I believe that as Americans in this day and age it is our responsibility to limit the amount of immigrants coming through our borders to a much greater extent than we do now. We are flooding our country. Now I would say this wouldnt be a problem 50-70 years ago when the country was still young; families didnt have 3 cars per house and live in suburbs that extend 20 or 30 miles from a city. Now you people out there who are first or second generation Americans may give the lame excuse that “America was built on immigration”. Well of course it was! What country wasnt except for some valley in Sudan? And now with the added threat of terrorism suddenly throwing our eyelids open over the past 2 months, those muslim extremists can slip right in and blow something up! Some of the terrorists of 9/11 had fake passports and some the government doesn’t know where they appeared out of; no papers whatsoever! Did they walk past the customs gate in JFK without a passport? Please, people, lets get a grip and draw the line in the sand so we can save America for the future.
Do you mean that in addition to immigration, you want to stop the admittance of refugees, tourists, and people that took a left turn instead of a right turn at the Canadian border? How about citizens that want to return to the USA after a trip abroad, should they be allowed to come back, or do we tell them “tough titty?”
I think we need to admit more immigrants/refugees and start exiling all the xenophobes.
Where’s the debate, nodaker?
Sounds like a rant, to me.
Hey Arnold-
"Close the Border" is a figurative term for restricting immigrants. I think you are taking far too much liberty in saying such obsurd things as not letting back in americans coming back on trips-they are citizens who, for the most part, believe in the American way of life. Unfortunately, our counterparts over at 1 Cave Road in Desert, Afghanistan don't share those same ideals.
Let's take a look at other countries that have taken little or no steps to limit their population. hmm...China, India...oh, they are doing just great, aren't they? Communism, poverty, no freedom, disease, wilderness dissapearing faster than the XFL, is that where you want to see America in the future? Because if it is, get out!Do I smell a troll?
:rolleyes:
Do you have a cite for the claim that the problems in India and China were caused by massive immigration?
Please. Most countries that have these problems are a result of rapid, sudden change, not gradual reform.
I never said that the problems of China and India were caused by immigration-they were caused by neglecting the fact that their population vs. usuable land area was getting out of hand. True wilderness in America is dissapearing in America at a rapid rate and it is an issue that is being ignored. Anyways, who would want to move to China or India?
You need to deal with the economic aspects of immigration and other population issues like declining birth rates and the looming retirement of baby boomers. The United States doesn’t support continued immigration because its a nice thing to do, it supports it because it is necessary to feed continued economic growth.
But the wilderness of America is not disappearing because of immigration. Unless you have proof that says otherwise?
I don’t get it-first you said it was about terrorism, now it’s about population?
:rolleyes:
It’s a bunch of problems grouped together, two of which are national security and over population. 30% of America’s population today is due entirely to the people that immigrated to the United States in the 1970’s alone. If that is not rapid growth, then what is? And if you haven’t noticed, Americans have been moving OUT of cities in the past 20 years or so to SUBURBS, which, through construction, destroy WILDERNESS because suburbs take more SPACE than does a high rise. Did your grandparents live in a large house 30 miles from where your father worked with a 3 car garage? Did’t think so. We are moving away, leaving the space in the cities for the immigrants. Eventually, as they acquire wealth, they will move out of the city, destroying more wilderness in order to provide them with ample housing.
I had no idea that the move to the suburbs started in the 1980s! Gee, I was always taught that the move to suburbs started in the cookie-cutter period immediately post WWII and was exacerbated by “white flight” from urban centers during the turmoil of the 1960s, and . . .
Wait, this must be Bizarro World or something. My bad.
sorry to offend you, but I think there is a much greater push out of cities in the last 20 years than there was even in the post WWII years with the exception of Levittown and what not. Plus, houses/suburbs today take a lot more property than they did in the 50s/60s
So, we get a semi-literate version of Pat Buchanan.
I’m fairly certain that we do not need much in the way of data to advance the hypothesis that immigrants are not the ones building second houses and detached garages etc. in the burbs.
Housing is a function of wealth. American wealth, per capita has risen substantially since 1950. That, combined with greater mobility as a function of falling real prices for transport and as a percent of total income, means more spread out housing. As a function of taste by native born Americans.
Try again.
Well, nodaker, you have certainly convinced me that the USA-Canada border should be closed.
Well I for one am tired of immigrants coming over here and stealing America.
We stole this country fair and square from the Indians when we all immigrated here.
I think it should be retrospective, starting from 1 January 1700. That way, vast tracts of wilderness would be reclaimed, and national security issues would be vastly simplified by simply imprisoning those who don’t look native American.
Damn it you beat me to it!
Yes!! What a great idea!!! Let’s hide behind the big strong government to protect us from terrorists. Closing the borders will certainly solve all of our problem.
… :rolleyes: or maybe not
Nodaker, I don’t know where you’re getting your numbers that 30% of the US population is comprised of immigrants from the 1970s alone, but according to the US census bureau merely 10.4% of the US population is foreign born. I’m not sure what portion of the 10.4% came during the 1970’s but even if it was half, then they would have hardly had enough time to produce 30% of our population.
Closing our borders would only make us more like Afghanistan where we would limit people based on what they looked like or where they came from. America has lived in a bubble keeping us from the realities that face the rest of the world for too long.
I do smell troll.
If you want to pay ten dollars for a head of lettuce, by all means, close the borders. California agriculture
wouldn’t exit if it weren’t for migrant pickers. As is often stated, if California were a country it would be the fourth richest in the world. Agriculture is our primary source of income.
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/pub/briefs/brief3.html
http://are.berkeley.edu/APMP/pubs/agworkvisa/planwelcomed120600.html
If you don’t have time to read it all, read the first and last paragraphs. Please, no flames. I’m only half serious about the minefields. More enforcement at the border is likely to lead to an improved business climate for professional smugglers.
Getting Serious About U.S. Immigration Policy
and Illegal Immigrants.
The United States’ immigration policy seems to lack decisiveness and rationality. There is much room for improvement in the formula for deciding eligibility for immigrant visas. The reader will be surprised to learn that, all things considered, immigrants are good for the U.S. economy, but it is no surprise that illegal immigration is a problem. America should get serious about restricting illegal immigration so there will be more room for legal immigrants. The best way to control illegal immigration would be to control the U.S.- Mexican border. America should make the legal immigration process more open and accepting, but minefields should be established along the border to stop illegal immigrants, since legal immigration is economically beneficial.
We must begin with a bare-bones description of the U.S. immigration process in order to give the reader sufficient background to consider the issue. Any foreigner wishing to immigrate to the U.S. needs a specific type of visa known as an immigrant visa. The U.S. immigration laws define a process for distributing visas which could be diagrammed as a flowchart. The decision points in that flowchart would form the elements of a formula which determines the ease and speed with which an applicant navigates through the process. The formula determines different point totals for different visa applicants based on various characteristics of the applicants and specifies what point total constitutes a passing grade. The passing grade can be set lower to allow more people to immigrate or higher to restrict immigration. The current formula has one overriding variable: whether the visa applicant has a close relative already legally residing in the U.S. An applicant who has an immediate family member already in the U.S. gets 100 points and is admitted to the U.S. Other applicants get zero points and cannot immigrate legally (Borjas, 1).
U.S. Immigration statutes are nearly as complex as the tax laws, but sponsor-applicant relationship is how visa eligibility is decided in most cases. Other factors determine the speed with which the visa is granted. The number of points awarded to an applicant usually depends on whether the sponsor is a permanent resident alien or U.S. citizen, and the exact nature of the family relationship between sponsor and applicant.
A parent, spouse, or child will get swifter consideration (one year) than will a sibling (twenty years). Refugees get some visas, and one in fourteen immigrants gets a visa as a result of possessing rare job skill, but family relationships are given the most weight. The U.S. is unusual among English-speaking nations in its heavy emphasis on only one variable. The U.S. is also unusual in that it does not admit to using a formula to determine eligibility for entry visas.
Some other countries display their formulas on web sites. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have more sensible formulas which the U.S. would do well to emulate. They include an applicant’s education, occupation, proficiency in the English language, and age, as well as relationship to the sponsor. It is possible that most potential sponsors want to be reunited with their parents rather than their siblings. The INS might think that most people feel a greater obligation to their parents than to their siblings, and desire to give their parents a higher priority for immigration sponsorship.
It is true that the U.S. cannot accept all applicants. One could argue that this country belongs to its citizens and they can do what they want. If discouraging immigration is what the U.S. government wants to do, the government should be forthright about it. Not publicizing the rules, like much of U.S. immigration policy, seems to have the purpose of discouraging applications. The U.S. government should be more open about what our immigration policy is, as are other countries. Secrecy creates unnecessary hardship for visa applicants. A person would feel angry if he/she invested time and money in a visa application and then found out it would take 20 years to get the visa, provided one even qualified according to unpublicized rules. The economics of immigrant labor makes the U.S. policy of giving parents and children of U.S. residents preference over siblings in distribution of visas seem irrational. Perhaps the INS sees it’s mission as being restriction of immigration. If this is true the INS should be honest about it. Giving people false hope is not the right thing to do. The INS should have no right to decide wether the siblings or parents get preference. It should be up to the sponsor to decide whom is to be sponsored. Applicants should be judged according to more practical measures.
Other immigrants are a less obvious aspect of immigration policy. Illegal immigrants are a sizeable proportion of the immigrant population. The U.S. government should allow fewer illegal immigrants so there would be more room for legal immigrants. “Mexico [is] by far the leading supplier of immigrants to the U.S.” (Kennedy 1). Latin Americans find it relatively easy to slip across the U.S.-Mexican border. These illegal immigrants would say that they are only coming to take jobs which U.S. citizens don’t want, but this is grossly unfair to people in other parts of the world who must cross and ocean. Legal immigrants should be given the chance to enter this country because they are the ones that have enough respect for the law to enter legally. In the interest of fairness and respect for law, the U.S. government should stop illegal border crossing. There is more than one way to control illegal immigration; we must decide which is the better method. Most people would say we need to strengthen the Border Patrol. The potential effectiveness of the Border Patrol was demonstrated by Operation Hold the Line in El Paso and later by Operation Gatekeeper in Southern California. In September 1993, Chief Silvestre Reyes of the El Paso Border Patrol suddenly closed several breaches in the border fence in his district and redeployed the patrol’s forces to de-emphasize the pursuit of illegal aliens after they cross the border in favor of concentrating on the border itself. Where the border runs through downtown El Paso agents were stationed within sight of each other. Total extra costs for fence repair and overtime were $ 300,000 during the first two weeks (Kennedy 14). Shortly after it began, Chief Reyes announced that the operation would continue indefinitely without new funding. The new strategy is very effective. Detentions resulting from train checks north of the border in the El Paso decreased by 90% (Kennedy 14). Detentions of illegal aliens dropped to about 150 per day from an average of 800 to 1000 per day before the operation began (Kennedy 15). Detentions resulting from train checks north of the border in the El Paso area decreased by 90% (Kennedy 15). Airport apprehensions formerly numbering in the hundreds per day have since averaged 8-15 per day.
Of course it is impossible for the Border Patrol to be 100% effective. They can’t catch everyone. Illegal activities nearly always involve large amounts of money which make corruption inevitable. The U.S. should get serious about closing the border to illegal activity. Political correctness demands that landmines be universally opposed. Most countries have agreed to ban landmines. It is true that landmines have been used carelessly in some places and many innocent people have been injured and killed by landmines. But there are some places where other measures can be as effective as carefully designed minefields. The border between North Korea is such a place, and the border between Mexico and the U.S. is another. The idea of placing land mines along most of the border may seem inhumane, but it would relieve more human suffering than it would cause by stopping the predations of border bandits and restricting the northward flow of drugs. The initial investment would be high, but maintenance costs would be low. A more expensive and less reliable solution would be to sufficiently strengthen the border patrol. Minefields would be less expensive in the long run and would be more reliable.
Money is the reason most people immigrate, and is also the reason most U.S. citizens are opposed to immigration. The lowest-paying jobs in the U.S. are preferable to what is available in most other places. One complaint about illegal immigrants is that they take jobs away from citizens. People who are opposed to immigration think of the national economy as being of a fixed size, and they don’t want to share. In fact, immigrants can increase the size of the economic pie. It is true that menial jobs would pay more in the absence of illegal labor, but the resulting inflation would make problems worse for everyone. The biggest reason immigrant labor is actually a benefit to the host society is because it increases the labor supply free of cost. The sending society underwrites the cost of caring for and educating a future worker until the age at which he or she can start working. When the worker emigrates, the source country ends up having subsidized the economy of the host country. ”Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?” (Kennedy 1). Kennedy explains how “the availability of unskilled immigrants may increase the economy’s overall efficiency… but may at the same time impose substantial hardships on the low-skill native workers… with whom they compete.” (Kennedy 16). If the U.S. government allowed more skilled workers to immigrate, it would be the skilled workers who are already here who would suffer. Another reason the INS should admit more unskilled workers “because that would liberate our skilled workers from unskilled tasks, allowing them to be more productive” (Kennedy 16).
Excerpt from; Illegal immigrants and the labour market Does illegal immigration help the underground economy? Who really benefits from the employment of undocumented migrants? And to what extent does their employment affect the recruitment and wages of nationals? To answer these questions, it would help to know how illegal immigration is actually defined. The spectrum is very wide. For apart from those who enter countries illegally, many migrants enter countries illegally, many migrants enter a country quite legally but overstay their visas or fail to get their permits renewed. Also in this group are the seasonal workers who fail to return home when their contracts expire and rejected asylum seekers. ... Being illegal is seldom the migrant’s deliberate choice. When the opportunity to get authorisation occurs, most of those meeting the criteria are only too eager to file an application. In fact, the advantages of illegal migration tend mostly to be on the side of the employer. An employer will benefit from the illegal status of a migrant who is desperate for work and therefore prepared to accept poor pay, usually below local norms. Hiring an illegal worker also brings the employer the advantage of paying less in the way of welfare contributions and other non-wage costs. The “welfare magnet” of illegal immigration is much stronger for the employer than for the worker, whose precarious situation and low bargaining power makes him highly vulnerable to discriminatory practices in the form of longer hours and non-payment of various bonuses, or even of wages.
Governments rarely accomplish anything without the influenced of money or political pressure, so a revolution of thought will be necessary in order for drastic improvement in U.S. immigration policy to occur. There has been some political pressure to do more to fight illegal immigration, so the Border Patrol has become more efficient for the last few years. Mine fields along most of the U.S.-Mexican border would be an extremely efficient deterrent. After a few casualties, news would get around of the hopelessness of crossing the U.S.-Mexican border on the ground by illegal means. The public needs to transcend squeamishness and realize that for every injured illegal immigrant, countless drug-related crimes could be prevented.
Works Cited
Borjas, George. “The New Economics of Immigration.” Affluent Americans
Gain; poor Americans lose 1.13 Nov. 1996
http.//www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/issue/96nov/immigrat/borjas.htm
Kennedy, David. “Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?”
Comparing Yesterday’s immigration with today’s, a historian is struck by the unprecedented nature of our present situation. 1.16 Nov. 1996
Kennedy.//www.the atlantic.com/atlantic/issue/96nov/immigrat/kennedy.htm