Increasing illegal immigration is a winning proposition to the Democrats and Republicans. Business owners get cheap labor, and labor which doesn’t directly get displaced by illegal immigrants has to compete with labor which does. Every American’s wages goes down (especially for blue collar workers (likely to belong to Democrat-supporting unions)), profits for the executives and stockholders go up. Republicans like that.
More illegal immigrants (mostly Mexican citizens) means more minorities and poor people… the more likely to vote for a more socialist agenda. Democrats like that.
“Oh, but illegal immigrants only work jobs that Americans refuse to do!” Ok, maybe that was true in the past, but there are three MILLION illegal immigrants in the country, two million of them here in California. Are they ALL picking lettuce and table grapes? Also, the second largest revenue source for the Mexican GDP (right behind petroleum production) is money sent back to Mexico by immigrants in America! Plus, try to get a job in construction in California without speaking Spanish. Not gonna happen… and that’s not low-pay work. Same with fast food (non-bilungual teenagers gotta do something else).
What to debate is… is this a conservative idea? Being anti-illegal immigration, that is. I can see that the conservatives are seen as less tolerant to minorites and the poor.
Is it liberal? Aren’t the liberals looking out for the interests of the lower-economic people of America? Defending them from the abuses of the rich who are happy to exploit cheap foreign labor? I can understand trying to help people of all nations… if the neighboring lifeboat is sinking, you can’t begrudge the people who are trying to swim to your lifeboat. But hey… your lifeboat can’t support your own people in addition to a large percentage of the other lifeboat.
How many businesses have been fined for using illegal immigrant labor? How many immigrants have been sent back to their home countries? The numbers are both small enough to be practically zero. What going to be left in this country? Rich people exploiting the poor workers with a negligible middle class? Sounds like MEXICO to me. And while I like the many Mexican people around me (good family oriented socially conservative people)… goddamn it Mexico sucks !!!
As a liberal, I say the best option is to bolster Mexico’s economy and make it a self-sufficient country. That takes a lot of hard work, policy, and money that the conservatives are unwilling to do. Of course, this is neverminding that Mexico is a corrupt and amazingly defunct state as soon as you leave Mexico City.
The reason some Republicans like the immigrants is also the reason some dislike them - they are cheap labor with almost no oversight, technically visiting on work visas, and taking their money home to their families in Mexico (or to help move their families to America).
Frankly, California relies on work visa immigrants. And some of them just stay.
The other part Republicans don’t like is that these immigrants get government services and subsidies on health care and junk, which they aren’t too big on. They’d rather they live in squalor and have no health care (because we all know what great health care and retirement plans the central valley farmers offer).
So that’s it. Best option is to make their best option to stay in Mexico. But that leaves us with a lacking labor force, so…
That’s the bill of goods you have been sold on by the Republicans… that Mexican citizens are in large part working farm labor and that we NEED them to do the labor in this country.
I call BULLSHIT! Cheap labor means the executives and stockholders get more of the profits instead of the labor. Plus, I’m not certain, but I believe illegal immigrants don’t join usually labor unions to fight against corporate greed.
Who is cutting the lawns and flipping the burgers in Minnesota? Who is gardening in Maine? Who is working in construction in Pennsylvania? How do they get the work done? American citizens, black, white, asian, hispanic? I thought they didn’t do such work?
They also don’t vote, which is another plus for the Pubbies.
I buy the “we need them for farm labor” because, well, there is a lot of farm labor, and not a lot of people willing to do it for that price. If it weren’t for the cheap visa labor, farm employees would actually have unions and voting power, things would cost more, etc etc. Do not forget that California is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world. We need an incredibly large manual labor force during harvest seasons.
If we didn’t have cheap labor from Mexico, goods would cost more, true. American citizens and legal immigrants would get paid more. More of us would have jobs. Fewer Americans would be unemployed. Fewer Americans would be on welfare. More would have health insurance. Medical costs would go down. We would have more money available to give to charities. There would be more taxable income. We could afford to give a helping hand to people in our own country and in other countries…like Mexico.
Illegal immigrant situations are exceding complicated.
For example, there was a recent outcry in California about giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. It seems straightforwards, right?
Wrong. People in America have to drive, and if they can’t get drivers’ licenses, they will drive without them. The bad part is that they can’t get insurance. This has lead to an abandon car crisis in my county. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars towing cars that have been in extremely minor accidents or recieved things like parking tickets because the owner doesn’t want to get caught without a license or insurance. In my personal experience, I’ve known people involved in accidents with illegal immigrants to simply extort the hell out of them (i.e. give me $10,000 for my “whiplash” or I sue you and you get deported). All of our insurance rates also go up due to uninsured drivers.
This whole anti-drivers’ license thing is costing everyone a hell of a lot of money for what really isn’t that great of a reason. Nothing involving illegal immigrants is as simple as it sounds in the soundbytes.
Anyway, I know a lot of illegal immigrants, and all of them are hardworking people that I welcome in to my country. People come to America to work and give a better life to their kids, not to fuck around. Frankly I have a hard time not supporting that even if all the papers arn’t in order. I’m pretty young, and most the illegal immigrants I know where brought here as kids and had no choice in this matter. America is the only country they’ve ever known, and the only country they hope to ever live in. I don’t think it’s fair to take away these peoples’ whole world because of something their parents decided.
I hope one day that Mexico will have a reasonable economy and poltical situation. Until then, illegal immigration is going to be a part of our lives. While I recognize that as much as I’d like to invite the world to America, we can’t take in every poor person on Earth, I don’t think illegal immigration is anywhere near that important of an issue and I think most illegal immigrants become a contributing part of our economy. I think that we need to look at issues involving them with a level head and figure out what is actually good for our country- not just yell a bunch of kneejerk slogans and pass “principled” but stupid laws that ultimatly end up hurting us more than anyone else.
Heres a page from the University of Berkeley: http://are.berkeley.edu/APMP/pubs/i9news/sanctions010903.html In 2002, the INS fined 320 U.S. employers for hiring illegal aliens. The fines totaled $5.3 million, though only $2.6 million was collected.
Plus I had my numbers wrong on how many illegals are already here: http://uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/summaries/undocres.htm INS estimates that the total undocumented population residing in the United States was 7.0 million in January 2000.
undocumented resident population growth in the 1990s was 350,000 annually
That makes a probable number of illegal aliens of 8.4 million! Are they all working for the 320 employers who were caught?
How many get deported every year? http://www.fairus.org/ImmigrationIssueCenters/ImmigrationIssueCenters.cfm?ID=1181&c=13 130,000 That percentage is 1.5%
Don’t buy the argument that because they come here for economic reasons and that they are hard workers means they contribute more to the economy than they take. That used to be true when socialism was much less in this country.
The Center for Immigration studies sums it up:
**Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household. ** Here in California where 55% of illegals reside, hospital emergency rooms are closing at an alarming rate. Taxes are collected from the citizens more and more by sales taxes, since more and more people aren’t making enough money to reach any sort of tax bracket. Frex, gas here costs $2.50 a gallon for regular.
Those licenses for illegals would pass, if the license were clearly marked as being “non-citizen”. The state legislators who favor illegal aliens over American citizens say this is akin to yellow stars on Jews. They neglect the fact that driver licenses are the de facto proof of citizenship and national ID card. Are we supposed to take our passports to vote if illegal aliens get driver licenses?
Democrats would be able to gain power if they would stand up to big business who want to exploit foreign workers. Why aren’t their buddies in the Unions fighting for American workers? Or at least try to get aliens into their membership? Their membership would swell…
You’re comparing the annual number of deportees with the total number of illegals to get that figure. That’s not really kosher IMHO. If you compare the number of annual deportees to the number of annual illegal immigrants (350,000 according to your cite) it’s a hell of a lot larger than 1.5%.
I’d be careful with FAIR and CIS statistics anyway, they’re not exactly impartial sources.
You do know that there are millions of aliens riding around our roads right now with driver’s licenses in their pockets, right? And that it has been this way since the beginning of licenseing? And that until about a year ago nobody has said a word about all the voter fraud and terrorism and whatever they might do with these objects? And that, in fact, it’s never been a problem? Legal immigrants have always been able to get driver’s licenses with no special marking or designations on them. If all hell was about to break loose because non-citizens have driver’s licences, it would have happened a long time ago. Anyone that accepts driver’s license as proof of citizen is an idiot, considering that citizenship is not and has never been a requirement for them. However, nobody does that. Every job I’ve ever applied to wanted either a passport or a driver’s license and a secondary proof (such as a birth certificate or green card) as proof of eligability to work.
As for the emergency rooms, perhaps if people had access to a more appropriate form of health care, they wouldn’t be flooded. Emergency rooms arn’t exactly the funnest way to spend a day waiting for the doc to look at your flu, after all. Just a thought.
