigrant. I asked, do you call the police/INS, etc. She said no, because the word might get out and the illegals won’t come there anymore. Since these people could have contagious diseases, it is better to have them come in and get treated for the common good.
Huh. Could this be some of the reasoning behind rights (besides obvious ones like police protection) for illegals?
You got it, Hub. Every argument I’ve ever heard for permitting illegal migrants (driver’s licenses, medical care, public schooling, whatever) has proceeded along similar lines:
Realistically, most of them are not going to get immediately deported. Not only would it be a huge bureaucratic/logistic headache, but many employers want them here. To some extent, our economy is actually dependent on them, so they ain’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
If they’re here, we don’t want them to be any more of a hazard to public health, safety, and welfare than necessary. Refusing to treat their diseases is bad for public health. Refusing to grant them driver’s licenses just means that many of them will risk driving unlicensed and untrained, which is bad for traffic safety. Refusing to teach their children will just create an additional pool of illiterate, low-skilled, dead-end kids, which is bad for our economy and society.
AFAICT, the only rational alternative to providing social benefits for illegal migrants is to implement and enforce a genuine serious universal zero-tolerance immediate deportation policy. But then you will have to figure out a way to get all the work done that the illegal migrants used to do here.
There are a few good reasons to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
The big one is that you can’t get insurance without a license. And, without insurance, you’d be a sucker to stick around after even a minor fender bender. Nobody wants to drive around in a car implicated in a hit-and-run, so they abandon the car.
Some cities are spending rediculous amounts- far more than providing a bit of medical care and schooling and whatever- on towing and storing these abandon vehicles. We all benefit from making sure the people we share the road with are licensed and insured, no matter what their other situations may be.
And that is how it is in most things. Even without healthcare, schooling, drivers licenses etc. most illegal immigrants are still going to have it here than they did in their home country. It’s not like they are going to get this stuff in Mexico- at the very least things will be even but with higher wages. So taking away services isn’t going to make them go away. But it will cause problems. Already, there are whole organizations of theives that prey on illegal immigrants counting on them not reporting things to the police. We all benefit from having healthy, educated workers in our country.
IMHO the only “right” that an illegal immigrant has is to emergency medical care. Quickly followed by a free trip back across the border.
Illegal immigration is a major problem in this country and we should not be doing ANYTHING to make it easier or more attractive, as it will only encourage others to break the law and sneak into the country. The borders need to be completely controlled. We can then open then as we see fit, alllowing in ten thousand a day or zero.
Practically speaking, the millions of illegals who are already here and, in some cases, have been for years, are not going to be sent back home. The logistics of it would just be impossible. So, instead of leaving them in this weird half-legal limbo, why not offer an amnesty for the ones who are here, then get SERIOUS about not letting any more in. When the government really wants to get something done, it can do it, and that includes closing off the border. Then we can adjust LEGAL immigration according to our needs – whether that means offering seasonal visas for farm workers, or whatever the best plan is. And even if we limited the amount of cheap labor, in the long run it might be better for us. I read a joke the other day that back in the 70s and 80s the Japanese got robots and the Germans got Turks – and the difference showed in their economies in the years to come. Unending cheap labor from across the border makes us lazy and less innovative than we might otherwise be. It has been estimated that the Romans might have initiated the Industrial Revolution millenia ago (they had some rudimentary engines, apparently, as well as a primitive battery) but they saw little need to pursue that course because they had an abundance of slave labor that would do the work for them.
Actually, magellan, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically unjust in a consistent, across-the-board, zero-tolerance immediate-deportation policy. If we choose not to have people from other countries entering our country illegally, we have the right to keep them out entirely and throw them out at once if they do manage to sneak in.
The thing is, though, that it’s hard to implement such a policy in real life because so many influential people want illegal immigrants here, for the cheap and docile labor they provide. You can’t solve the problem just by punitive measures for the immigrants themselves, like denying them social services: you’ll merely exacerbate our own social problems without getting to the root of the trouble.
Anybody who seriously advocates denying all services to illegal migrants needs to have a serious plan for effectively closing the borders and for coping with the economic consequences of losing that labor pool—and also, as Fear pointed out, for providing effective disincentives to the employers who encourage illegal immigration. Otherwise, such a position amounts to nothing more than “get-tough” posturing that punishes the immigrants without actually fixing the problem.
Excellent point. There are tow components to the illigal immigration issue and they both need to be addressed. We should quickly and consistently enforce the laws that already make it illegal. And business owners and managers don’t fiind the current deterrents to be strong enough (fines and possible jail time for repeat offenders), we need to make them so. I had an arguement with someone I know who was running a large national construction company. He professed to be Mr. Conservative, and he was on just about every issue, EXCEPT controlling our borders. In my book he was simply a hypocrite more concerned with his easy monetary gain than with principle.
I don’t buy it. We can put a man on the moon, we can load people onto buses and planes and send them back to their home countries. We lack the only one thing to make this possible: the will to do it. As you say Rodgers01, “When the government really wants to get something done, it can do it…”.
Amnesty was tried, admittedly without the “getting serious” part. But it 1) rewards criminal behavior 2) encourages more of the same, and 3) is unfair to those who have been trying to get here legally .
You raise two good ponts here. One it could benefit the U.S. by putting some of those who are unemployed to work. The idea that Americans don’t want those jobs might or might not be true. (For example, it might be very hard to find people who want to be garbage men if the pay were $20,000 per year, but it’s a lot easier if you pay them $75,000.) When the source of cheap labor evaporates the pay for those jobs will go up. You want a Guest Worker program? How about subsidiziing those out of work in areas like Michigan and making it easier for them to take advantage of seasonal work in the south?
The second point is that sending the illegals back home and sealing the bordsers would force Mexico (where the majority come from) to get their shit together and strengthen their own economy. Right now, their governement has incentive to facilitate borders crossiings—illegal or not. I think somehting like 12% of the money coiming into their economy is sent back fro the US. And, of course, if those people are not in Mexico, Mexico doesn’t have to spend a dime on them in the way of services.
Kimstu, I agree with all of what you’ve said, even the part about denying them services exacerbating problems for the US. But I view that as a temporary cost that needs to be looked at in context of the overall benefits., which would be a less attractive deal for illegals. Anything that can stop them from wanting to want to come here is a good thing.
I would think tightening up on exsisting laws would be deterrent enough to stop the mass immigration. It may even be enough to make others want to go back.
As it is now they are immigrating because they know they can
Get a paying job.
Get free health care.
Have a place to live.
Take these two things away and I don’t know why they would want to be here.
It’s as simple as ‘don’t hire illegal immigrants because it’s against the law and if you do there are significant fines and jail time’.
And ‘don’t give health care to illegal immigrants because the government will not reimburse you for it and it’s illegal’.
And ‘don’t rent homes to illegal immigrants because it’s illegal and you will be fined and jailed’.
Once you cut off the money and health care and homes I think the word would get out quick that there’s no benefit of coming here unless you go through the process legally.
I think the government needs to crack down on the enablers and the problem will solve itself.
Nice plan, Hampshire. But don’t forget the ending the most ridiculous “entitlement” of them all: in-state tuition. It’s minor in the grand scheme of things, but it couldn’t be any dumber.
I would also add the law enforcement also do what the law states: if an illegal is arrested, he needs to be sent the fuck back. not released back into society! If the geniuses in Seattle would have followed the law and their own guidelines we wouldn’t have had the DC Snipers, at least not two of them anyway.
Have you crunched any of the actual numbers on the consequences, though? That is, do you have any quantitative estimate of what the costs would be of eliminating this large cheap labor pool, and how the US economy would deal with it? How much more would we as a society have to pay for agricultural products, manufactured products, processed foods, etc., if subservient low-wage illegal migrants were replaced by American workers with higher wages and more rights? What would be the effect on our consumer economy?
I sympathize with your concern about the problems caused by large-scale illegal immigration. But if you can’t answer questions like these, you haven’t got a policy position, you’ve merely got a rant.
Yeah, I suppose if we really wanted to do it we could, but I think the cost of doing so would probably outweigh the benefits. Considering that there are MILLIONS of people here illegally, I imagine it must be unimaginably expensive to send them all home, not to mention the cost of finding where all of them are, determining where they belong, fighting the inevitable lawsuits, determining whether illegal parents should be allowed to stay with their US born children, etc. I suppose if we really wanted to we could make the illegals pay for part or all of the cost of their deportation (hey, you break the law, you gotta pay for it), but that seems excessively harsh considering that we’ve been letting them stay de facto for so long. While still expensive, it seems more feasible to me to just seal the border so that we won’t have to deal with this problem and grant another amnesty in another 20-odd years.
That’s the biggest downside, and I don’t have any answer to it.
Frankly, I don’t think you’re going to see any politicians seriously attack this issue, because both parties are desperately trying to court the newly strong Latino vote – a large portion of which is only here because of our lax border policies. (I doubt those Hispanics who immigrated here legally would look too kindly on their cousins who cheated by slipping across the border – anyone know more on this subject?) It reminds me of the situation in Germany – their welfare state has become so bloated that it is holding back the economy, but any politician who tries to cut back on benefits is voted down…by all those people who benefit from the welfare state.
There are only a few million people who are here legally, whose ancestors entered this country in accordance with the laws of the land at the time. They are Native Americans and the descendants of people who settled on land granted them in treaties which were honored throughout history from the time they were made.
Remember that a large portion of the so-called illegal immigrants came here legally but are so-called “undocumented aliens” – people who had and have sound reason to be here but whose paperwork is not current for one reason or another, including failure on the part of the INS to act with proper speed to extend a visa in accordance with law. The spouse of one member here was for a significant period in precisely that predicament; here legally but with her paperwork not processed with reasonable speed to enable her to stay. Another member is an immigration paralegal, and the stories she tells of the bureaucratic morass are repulsive.
It’s probably worth noting that a substantial portion of this country’s Hispanic population is descended from people who were living in the Republic of Texas, the Mexican Cession, California, and the Gadsden Purchase before those lands became part of U.S. soil. There, the Anglos were the illegal immigrants.
In short, handwaving about “the illegal immigrant problem” smacks of pre-Civil War racism to me. Undoubtedly there are some people who intentionally and willfully disregarded the immigration laws to find work and better themselves. Just as there were in the 1800s.
Of course, we could remove Emma Lazarus’s poem from the plinth of Lady Liberty, replace the torch with a stop sign, and adopt a policy that we’ve got it and you don’t. Except that it would be hard to ignore the snickering of the Navajos, Sioux, Cherokees, and the rest of them at our hypocrisy.
So what do you want the children of illegal immigrants to do?
They didn’t chose to come here. They know nothing but America. They went to American schools, they have American friends, they have American dreams and they want to go to fucking college to achieve them- it’s not like they are aspireing to become drug dealers and mafioso here. And you want to do what, exactly? Say “You have to go back and live in a country you havn’t seen since you were four years old and whoes language you barely speak!”? Do you think that is really going to work? Or do you think we’ll just have a few more bright wasted minds screwing around in America looking for other ways to get ahead besides hard work and education?
Could you look in to the eyes of a bright- maybe brilliant- high schooler that has none nothing but a normal American life, and tell them they can’t have their dreams because of something their parents did when they were babies? Can you pick out the Mexican kid, point to all her school friends, and tell her that while they get to have real lives, she doesnt?
FWIW, illegal immigrants do pay taxes. They often pay more than their fair share of taxes because there is no way to get a tax refund out of a false social security number. They arn’t burdens on society- they are largely hard working, family oriented people who love America and would love to abide by her rules. Instead of looking for ways to punish them, we should be looking at how to harnass all of this energy to make all of America better.
I’ll get to the other points in your post later, as I’d like to provide some numbers. But are you really saying that giving ILLEGAL immigrants in-state tuition is fair? Say we’re talking about a school in Colorado: do you think it is fair that someone who is not a citizen, someone who snuck into the country should pay less for an education at a Colorado state school than someone who happens to live in a neighboring state?
I really don’t have an answer for this problem - I wish I did. It’s just frustrating for me to read about illegal immigrants getting drivers licenses, health care, etc., when people who play by the rules and try to do things legally are denied entry to the country. The coach of our hockey team is up to his eyeballs in paperwork and stress right now trying to make sure all of our Canadian players have visas. Our season starts in less that two weeks, training camp starts in a week, but INS doesn’t give a shit - they process paperwork as they feel like it. Coach didn’t start the paperwork late - he’s been working on this all summer. These guys have jobs and homes waiting on them, but INS doesn’t care.