With all the talk about this new law in Arizona, I started thinking about how illegal immigration affects me personally. I can’t think of one single way.
I know lots of people are really up in arms about this, and I assume it’s because it has a direct impact on their lives. I know about all the abstract effect it’s supposed to have on the economy, but I live in an area with many, many undocumented immigrants and I have to confess that they don’t bother me one bit.
Does the issue of illegal immigration have any effect on your life? What kind, and to what extent?
Since living in this city, I have been hit-and-run four times. Illegals don’t have insurance.
If I need to go to the emergency room, it’s almost always a 6-10 hour wait, because there are a lot of illegals there, using it as their primary medical care. For free.
I once lived in an apartment on the ground floor, when there were easily 10 illegals living in the apartment directly above mine. Gets annoying, when you’re trying to sleep.
I have to prove that I’m not an illegal every time I start a new job, and I may soon have to start proving it just to walk down the street. If they’re not going to be allowed to profile, then we’re all targets.
My special-needs son is not eligible for certain programs at school that could help him, because he speaks English.
I wish one of the ranchers on the border could participate in this thread, so that he could discuss how, in the last 20 years, half a million illegals have crossed his property, littering and committing crimes, which get worse and worse as they get more desperate. Too bad the rancher that was just killed by a smuggler can’t come and tell you about how they’ve affected his life, but he’s dead.
Negative: They result in higher taxes and medical costs for me, because I have to pay for stupid, racist, and ultimately ineffective enforcement policies by a system already overloaded by real crimes. They use public services but cannot obtain insurance and pay few taxes, regardless of their willingness to do so. They make my country look bad–enforcing harsh and repeated penalties primarily against people who are refugees from extreme poverty and violence, while at the same time making the paths to legal immigration so high as to take a significant fraction of a persons lifetime to achieve, assuming they’re lucky enough not to be quota’d out of any possibility at all - in the named of “protecting” a nation of which very, very few people are more than four or five generations from being immigrants themselves.
Positive: They are willing to perform a lot of jobs that most Americans are not, provide a new generation of citizens (eventual employees for me or my company) via birthright citizenship, provide exposure to the diversity we claim to cherish, and provide at least a little tax revenue through sales taxes. I strongly suspect that they prepare and serve a fair amount of the food I eat-- although unlike Arizona’s newly trained police, I can’t look at someone and determine their legality.
Not at all personally, as far as I can tell. I will say, as someone whose husband went through the legal process of emigrating to the U.S., that it did not escape our notice how nearly insurmountable that task would have been if we did not speak English, have a good education, and were not familiar with the system of government and confident in our rights.
Just curious: how is that you acquired your supernatural ability to know whether somebody is in the country illegally just by looking at them, and how do you know what they do or do not pay for medical care?
Incidentally, “illegal” is an adjective, not a noun.
Start a thread in great debates,** Dio**, I’m not your whipping girl tonight. I’d really like all the bleeding heart pro-immigrant whiners to live here for a while, and see what it’s really like. There’s a reason Arizona is changing the way things are done- it’s because things aren’t working the way they’ve been. And sorry, but here illegal is a noun, too.
Meh, whatever. It’s really hard to get excited about it on a message board when you live it every day. What’s racially offensive about it? It’s a fact that illegal immigrants are draining this state of resources. I have nothing against people coming here legally.
Wow, who knew an IMHO thread could get people so riled up?:rolleyes: Great idea.
I don’t think you’ll find many folks from either side to disagree with the “it’s not working now.” But I guarantee you that Arizona’s law will make things worse, not better, and will negatively affect a lot of folks who aren’t illegal immigrants – assuming it survives constitutional muster long enough to go into effect.
Simply put, life as Mexican poor (and let’s be honest, folks are only complaining about Mexican “illegals” – there are plenty of nice white Canadian ones here and I haven’t heard a single report or complaint about them, ever) is vastly worse than being poor, or even a de-facto criminal, in the US. Nothing that does not solve that basic equation will ever be effective, and most of us “pro-immigrant whiners” aren’t so much pro-immigrant as anti-“throwing good money after bad, with a side order of racism.”
I work with many, many people who aren’t from the US, and visas, legality of employment, and citizenship issues pop up frequently. Some choose to become citizens, and for the ones who do, it’s a big thing, a proud moment. But the process takes years. Even if their aim isn’t US citizenship, there’s still a lot of legal issues, paperwork, and accompanying hassles to deal with.
I don’t blame illegal immigrants for wanting to avoid all that, but it’s sad that getting here is hard to do legally but easy to do illegally. It comes across as being punished for playing by the rules.
So **Alice **isn’t going to answer the question about how she knows people are residing in this country undocumented simply by looking at them? I’m actually curious.
It’s affected me personally once very directly, I was undocumented once for three months, and a couple times I was affected in a more indirect fashion.
Direct:
While working in a pharmaceutical company in Miami, I needed to renew my work permit. My lawyer and the company’s lawyers decided that it was “best for all concerned” if I didn’t. Consequences: I left the country and the HR manager discovered that over 1/3 of the company’s workers were “not fully documented” on any given day and that refusing to provide employees with proof of employment needed to renew work permits was company policy, then proceeded to raise hell about it. Way to go, Dorothy!
Undocumented:
The third time I entered the US, it was as an in-company transfer, on a “Technician’s” visa. I already had a SSN and SS Card, but I needed to renew the card. Only US Citizens and Nationals could renew a SS Card outside the US. I went to SS on the same day I’d landed, hadn’t even opened my suitcase. So I get there and they tell me, the renewal is supposed to take less than two weeks (I’m supposed to show my new SS Card to my employer within those two weeks, as well, they’ve already seen the old one), but because of this additional step where my information needs to be verified by the CIA it’s going to be over two months. I got the Card back 13 weeks later. Strictly speaking, I could have been considered an “undocumented alien” and kicked out at any time during those 13 weeks.
Indirect. These weren’t so much “illegal immigration” as “people’s notions of what is and isn’t legal in relationship to immigration”.
My graduate advisor decided that, since I was “the best researcher I’ve ever known and a fucking foreigner, so you can’t do anything without my permission” (sic), he could publish my research without my name and would do so for a minimum of nine years at a rate of one or two articles per year, making my PhD take at least 11 years and his publication list look real nifty. Consequences: Master’s without Thesis for me and his career in a slops bucket for him.
The Visa I had for that third stay in the US could be renewed twice, for a total of seven years, at which point I would have been able to directly turn in a request for permanent residency. It was linked to my employer as much as to me, and all that was needed to use it while changing jobs within the company was a one-paragraph letter to INS stating the change.
But, because the people of HR believed the lawyer who said that regularizing a change of job for a foreign employee was “very, very difficult” and would “take a long time”, the four foreigners in the team (out of over 200 people, and having gotten the jobs above Americans, we were good at what we did damnit), all four of which had post-project offers in the US, got shipped “back home”.
Not only that, but the people of HR apparently consulted the same lawyer when us four pointed out that we’d like to be considered for jobs throughout Europe and not in each of our own countries. He said that getting job permits for, say, a Spaniard to work in Italy, was going to be “very difficult” and “take a long time” (it’s impossible, actually, in the same way as it is impossible for a Texan to get a job permit for Illinois). So we ended up fired because “we don’t know what to do with you” (sic, from the top HR Manager in a multinational with 60K employees in 45 countries). We had just been part of the 5-year project to implement the new management system in the company, each of us was in one of the four subteams (Operations, Finance, Logistics and Sales), it was us who had written every single White Paper the company had produced during the project… but there was “nowhere to put us” because the lawyer was a bad salesman and the people from HR didn’t know migration laws for either the US or the EU.
I used to live in Idaho, which has always had a large, thriving and permanent migrant population. Legal, for the most part. Unions and everything.
This…this new thing is totally different. I’ve always been pissed that someone who looks like they might be illegal is given a free pass regarding ID, where I, as a legal citizen, am not. (Yes I know that it varies from place to place, and this story in Seattle is neat, and is an article, not a video as the link suggests http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418746_video.htmlbut illegals do not deserve MORE rights than the citizenry.
Pardon my language, but that’s fucking idiocy. Always has been.
And I’m tired of it.
I am a liberal, and I approve of this message.
I’d get more into it, but this has been a raging debate for over a decade. This latest law, allowing local police to FINALLY DO THEIR JOBS isn’t even worth arguing about. It’s just common sense.