The Senate has agreed on a bipartisan compromise immigration bill:
But it’s still facing opposition from both sides of the aisle. Conservatives object to “amnesty” for illegal aliens, liberals to the de-emphasis on family reunification.
Should this bill pass as is? If not, what should be changed?
I am always pleased when I can answer a question without any hesitation. I don’t know.
Clearly, something must be done, and whatever is done, innocent and worthy people will suffer for it. Who do we protect, who can we protect? Can we regard the prospect of sending parents away from children, children who are our own by law, citizens? How do we send away people who have risked their lives to be among us? How do we call them criminal for doing what any decent human being would do for the sake of their families?
Perhaps its best to accept this as a starting point, with the presumption of amendment as the results manifest. Be that as it may, a lot of good and worthy people will be cruelly treated, and my heart aches for them.
My main complaint is it’s complexity.
They want to give something to everyone and take away something to appease all critics.
In the process they create a huge new bureaucracy and perhaps millions of court cases. Only lawyers should love this bill.
The victims have no money.
If they have no money, why are they taking our jobs? For fun?!?!
-Joe
Very droll.
That’s right. It’s a compromise bill. Politics is the art of the possible, you know.
This is the part that gets me. IMO, it’s like selling amnesty for $5000. I’m not sure how someone working a job that pays less than the federal minimum wage would be able to pony up that kind of cash.
LilShieste
I think, considering that something should be done, this is certainly a place to start.
It’s my opinion that most of the ‘enforcement’ side of things should be focused on detecting and severely punishing businesses and private enterprises for hiring illegal aliens.
Well, the Senate has decided to put off a vote on the bill until June, so they (and we) will have plenty of time to debate it.
Not just the 5 large, which would feed one of thier families for…what, two years? But to go to the back of the line behind everyone who didn’t have the guts to risk their ass…I mean, behind those people who respected our laws more than feeding their families.
[aside] Theres a lot of Hispanic families in my neighborhood, some of the simpy have to be illegal. They meet the school bus to pick up their kids, the kids are well fed and scrubbed within in an inch of their lives, they are constantly smiling and touching one another. You want good old fashioned hard work and family values? Do you speak Spanish? [/aside]
Are you accusing me of drolling???
-Joe, hates puns
There’s a little too much hyperbole in that last statement, for my tastes. And I certainly don’t think it would be fair to allow the immigrants who came here illegally to cut in line in front of the immigrants who were trying to enter legitimately.
There were some kids like this at my bus stop, when I was little. They weren’t illegal immigrants, though.
LilShieste
Well, then, what you would risk it for? I’ve lived in the Sonoran Desert, around Tucson, and so long as you have water, its a slice of heaven. But you get caught out there without water and/or transport, you’re in for it. Big time. It doesn’t get worse than that without imaginative refinements.
So why, then? Why risk such a ghastly death? And they do, you know, odds are decent there’s one dying there right now, cheated by a coyote and abandoned, a stranger and afraid. What would it take to get you to risk that? A toaster oven?
And those people who line up to send money orders back to Mexico? Tending to their 401Ks, you think?
This is a very complicated bill (getting more complicated as we speak), so I don’t pretend to understand it. I guess “something” is better than nothing, but my cynical side predicts that when all is said and done, nothing will change. There are all these provisions about “securing the border” before the real stuff kicks in. Secure the border? Yeah, like that will ever happen.
I still remember the last immigration bill that was supposed to fix everything back in the 80s. And that one was pretty straight forward.
It will be interesting to see if we implement the part about employers being responsible for ensuring their workers are citizens. That could be a source of a lot of abuse, but it shouldn’t be that hard a thing to do.
I don’t much like the idea of “guestworkers”. That would make John Edwards’ vision of 2 Americas a reality. We basically have that now, with illegal immigrants, but creating this new class would legalize the concept. Again, maybe that’s better than the status quo, but I still don’t like it much.
I think I was unclear in what I was referring to, regarding the hyperbole (genuinely). Let me try again:
The underlined portion is what I was referring to. The implication here is that the people who are respecting our immigration laws probably don’t care as much for their families. I think that’s an unfair characterization of the situation.
“Why”, indeed. They wouldn’t run into these particular dangers if they entered the country legally.
Seriously - if I were the primary bread winner for my (hypothetical) family living in Mexico, should I risk my life trying to enter the U.S. illegally, to be able to send my family some additional money each month? What happens if I get killed by a coyote, or die of thirst, or get killed by some border patrol? What are they supposed to do without me?
Not at all. I’m not trying to argue that.
LilShieste
Do you think entering legally is an option open to the persons in question?
About as well. The economics of Mexico and Central America are in such a disastrous state, they can’t even fall back on subsistence farming. They have long since beaten the hell out of soil not that great to begin with. In such a situation, a strong and healthy “breadwinner” is not an advantage, but a detriment.
If the strongest youngster in the family gets over and starts sending back money, they will live. If he vanishes, they are no worse off than before. And so it goes.
PS and aside: the term coyote doesn’t refer to the mangy varmint of the desert, but a Mexican specialist in border infiltration. People work and save for years (literally) in order to pay one of these to get them into America. Some are not such bad people, others make you ashamed of your species. There is no particular reason you might know this, so it was presumptuous not to offer a definition.
They always have to have a bad bill before all the flaws come to the surface.
The next version will be a lot better, I’m sure.
Got a cite for that statement about the soil?
Agriculture in Mexico has been declining, but it’s just following the typical path of a developed nation. It’s the world’s #1 producer of avocados, onions, lines, lemons, number 3 in oranges, and number 4 in corn.
I don’t think you can blame the state of Mexican agriculture on the soil.
My guess (and I really don’t know for sure) is that Mexico, like much of Latin America, still suffers from the legacy of a stratified society where land ownership was concentrated in the hands of the powerful (read: those with government connections). People can’t make much of living farming because not enough of them own any land.
If the US didn’t turn such a blind eye on illegal immigration, and could actually enforce border security, we’d see agricultural jobs move south to Mexico where the cheaper labor is. As it is, it’s easier to get the cheap labor to come here.