Do you? I mean, do you have hard, reliable, unbiased figures to demonstrate the net detriment of the presence of illegal immigrants?
Could you provide a cite for me? Also, how does it compare to the economic impact of the influx of American dollars into the Mexican economy, thereby increasing Mexico’s purchasing power parity next to the US. What about the economic benefit of having a cheap unskilled workforce available? Keep in mind not only big corporations employ migrant labor.
So I’m intersted to see the cite about their strain on services. They clearly aren’t straining social security. I’m certain they strain health services to a certain degree. I am dubious as to their strain on education, or would you be referring to their CHILDREN that were born in America, thereby making them American CITIZENS? As for law enforcement, this thread has already given examples of ways to keep the cost to law enforcement down, by not chipping them, and not putting them in prison.
Erek
If it’s a case of plucking an innocent schlub off the street and asking for proof that they’re legally allowed to be in the country, yeah. “Reasonable clause” and all that.
Now, if you’ve captured someone in the process of committing a crime, and you found out he was in the country illegally, then feel free to slap “illegal immigration” on top of the other charges. But just quizzing people’s eligibility status at random (or even not-so-random) is just creepy IMO.
OK, I didn’t get very far into the thread, so maybe this has already been suggested.
Here’s an alternative: Let the Mexicans come in & pick strawberries; & if this would create population stresses, for every excess alien that we can’t afford in this country, take some slacker native who thinks he’s too good to work outside in indentured servitude & shoot him in the head. Bingo, we’re actually improving the population.
:rolleyes:
(Sorry if this post seems non sequitor; it’s late, & my Devil’s Advocate mechanism has been getting cranky & really diabolical lately.)
(Whenever someone complains about Mexicans invading, I wonder about his ethnic background. The aboriginals have more to worry about than some Mexicans, so I guess the OP, like me, is descended from the genocidal flood of white men that invaded this country some time past. Is there some nervous race memory, expecting retribution, here? Or simple obliviousness to the past?)
Why is illegal immigration a problem? They take jobs you don’t want anyway and pay taxes. I’ve heard they’re what’s keeping social security going, since they pay in but can’t collect benefits. Most get jobs by buying fake IDs and have normal paychecks with withholdings.
I say, illegal immigration is only a problem to people who don’t like Hispanics and Asians. There’s no real effect on the economy. In fact, it probably helps the economy by providing cheap labor to farmers and small construction companies.
It’s a pretty repugnant idea. You can’t force people to undergo surgical procedures because it’s just plain immoral. Also, face recognition devices will probably be in the hands of law enforcement in the not to distant future any way. You could acomplish the same thing as the RFID implants without the intrusion.
Marc
Bingo [except spelling; “reasonable cause,” not reasonable clause."]. I’ve interpreted in numerous immigration court hearings on this very issue… For a while in the NW Chicago suburbs, particularly Arlington Heights, some moron in the police department decided he didn’t like the growing Hispanic population in his area, and decided to have INS agents do “ride-alongs” with the police.
Apparently they would stop people for the crime of Driving While Hispanic, arrest them, book them, ask them for proof of immigraiton status. Some were obviously here legally (many families with legal immigration status have one or more members without it; it can take years even to bring your spouse to the U.S. legally if you’re even a permanent resident rather than a citizen, and longer for children over 21 or siblings - and there’s no immigration category for parents of permanent residencts. Siblings of U.S. citizens can take more than a decade.)
Then they would place these poor schlubs, most of whom hadn’t been doing anything wrong (the usual reason for the traffic stop was usually given as something like "driving erratically,"or occasionally “busted taillight”), would be placed in these extremely farcical deportation proceedings.
The ones who could scrape together a few bucks for a lawyer would usually end up with the lawyer ttrying to exclue the whole traffic stop from evidence for lack of probable cause and terminate the deportation hearing. The cops/INS would counter that the stop was admissible, because they’d stopped the guy because he “met the profile of a known gang offender.” Judge asks what is the profile, cops say “young male Hispanic, and we can’t tell you more because it would jepoardize an ongoing criminal investigation.” Judge usually ends up having to admit the evidence, and in most cases order the guy to leave the U.S. It was one of the most frustrating farces I’ve ever had the misfortune to be involved in.
Eva Luna, former Immigration Court interpreter
Well, I think illegal immigration is a problem – but mainly in the same sense that a nonsustaining minimum wage is an income. People who work for a living but don’t make enough to cover basic necessities end up either (a) requiring social services to cover the deficits, or (b) ending up being homeless, or resorting to crime, or whatever.
Of course, the solution to this would be to raise the minimum wage and make sure folks working 40 hours/week actually make enough to live on (thus making the “undesirable” jobs actually desirable), then toughen up immigration and border enforcement to make sure the folks in the country are here legally. But then that gets into another can of worms, one that won’t get resolved any time soon.
I dunno; you don’t have to be concerned with skin color to wonder about the effects of illegal immigration on, say, population density and the issues that brings, such as increases in pollution, additional strains on the infrastructure, etc.
We dont’ need a hight tech solution. I have a better idea. All illegal aliens should wear a symbol… I don’t know perhaps an star or something like that.
From the Center of Immigration Studies
From a study done by FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform)
I have made no secret of my opposition to continued mass immigration to the United States, legal or illegal. However, putting a chip into illegals so we can quickly find and deport them again is not only dystopian and immoral, it’s also unnecessary. Anyone who follows the issue knows that the only practical way to stop illegal immigration is to impose heavy fines (like $100,000 a pop) on businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
This thread seems to be veering into a general discussion on illegal immigration. I’d advise anyone who wants to take the “con” position on illegal immigration to do it in some other thread so you don’t suffer “guilt by association” with this loony RFID idea.
That might be more workable if, as someone who provides in-house immigration advice for one of the largest businesses in the country (and one that is quite concerned with compliance), I didn’t have a 500-plus page manual explaining the intricacies of the 1-page form used to document employees’ U.S. employment authorization at the time of hire. And even that manual leaves many questions of legal interpretation unanswered.
Wise words. For the record, I didn’t mean to imply that I am in favor of planting a chip into anyone. I don’t agree that the OP is a good idea whatsoever. I was simply responding to a post that I disagreed with.
I think illegal immigration is a serious problem. I don’t think that the solution is to tag everyone.
A point made by INS workers regarding current policies is that, because they are overloaded, many people who entered the country legally “become illegal” at some point due to bureaucratic issues.
I’ve been living and working in the US twice. The first time (94-98), it took less than two weeks to get my SS card. Since I was a student, it was stamped “not valid for employment” - I could work only for my college.
The second time (2004), I still had my old card. When I called the embassy to ask about the fee for my Visa, I also asked about getting a new SS card: I couldn’t do it while in my country, because I’m not a US citizen. You can get a new US-SS card outside of the US only if you’re a US citizen or national. Ok, so I went to get my new card within 12 hours of entering the US.
It took over 4 months.
Since I was supposed to give my SS card to my employer within one week of my transfer, this means I broke the law. Not because I wanted to, but because SS had to get my data verified by INS and INS took more than 3 months. So I could have been kicked out of the country at any time between January 27th and June.
Silenus, are you planning on sticking a chip into anybody who’s been kicked out of the country in the time between sending in their paperwork and getting it back?
I oppose this for three reasons. (Three original reasons besides the ones mentioned in the thread already.)
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It violates the eighth amendment to the Constitution.
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I doubt that the technology would work flawlessly. You might get a lot of false alarms that would cause wasted effort. Alternately, it might turn out that the chips are harmful to the bearer in some cases, in which case the government would be liable for damages.
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Suppose I really hated an American citizen or legal immigrant. I could konk them unconscious and install a chip in their intestines. It would cause no end of trouble for them.
The major issue I have with this, is I feel like a human being before being an American, and I just cannot care that America’s economy is slightly burdened because it has to actually deal with it’s super-poor neighbor. America shouldn’t HAVE a really poor neighbor, but we rape and pillage economies in order to supplement ours. What we consider to be a barely liveable condition, is opulent for all intents and purposes. I just see it as a slight balancing, and I don’t think it’s even workable to stop illegal immigration. We make deals with the power structures of other countries, and then we bitch about the people at the bottom that had no say in those decisions, and treat them like criminals for merely wanting to survive. For that reason I just can’t see immigration as a problem. If we need to save money, cut the defense budget and look toward stabilizing North and South America instead of all these middle-east adventures. Our gluttony isn’t worth the beat down of more Mexicans. What is so inherently great about Americans that we DESERVE all this wealth, when the standard of living for your average middle-class American is SO MUCH higher than most of the countries we have accrued wealth from by keeping them in debt?
I’m sorry, I just can’t feel sorry for the average American in this, the world economy needs to stablize, and that means that the top needs to help balance the bottom, any resistance to this balancing is only going to ensure that we fall from the heights rather than gradually reducing our decadence.
Let’s not forget that it’s not even realistic to try and control the economy that way. Fining 100,000 to companies that hire illegal immigrants would only crush businesses, putting the illegal and legal employees out of work, and it wouldn't even impact the big multi-nationals with political clout, they'd just make an example of a few decent size local contractors, and maybe one or two companies that subcontract them. The fines would be pure fluff, and it would make it harder for small businesses to operate while giving carte-blanche to those that have the clout to avoid it, or can toss 100k into a bucket once in a while, so long as the CEO has plausible deniability.
The world cannot afford America anymore, and that’s just the way it is. Our ideals are great, and that’s what I love about this country, but the government forgot what those were a long time ago.
Erek
(And I don’t mean this in a ‘we should all become hippies and live in harmony with mother nature providing for us’ sort of way, but just simple reduction of all the plastic and paper crap we buy and don’t need.)
So you support stupid immigration policies as a means of punishing America?
No, I think we should have good immigration policies, ones designed to manage the transition of this imbalance to one of more balance. I don’t think much of what has been proposed is a good idea.
This country is a long history of screaming equality from a soap box, while disenfranchising the poor every step of the way in order to increase marketshare. From it’s inception we brought in black slaves to till our fields while we went off and killed the Native population so that we could expand our holdings farther afield until we got to where the Mexicans were, we pushed them out of what they held, assimilating some, meanwhile a steady stream of poor immigrant labor came in and road this wave, some got caught at the bottom, some were able to ride at the top and get a good thing from it. We never lived up to the ideals set out by the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but I don’t think that’s any reason to believe that we shouldn’t.
If we’re going to go out and adventure across the world manipulating the world situation for our own benefit, then we should start extending our ideals to them. If we are going to continue to tax the populace of the world, we should be striving to represent them as well.
We need to ask questions like: How poor would Mexico be if Migrant workers weren’t keeping their families up with a steady influx of American capital? What is the relative cost of fighting the influx of immigration rather than accomodating it?
Manifest Destiny didn’t stop at the West Coast, it’s gone all over the world, the only thing that stopped at the west coast was states rights. We stopped initiating new states, and rolled back a lot of the rights the existing states had. We’ve turned most of the world into vassal states and can overturn their governments by the whim of whatever the current administration is. This practice is catching up to us.
Local Law Enforcement agencies generally deal with maintaining the status quo, they aren’t that concerned with creating some kind of idealistic utopia where all law is obeyed, and forcing them to do so only puts them at more risk than is necessary for a lot of stupid reasons.
Erek
Government meeting:
“Hey, why don’t we use RFID tags to track illegal aliens coming into our country.”
“No, we don’t want to waste resources.”
“Sir?”
“We need to use them to track American citizens!”
Besides all the other objections already raised, there’s the little fact that it won’t work. RFID tags are short (as in a few centimeters) ranged devices – “sweep of an agricultural area”, indeed.