A wall won’t work, and not even Trump is suggesting fortifications like the Korean DMZ’s.
No it isn’t.
I thought it was about a border fence.
But we aren’t talking about then are we?
So everyone in the world was racist and we all still are. Good to know.
Let’s discuss it here.
I am in agreement that a plain, unguarded wall won’t work to do anything.
For a serious question, I don’t really listen to anything Trump says. Has he expanded upon what he considers will be an effective wall?
Yes, and your flip side benefits, even if generously estimated, don’t line up with the proposed costs, even if conservatively estimated.
Every 10,000 posts, we get a free sundae. Read your registration agreement.
I know they are there - you can talk to the U.S. ones in Grand Marais (and I have). You just aren’t likely to run into them when canoeing on a lake where you see two other canoes and a loon all day. Its a long border, without heavy patrols and with hundred mile stretches of wilderness.
Moving is expensive. Both in money, opportunity costs, lost wages, etc. And moving is hard. Only the truly desperate or truly affluent do it. I know a lot of people in southern Missouri who stay in one horse towns, where the only job is cooking pizza at Casey’s gas station or collecting disability checks, rather than moving two hours over to St. Louis or Illinois where there are decent paying jobs (or North Dakota, where a Walmart cashier was making $25/hr until the oil market recently collapsed). If poor Americans won’t move two hours for a better life when there are literally zero restrictions on it, what makes you think half a billion Chinese are going to hop in planes the minute we stop deporting people?
500 million people migrating is absolutely unprecedented in history. People only migrate when they have to. Now you’re right that if you take my advice and stop restricting migration, we’ll get more immigrants than we currently do. That’s simple logic. But half a billion is chicken little stuff. The sky won’t fall because we stop treating people like cattle and herding them into imaginary boxes. It didn’t fall when we let down barriers to trade, and it won’t fall when we remove barriers to migration. Free trade and free migration are two sides of the same coin. And a free, thriving society requires both.
Well, if Trump’s election causes the American economy to collapse, coupled with his likely “pay off the debt by printing a bunch of trillion-dollar bills” policy, the American dollar will collapse to where it’s worth less than the peso or bolivar or real or whatever, meaning immigrants will actually lose money by going to the U.S.
150 million want to move to the United States.
Have you seen some third-world countries? There are no wages lost, no opportunity costs because wages and opportunities do not exist.
Have you been to Riyadh airport? All day and night, plane load after plane load of workers from third world countries arrive to work in the shit-hole that is Saudi Arabia. That should tell you how bad THEIR country is that they move to Saudi Arabia to work and get treated like shit for very little wages. Don’t you think they would rather come to the US?
Millions of people from other countries would LOVE to come to America, but unlike Mexico, most of them can’t simply WALK into the US. And it’s almost impossible for a poor, uneducated third-world national to get a visitor visa to the US, because the US knows that person will NEVER go back.
With open borders, believe me, you would have people lined up at the airport day and night, with every flight full trying to get to America.
I don’t think you realize how desperate people are in other countries. You cannot seriously compare “poor people” in American with the poor in India, or Bangladesh, or other third-world countries.
Okay, so we had several hundred thousand years of free human migration up until the early 20th century. But if we repeal a few racist laws now the world goes to shit? This is exactly the same issue as free trade, because people are important economic resources just like oil, cotton and widgets. But free trade is championed as an economic boon while free migration is considered pie in the sky idealism?
Keep looking askance at me with zero evidence or reasoning to dispute what I say except “that’s not how it works right now so it can never work that way ever, even though it used to work for literally all of humanity”. By all means, keep discussing whether 20 foot walls are better or worse than 30 foot walls and whether you should have guards every 50 feet or every 100 feet. That’s totally a much more worthwhile discussion to have when families are being torn apart and people are dying.
You must have me confused with someone else. I do not favor some dumb wall. I also favor more open immigration policies. I do not, however, favor just letting as many people who can get here stay here, without some sort of immigration vetting and process. More availability of visas? sure! Complete lack of visas needed? No.
7 billion people in the world is absolutely unprecedented in history. Modern day travel is absolutely unprecedented in history. First world social safety nets are absolutely unprecedented in history.
You can’t look at this in isolation.
It costs a lot of money to raise and educate people from infancy until they reach working age. Those costs are not incurred with immigrant workers. You must account for these savings in your calculations.
Of course! When I’m inaugurated as President, we’re going to round up and deport all those undocumented artichokes!
Actually, they will stop you at (or near) the California border and ask you if you have any fresh vegetables. Depending on what you have, and what bug is the major agricultural threat du jour, they might impound your vehicle and everything in it and “disappear” you into a California detention center, incommunicado, for the rest of your life.
(Or, in the case when I got caught with a forbidden apple, they just let me eat it there on the spot and put the core in a nearby trash can.)
There was an op-ed column in the Times a while ago from an illegal Canadian immigrant. (I think he overstayed.) He has lived here for decades with no problem. In fact people have complained about them damn illegal immigrants to him.
But he don’t look like a furriner. I wonder how many are here.
The years I’m looking at are 2005-2014; that pretty much covers an entire economic cycle.
Other important factors are changing Mexican demographics. Economic growth in Mexico and a declining birthrate there mean there are more job opportunities at home and hence less compulsion to head for el norte. In some cases, there’s actually incentive to head home, in that decent-enough jobs are now available at home.
I don’t understand your second point. The people being born here are U.S. citizens from birth. As noted, most illegal immigrants are young people (teenagers to 30-somethings), which are not groups with high death rates.
Actually, no, not for the kinds of jobs most frequently filled by illegal immigrants (such as agriculture or construction labor). There is a legal process for EMPLOYERS to bring migrants for specific openings, but the process has to start with the employer–a migrant can’t get a work visa to come here and look for a job. American employers have shown little interest in participating; there are, e.g., hundreds of thousands if not millions of illegal migrant workers employed in agriculture, while employers do the paperwork to bring in perhaps 30,000 on the H2A agricultural worker visa.
No, my stance is that we ought to HAVE a process for anyone from anywhere to apply to come here. Most illegal entrants from Mexico, e.g., would I’m sure be willing to pay the fees and undergo the vetting to enter legally, as opposed to paying the coyotes large sums to smuggle them across dangerous passages. Right now, though, most of them are not even eligible to apply, because the U.S. won’t accept visa applications from unskilled/semi-skilled laborers who don’t already have close kin in the U.S.
I don’t agree that Americans would most certainly be doing those jobs, even if wages increased. Some Americans would be doing some of those jobs, but your blanket statement is I believe incorrect.
Roofing, agricultural labor, and other similar occupations are a young person’s game. They’re hard physical labor, not jobs a 50-something discouraged worker is going to want to take up or even be able to take up. Farm labor jobs are also mostly located on farms, not in the inner cities where a big proportion of American unemployed youth are located. Moving to rural California from rural Sonora or Jalisco is probably less of a cultural readjustment than moving from East Los Angeles.
Based on what Spain sees in Ceuta and Melilla (ok, so that’s fences and not a wall, all that changes is what’s needed to climb it), not at all.
Lots of them pay income tax, too, either using a fake SSN or their own SSN. I used to work for a company where more than 50% of workers were immigrants who’d entered the country legally, and at any given time 1/3 of those would be working illegally: they still paid their income taxes.
Maybe the Indians do, In Pakistan there are no restrictions*, anyone can go to the border and many do. And the border is not fully lined up, in the Sindh-Rajestan area its literally just a signpost.
*Military personnel are not allowed a certain distance from certain border areas in uniform unless they have specific orders but thats it.