If I ever get arrested I’ll be sure and tell the judge I don’t want any special treatment: Just treat me like an illegal.
As to the specific claims from the OP:
“Free welfare” - Check. See Auntie Zeituni for an example. She was here living in public housing and collecting $700 a month disability while being here illegally. She’s one example, I’m sure there are millions more.
“Healthcare” - Check. Illegals are swamping ERs across the country.
“College Tuition” - This one is debatable. It’s not like we hand every illegal free tuition like we do welfare and medical care. But they certainly do get the same breaks that those of us who live here often don’t qualify for. Plenty of people work in MA and pay income tax there, yet live over the border so they don’t get in state tuition rates. Yet illegals can get in state tuition rates. Plenty of colleges offer financial aid to illegals and that money is fungible. If it weren’t going to them, it would be available for citizens. So this claim is mostly true, but poorly worded.
“Drivers License” - Another debatable one. Illegals don’t get “free” licenses that I’m aware of. Yet, it’s true that most of them either just drive illegally or commit identity theft to get the documentation they need.
Rushgeekgirl casually mentions this upthread when she says “He paid in a lot of taxes on his fake SS card, at least until they started making it near impossible.” You lament this as if it’s a bad thing! You realize that when an illegal makes up a SS number to use that directly harms the real person who is associated with that number somewhere, right?
These crimes illegals are constantly committing aren’t victimless.
But this and some of your other examples are not BECAUSE she is illegal, but DESPITE the fact that she is illegal. Correlation, causation, and so forth.
That’s fair if there’s an equivalent punishment for citizens who don’t pay their free clinic bill. What would you suggest?
How could it be a good idea to have immigrants forever one misstep away from deportation? Felonies are one thing, but you’d spend a hell of a lot less just subsidizing the clinics that deporting people.
The point that the OP was refuting was that people “sneak across the border” and get that list of things. That point is true for most of the list, as I’ve illustrated.
It doesn’t matter if illegals are getting millions in benefits because of their illegal status. The fact that they are getting them is certainly a legitimate cause of frustration for most people.
Two people fail to pay their bill. Joe Schmo is from Mexico and Nate Bates is from the States. Do you’re saying that Joe gets deported to Mexico and Nate gets deported to the US, from the US? How is that equivalent? How would that even work?
Or perhaps you’re suggesting that Nate be processed, separated from his family, and shipped to a location hundreds or thousands of miles from where he comes from: say, Scottsdale. That seems like a just punishment for nonpayment of a debt. You’re right. Much better than those old-fashioned workhouses!
This always gets brought up as the straw man for what to do with illegals. You don’t need massive deportations. Just stop giving them benefits and start punishing employers who hire them.
If you took away Auntie Zeituni’s disability check and free housing she wouldn’t have stayed here. She would have had to go home on her own.
If no one will hire them because we verify status of employees then they will mostly leave.
It’s not hard. It just requires the political will to do it.
Two people are pulled over for speeding. One of them has a valid drivers license. The other one is driving without a license. Do we need to treat them the same out of some sort of misguided sense of fairness?
People!! This was a joke! :smack: If you go to a free clinic your bill is $0, so there is no bill to pay.
Also you can’t deport citizens to their own country (second bad joke in response to a comment on the first bad joke.) Mostly I read Debasers post and the articles cited as well as the comments were so weak I figured I would boil some tea and study for my statistics class instead of trying to respond in any intelligent way - someone else will have to do the ignorance fighting for today - carry on brothers.
Well, at least Dewey Finn sort of got it, maybe it wasn’t all in vain.
Having an illegal immigrant husband and family members I can tell you it’s not “living the life”. It’s a lot better in some cases than where they came from, but those options you mentioned aren’t available to everyone.
In our state they do not give drivers licences to illegals. I have heard of this being done in other states, but not that many.
He was not able to get college tuition either.
He wasn’t able to get healthcare, because he had no social security number.
Everything was paid for up front in cash.
I don’t know why people think that illegals get all the same things citizens do, It’s very difficult if not impossible for them to get these things. Life as an illegal for my husband was very hard, aside from living every day with the fear he could be deported, he had no health care, no drivers licence, hell, even getting a fishing licence was an ordeal that we finally resolved by paying 50 dollars. Car insurance is crappy too because without a licence you have to find a company willing to ensure him and they are usually crappy.
There is however, a way for illegals to file taxes. Although this is becoming more known now days, my family never knew about it. If we had, well things would be much easier for us as we now are paying for about 8 years of back taxes with my husbands newly given social. If we had known about the ITIN number we would have been filing taxes all along.
Marriage by no means assures papers. The U.S has harsh penalties for illegally crossing, one crossing(and a certain amount of days) is a 10 year penalty ( 10 years you must stay out of the U.S), for which you must apply for a waiver (a pardon), and to get this you must prove that being banned from the country for 10 years would cause you and your family EXTREME hardship. This is difficult to do, they are very strict.
Multiple crossings and/or deportations can be a permanent ban, regardless of your being married to a citizen or not.
So in many cases even having kids here and a citizen spouse they are permanently denied papers and have no fix.
Yes, this. I’m so grateful my mother got her citizenship straightened out before this came into play (under Reagan’s amnesty law, ironically enough). What was possible for illegals like my married-to-a-citizen mom as recently as the 1980s is difficult to impossible now.
Very true. Most of the people in my family who have papers are older family members who got them way back when it was easier, or under that amnesty law.
Sometimes. It depends on the visa. When my (now-)husband was in the US legally on an O-visa, marriage to a US citizen would have been considered a violation, since O-visas do not lead to permanent residency and marriage would have been taken as a sign that he intended to remain in the US, or even that the original entry to the US was undertaken fraudulently (this was from our immigration attorney).
How long ago was this? because there have been several marriages to foreigners legally in the country in my family, but there has not been on recently. Actually, not one this century, now that I think about it, so I suppose my knowledge is dated, and I shouldn’t be putting in my 2 cents.
Hmm. The last two in my family were both in the 1990s. One was to a person with permanent resident status, but the other was a green card marriage, although it worked, and they are still married. It led to a kind of unusual situation that I’m surprised never became a sit-com.
