Something that f***nuts obvious should be rather easy to document, right?
Well then, let’s break this down:
For most illegal immigration source countries, there basically is no “turn” to wait for.*
And of the 11.4 million whose turn has already come? That 11.4 million which represents 30.1% of all immigrants in this country?
*
Mexican immigrants with no immediate family ties to US citizens have no chance of being allowed to immigrate legally.*
This is odd. These immigrants-in-waiting have family ties to US citizens. So, as a foundational premise, these US citizens once lived in Mexico and somehow magically are now US citizens. But they of course had “zero chance” to immigrate legally.
Something does not add up to your assertion that the group which represents 30.1% of all immigrants in this country have zero chance of immigrating legally. If family ties are required for legal immigration, which I am fairly certain is not true (doesn’t Mexico have geniuses like everyone else?), how did the family tied to them get legal immigrant status?
That doesn’t sound like breaking it down. It sounds like changing the subject.
Your own cite (don’t know what it is because you didn’t provide a source) shows that half of those 11.4 million are illegal immigrants. Of the remaining ~6 million, most have ties to people who arrived when we had a more liberal Mexican migration policy. A lot of the rest have family ties here because there has been cross-border pollination since the annexation of the Southwest.
Has anyone ever linked immigration (legal and otherwise) to free-market thinking, i.e. if the market should be completely free, then let people with a demand for labor freely deal with people who have a supply of labor.
Seems to me someone who subscribed to a “free markets above all” philosophy would want to knock down barriers to immigration, no?
From an article citing statistics contained in a study by the US/Mexico Border Counties Coalition, released March 2006.
If the 24 U.S. counties bordering Mexico were the 51st state, how would they compare to the rest of the nation?
*2nd in incidence of tuberculosis
*
2nd in unemployment (5th with San Diego County included)
3rd in deaths due to hepatitis
*
5th in diabetes-related deaths*
7th in incidence of adult diabetes
12th in incidence of AIDS
*
51st in percent of population that has completed high school (50th with San Diego)*
*
51st in per capita income (40th with San Diego County included)*
*
51st in number of health care professionals*
All of which supports my initial claim before it was side-tracked by others: that it will be inordinately expensive and a national health risk to open the borders and allow anyone to come here that wants to. Those who advocate open borders and “free healthcare” for all are doing so on an emotionally-driven, humanitarian premise. Which is fine, provided we are willing to pay more, receive less, and put ourselves at a greater health risk.
So, instead of responding to the (always expected) cries of ‘But…BUT A CONSERVATIVE SAID IT!!! so it cannot be true!’, I did some actual looking into the issue.
Some quotes:
From here*.
So I went to look. And, lo and behold, I found this.
That article is about the ethical considerations of reporting research results regarding undocumented immigrants. That article has lots of footnotes.
A quotes:
From the original article on documented vs. undocumented:
So, the rate in undocumented workers is higher and the duration of symptoms is longer. Additionally, documented workers results matched those of born citizens.
Now, of course, I fully expect czarcasm et al. to claim that the CDC, the American Thoracic Society, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America are biased, unreliable sources.
Note, the above only concerns TB. However, I am willing to bet that the same holds for other infectious diseases.
So there is an issue. An interesting question would be how many of the reported TB cases by citizens are caused by contact with undocumented workers with TB, though I imagine that is a hard thing to track.
Slee
FTR, I am all for immigration with a few small caveats. One being no free services until a certain amount of time in country and paying taxes is met.
You failed to observe the bits where people showed the claims in the OP are not true.
Since it didn’t work the first time: nobody has advocated open borders. Nobody has advocated open borders. Nobody has advocated open borders. A couple of posters have said immigration restrictions should be loosened (XT said the border should be more open, but in context it was obvious he was not talking about an open border as such). You are arguing against a strawman or a misunderstanding.
That’d be nobody in this thread.
I’m not seeing the downside of that.
“We are willing to pay more, receive less, and put ourselves at a greater health risk” should be the motto of the U.S. health care system. And you still haven’t actually demonstrated the danger the OP’s “source” talked about.
Those places suck.
You should try to get Mexico to take them off your hands.
How does poverty and poor health among U.S. residents prove anything about open borders? The colonias in the border counties are not much more than third-world shantytowns, frequently with inadequate or nonexistent sewer systems and lack of potable water, so of course disease is much more prevalent. However, the colonias date back to the 1950s, and most residents are U.S. citizens. These are our own people who are unemployed and living without ready access to health care.
(1) You are citing the Border Counties Alliance, whose raison d’etre is bitching about immigration. Second, you don’t seem to understand your own argument.
(2) “Border counties” are poor doesn’t tell us anything. First, those places are mostly desert, so it stands to reason that they are poor. Second, your source excludes San Diego County, because… well, because including it blows up their argument.
(3) People in border counties are already in the United States. They are not new immigrants.
(4) Even if these statistics were helpful, undocumented workers don’t stay in border counties. There’s no work there (as your own cite suggests) and lots and lots of border patrol agents.
(5) Finally, even taking all your figures at face value and pretending they are relevant, they still bear no relationship to the OP, which is about an imaginary looming public health crisis, not a mild uptick in health issues.
You are wrong. RNTB is talking about family-based immigration, which is how the vast majority of people legally immigrate to the US. You must have a US citizen relative or Resident Alien relative to immigrate under this system. How long it takes you to legalize depends on the nature of your relationship and whether or not your relative is a citizen or Resident Alien. If you have no relationship that meets this criteria, you cannot legally immigrate under the family-based system. Period.
As to how their relatives got their status? They could be born here, have gotten their green cards because they are asylees, they got their green card because they are married to a US citizen, they were able to legalize back when you could pay a fine and stay in the country… You know, under the family-based system.
Cite for options for relatives of US citizens: http://www.uscis.gov/family/family-us-citizens
Cite for options for relatives of Resident Aliens:http://www.uscis.gov/family/family-green-card-holders-permanent-residents
Further, there are only a certain number of visas available every year and that number varies on your country of origin, the nature of your relationship, and the immigrant status of your relative. (Except for spouses of US citizens, for which there is no limit.) Waits can be years’ long. For example, the wait for brothers/sisters of US citizens can be 15 years-long, in effect making it impossible.
While I’m at it, “amnesty” doesn’t mean that undocumented immigrants go to the front of the line, it means they have the opportunity to be petitioned for and pay a fine and stay in the country while their applications are in process.
They still are subject to the same wait times as everybody else. They don’t jump any line.
“Hey, if we all can’t agree that illegals are undeserving criminals, can we at least agree that they’re diseased impure vermin?”
If you’re a construction worker complaining about unchecked immigration destroying your livelihood then you’re just a pampered first worlder who needs to put his nose to the grind stone and learn to live in the 21st century. Protectionism is wrong!
If you’re a doctor or other professional who gets to shut our their foreign competition or put up walls around your industry with inflated accreditation monopolies to lower your supply, well yeah, that’s just safeguarding our way of life. Can’t expose our best and brightest to the deprivations of the free market, their income would plummet to third world levels. Then what’s the point of all those insanely expensive schools?
In my own words, his argument is that it is virtually impossible to immigrate to the United States outside of the family-based immigration system, and thus illegal aliens are morally justified in coming here illegally.
The first is not true, as there are options to immigrate outside of the family-based system, and the second is debateable, both on the grounds that entering a country illegally is acceptable and also with regard to *our obligation *to allow them to stay.
I don’t quite see this as responding to my question, but okay.
What options would those be?
Mexican nationals are not eligible for the green card lottery; that leaves the employment-based preferences and the “special” categories. Those latter are categories such as international adoptions, victims of human trafficking, Iraqi translators, and other very narrow groups.
Employment-based immigration is limited to 140,000 people a year (all countries combined), with preference given to genius-level scientists and researchers, managers of multinational corporations, certain skilled professionals, and people with money to invest. People in ordinary jobs (farmworkers, electricians, carpenters, welders, pretty much anything blue-collar) are not eligible for an employment-based immigrant visa, no matter how long they stand in line.
So exactly how could your average Mexican citizen who lacks close family in the U.S. legally immigrate?
The green card lottery is specifically for countries deemed to have low rates of immigration to the United States, and only offers 55,000 residential visas a year.
So, I would tell the average Mexican what I would tell the average resident of any other country. You need to win the lottery or prove yourself exceptionally worthy such that an American employer would sponsor you.
Actually, I would probably advise him or her to try and sneak into the US illegally because we do not enforce the law anymore. Shame on us.
That would be enough, but no. Disease is everyone’s enemy, and for-profit health care is more expensive than “free healthcare for all”. And a world where capital can freely cross borders but people can’t is inherently economically unbalanced.
That’s just blaming the victim. We are the ones who exploit illegal immigrants for cheap labor, we tax them for services they’ll never receive, then we demonize them as illegals so we can feel morally superior about our abuse and exploitation of them. It’s not “expensive”; it’s profitable. That’s why we do it.
It would take a century or so for the vast majority of Mexicans to immigrate legally; the laws are carefully designed to make it effectively impossible for them without openly forbidding them. We want them here, but we want them here illegally. If they were here legally we’d have to treat them better after all.