I’m in the UK, but wanted to chime in because I think I have a different issue than those already raised.
I work in the field of domestic violence, in a city with a large immigrant population. My particular area has very large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, the vast majority of which are legal and generally law abiding people.
However, about once a week I get a person sent to my office (usually women) who have been brought into the country illegally for marriage, and who have been horribly, violently abused once living with their new spouse. These people usually speak no English and have no understanding of our legal systems. Some of them don’t even know they are illegal immigrants - they just trusted whichever person planned this.
The effect is this - they are too scared to call the police because they fear deportation. Their families back home won’t have them back now that they are married (often with threats of murder if they shame the family by leaving their husbands). They often believe their children will be taken from them because they are illegal (or at least, their partner’s family will remove the kids and refuse access). They are eligible to no public funds (obviously) which means they can’t go into a women’s refuge or homeless shelter. They can’t legally work (and are usually not allowed by the families) and have no money to pay for themselves. They are stuck.
So it affects me because I have to deal with these distressed and frightened people and have no solution to offer them. Frequently I have women tell me tales of rape and vicious beating, but return to their abuser at the end of the day because they have no other choices.
It’s not just hard to do legally, it’s next to impossible. One cannot just decide to emigrate to the U.S. and have any path to citizenship whatsoever. If you don’t come in via work pre-arranged and with an appropriate work visa based on specific skills or via very specific family connections, you will never ever become a citizen, and in most cases, you won’t ever even have a green card. If you are an unskilled worker you will never be able to just come here and “work your way up” to citizenship. We don’t have a legal means to do so.
Illegal immigration has affected me thusly: from 1996 - 2001, I drank watered down drinks every Tuesday night, poured by a barman who openly admitted to just about any regular that he came to the US from Ireland on a student visa in 1984 and never bothered to go home. I stopped going to the bar but had business nearby last week, and walking down the street, there was Declan, smiling and waving and asking where I’ve been for the last near-decade. Still undocumented, still working under the table at the bar, no questions asked.
Meanwhile, my friends Ruby and Mario were sent packing with their two U.S. citizen children, (so much for “anchor babies”) without access to the majority of their belongings including the cash they’d saved from Mario’s under the table job. ICE sent them to Juarez and left them there, even though they were from the south of Mexico, and left them stranded with two preschoolers and no resources to get anywhere. He was turned in by another undocumented worker (who wasn’t deported) who was angry that Mario got the job the other man wanted in the restaurant where they worked in the kitchen. It took them six weeks to get their things and get home to the Colima region, and only because Ruby’s sister was still here (made quasi-legal when she married an American) and could get their things together, get money to them and so on.
We hear from them once or twice a year now, and the lives that they’re leading now are pale shadows of what they had here, even living in a tiny apartment with their two little children on his under the table salary. Most notably, when they wrote at Christmastime, they shared that their children aren’t in school, because a flood wiped out the school in the town where they live, and so there just isn’t one. Ruby is trying to teach them at home. Whatever one might think of the fact that Ruby and Mario came here illegally, their daughters are American citizens, and deserve considerably better than that. And I and the rest of their social circle from their brief time here have to miss them and worry about them every day.
I’m in Australia. The most publicly obvious way they arrive here is by boat. My job is to find those boats, so the direct effect on me is that they keep me in a job. As far as their effect on the country goes, I’m not aware of any. The only thing I don’t like about it is that other refugees wait patiently in camps for a chance at a fresh start in a country like ours, the illegal immigrants are jumping the queue.
I’m upset by the new ordinance. The standard stereotypical response to a request for ID is “I don’t need no fuckin’ papers!” but that seems like a dangerous option now. :rolleyes: I’m pretty upset by anti-immigration laws in general. They do the work the rest of us don’t want to do and we’re all immigrants anyway, who the fuck are we to deny them from coming here?
Unrelated to the debate: With a lot of them it’s obvious. I live in central Phoenix and you see plenty of Hispanics in beat-up clothing who don’t speak English. It’s not hard to put two and two together. I have acquaintances that I met through high school that are the naturalized children of illegals and I’ve met plenty of their recently-arrived family members and they seem to fit the profile.
Of course, this profile only really applies to recently-arrived illegals from the southern border. Anything else and I wouldn’t be able to tell one person from the other. It’s worth noting, though, that the above-mentioned type of illegal that are pretty obviously spotted are abundant. I see them everywhere.
(The Dead Kennedy’s were right - some of you US citizens(and a lot of my fellow UK ones) need a “Holiday In Somalia”, or somewhere, to get a bit of perspective on what hardship is.)
I had my project car hit and destroyed by an illegal. No licence, no insurance, not even her car, and she fled the scene with two children in tow. A truck driver tackled her and hauled her back to the scene. No ticket, no nothing for her. The cops just told her to walk away. I lost my car and had a concussion. :mad:
I can no longer camp or hike in the southern part of the state. It is too dangerous. We have lost the lower 1/3 of the state to the thugs. The last time I was down there exploring, there was so much trash from illegals, it was disgusting. I’ve seen about everything out there.
I’m a solid liberal, but we have to get these criminals out of here. Come into America through the front door, and we will all welcome you with smiles and cheers. Shlep in though the backyard, and that’s when we get upset.
We don’t have enough police here to begin with. I don’t know why this is such an issue, hell you never see police anywhere. Want to drive like an idiot? Come to Arizona, they don’t patrol.
I will confess that I actually know an illegal alien [though a european, not a south/central american/hispanic.] They would love to be here legally but don’t fit into any of the right categories for it to be made easy for them. They are reasonably well educated, enough to know that if it was 100-150 years ago all they would have had to do to get here was to buy a ticket.
They happily work ‘under the table’ cleaning houses at a wage that most people would turn their noses up at being offered, and they work hard. They can go to bed at night knowing that someone isn’t going to break down their door and kill them in the middle of the night for being the wrong tribe or wrong religion, or because someone with a tiny bit of power now had a grudge against them for something random. Their kid is going to school and their only worry right now is getting the kid legal so they can go to a university and be legal.
I live with two of them. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that or anything else since talk about illegal activities seems to be a violation here.
Otherwise I’d love to start an Ask the thread. Miguel could offer a lot of insight from an actual immigrant who came here as a child and has lived most of his life as an unwelcome outsider in this country. There really is a lot people don’t know about.
How can you possibly know that these are recent arrivals who are undocumented and not just poor people?
Really, the police let her walk away from a felony? And you think that the answer to that is more onerous illegal immigration laws and not enforcing the laws already on the books for driving without a license, insurance and fleeing the scene of an accident that caused injury? Not to mention endangering children? That’s a huge leap of logic.
And when we have an actual front door for an average Latin American citizen, that would be a completely legitimate position to take. Since we don’t, your answer is no more immigration, period.
If I’m trying to have a conversation with someone who is dressed shabbily and doesn’t speak English, I may guess that the person is an undocumented immigrant. If I see some people standing around dressed shabbily speaking Spanish, I’d just assume they’re poor and are speaking Spanish because they want to. Speaking in Spanish does not mean you don’t speak English, so I’m curious to know how **Alice **obtains this information about what languages people do not speak, and furthermore, their immigration status, by looking at them in the waiting room.
Illegal immigration has affected me profoundly, since I’m not a full-blooded Native American. Which means, of course, that, like most citizens of the USA, I’m descended almost entirely from illegal immigrants.
I agree. But 1.) They’ve tried to communicate with me at my place of work, at their place of work and when my family is hiring them to do work (only one or two guys in the entire group speak English and they have to act as translators) and 2.) Only a certain group of individuals stand outside Home Depots waiting for day labor.
Honestly. It’s not hard to spot them. I know a few of them.
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. I called the PD the next day to complain about that and they told me the “Officer makes his best call”. Later when I got the insurance papers from the other side, the undocumented alien was specifically called out on the policy NOT to drive in the US at all. :smack: My insurance covered me, of course.
I live in Tucson AZ so we are on the front lines of illegal immigration. He are a few ways I’m affected daily.
Illegal immigrant in the public schools are one of the main reasons we have such a large ELL (English Language Learner) program which costs a great deal of tax dollars. So there is less money for things like band, teacher’s aids, art, librarians, etc.
It is pretty cheap for me to hire laborers to work on projects. To have my front yard de-weeded or tile installed is cheaper because of the downward pressure on wages causes by illegal immigration.
There have been many many many cases of illegal entrants being injured coming here (often in car accidents involving a van packed full of them) and they are treated for free at our local hospitals, which drives up the costs for everyone
Marijuana is plentiful and cheap
So it’s a mixed bag, but the effect is constant for me.