I don’t know why it’s such an “I can’t figure out how I feel” issue with me. I’ve gone over a zillion times:
POINT: They’re here because they’re fleeing poverty and or opression and wanting to make a better life for themselves and their children. Most of them are hard working and honest and productive citizens. Dash gum dang it, America is a country of immigrants and their children, open the borders (within reason- even my furthest left point wants some sensible restrictions).
COUNTER-POINT: They detract from the economy perhaps as much as they add to it by receiving benefits they have not paid into, they are most definitely not all honest (any more than Americans), I’ll admit to being irked at people who cannot speak English and will never advance outside of a barrio or other ethnic ghetto, they generally have few or no skills, they take jobs away from the people in American society who can least afford to lose their jobs, etc…
POINT: Some companies would have to fold if it weren’t for illegal immigrants.
COUNTERPOINT: Those companies are breaking the law and should fold.
POINT: They only take jobs Americans won’t take.
COUNTERPOINT: Really? Well who did these jobs before illegal immigrants?
And on and on and on, and I never reach a stand on one side or the other. If I were to be made IMMIGRATION TSAR tomorrow with full power to open every border we have and toss out free T-shirts and coupons for free apple pie or close down every border we have and “no questions asked” for those apprehended, I don’t know which way I’d jump, and it irks me because I usually have fairly strong political opinions. (I most certainly believe all aliens who are law abiding other than for their immigration status should be treated humanely, of course, but at the same time I also have an "I’m sorry things are bad in their country… but we’ve got our own problems, and if it were just her and the three kids that’d be a no-brainer but it’s her and the three kids and 300,000 more just like her poised on the border and wanting to come next month.)
Is anybody else as equivocal? Or if you were until recently what changed your mind and which way did you go?
I’m having trouble resolving the conflict between my “fair/right/moral” compass and my “real world” compass.
In an ideal world, if I were “Immigration Czar” I would say, “OK, all you illegals. You have 6 months from today to go back across the border and come back in legally. We promise that if you fill out the paperwork and have a clean record we’ll let you back in and you can go back to your job. After 6 months you will be arrested and prosecuted for being here illegally.”
Obviously, in the “real world” this would never work, because of the political, economic and other disasters that would result.
And of course it goes without saying that all posts should examine the dichotomy to the tune of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s AMERICA:
Let people come to America!
Don’t be so dumb about America!
They want to work hard in America!
Then they can get a green-card for Ame-REEK-ca!
I know a great Chinese national named Chang!
I know three illegal Chinese kids in a- street gang!
Chang opened a laundry and did well!
The street gangs made the riverside market a real hell!
Millions would flee to America!
They wanna be just like me in America!
But with every Tomas, Raj and Lu Chi in America-
they’d soon own the keys to Amer-REEK-ca!
My illegal, Sofia’s, a great maid!
How much does she cost us in- state aid?
She works her fingers to… the bone!
But she sends all she makes to folks back home…
Foreigners who pick, sew and scrub love America!
Foreign thugs who sell drugs love America!
All our ancestors were once new to America!
But that was in 1802 in Amer-reek-ca!
COUNTERPOINT: Rampant and poorly planned population growth, especially in the water poor Southwest, with all its attendent environmental impacts. Population growth in the U.S. today is mostly due to high immigration levels.
POINT: I’m still trying to think of the “pro” point for this one.
Other than that, I’m about as equivocal as the OP.
Last night a few of us met at my professor’s house for our last honors meeting. We ended up sitting out on her back porch talking about the issues of the day, this being one of them. For the most part, we agreed. It’s not the typical wedge issue that would fit into the gay marriage/affirmative action/death penalty mold, because of the reasons that you outline. My prof thinks that no one will act on this because there’s no way to unify either base.
I’m really torn on this one too. My boyfriend (a lefty liberal) has been hassling my libertarian-leaning self about what I think about this. I’m just not anarchical enough to throw open the borders to any immigrant without question. He’s torn because his dad is a GM retiree, and he sees this labor as driving down wages… (an opinion that is fodder for another thread in another forum).
So the answer to you OP, is yes.
That’s another thing that keeps coming to mind. Alabama has more illegals than you might think while there are counties in Georgia where at certain times of year illegal aliens (Hispanics and Haitians mainly) become the second largest ethnic group (after whites or blacks, whichever is the majority in the county). I lived in a working class apartment complex in Milledgeville, GA (a town of about 20,000 that most people have never heard of) where the vast majority of my neighbors were non English speakers and, I would guess, illegals. (The apartments were rented usually by the owners of the large farms or the trailer factories where they worked.) But even so, our problems are nothing like Texas or Arizona or New Mexico or California would have as border states, and as much as I like to think of illegal aliens coming here with a “we are free leetle one, and I will make you an American preen-sess” RAGTIME like musical scene, most of them are people who were starving in Mexico (or wherever they started), will in all likely not do much better here (at least at first) and who if they remain here five years will most likely be living in a Spanish speaking lower class neighborhood and still have no skills to live much above subsistence and with kids who are being schooled by the state with money from state income taxes paid by other people- it’s not a romantic scenario. And neither is sending them back to their own countries to starve and die of diseases they can’t afford to treat even if there were sufficient healthcare, etc…
I agree with all your points and I can’t decide either.
I’d like to see conditions in Mexico improved, so that their citizens wouldn’t want to leave, or so that US citizens might want to live there. Make Mexico better.
But for all I know, the US is already sending them gazillions of dollars, and their problems are just too big to see major improvement in our lifetimes.
When and why did European and Asian immigration slow down? I’ve read that Irish immigration after the potato famine stopped because so many of them left that conditions improved for the ones left behind – they could demand higher wages, there was more available land, etc. Is that likely to happen with Mexican immigration?
The thing that makes it hard for me is that I know a lot of young kids who are illegal. For example, one of my friends came over here from Lebanon with her parents. She attended UCI and graduated with a degree in biology. She is now 23 and must either go to Grad school or find a company willing to sponsor her so she can stay in the country. If she doesn’t do that she risks being deported despite the fact that all of her immediate family members are here in the country and she doesn’t know if she can stay with any of the others scattered all over the world. She wants to be a doctor and is a bright, intelligent, funny girl. I think the country would be poorer off without her, yet because legalization takes so long (she might have to leave the country for over a decade before she gets it) she is thinking of just going permanently overseas after getting her degree. Right now I am rooming with a Croatian girl, a French boy, and a Turkish boy. All of them would love to stay here after they graduate and are applying for green cards. It doesn’t look like they will be able to get them unless they manage to find companies willing to help them. There are other, younger people who were brought into this country by older, well-meaning relatives. I read about a 16 year old boy who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish and didn’t even know he wasn’t illegal yet risks being deported back to Mexico.
Another thing, a lot of the illegals I know do send money back home, but they also spend a great deal here. If immigration laws were tightened, the companies might simply move to Mexico and then there wouldn’t even be that amount spent here. I wish there were some way we could know how much each immigrant costs us. I know it varies depending on their level of skill and education, which is why I am in favor of tiered immigration systems where we give preference to those with degrees or seeking degrees.
Another problem is that the American government has turned a blind eye to illegals for so long. The illegals I know are given Social Security numbers and pay taxes. It seems that the government is okay with them as long as they pay. I read about the government going after a company after the illegals there ripped up their W2s. It seems hypocritical that the government is “okay” with them as long as the taxes get paid.
Yes, my feelings are mixed, but some of it has to do with my last boyfriend being an illegal and a bastard, so my inclination toward a socially just solution is diluted by my desire for his punishment and suffering.
Count me in with the “But on the other hand…” group. Striving for economic freedom vs illegal. Jobs we won’t do vs permanent second-class status in a barrio. Kids growing up in a better environment vs proliferating gangs. Agriculture vs over-population. The list goes on and on. It is going to take a flashpiont occurance to polarize this topic, and that may make things very ugly very quickly.
I’m pretty firmly on one side. I had to jump through hoops and pay outrageous amounts of money for the privilege of marrying my husband. However, my cousin’s girlfriend is illegal and there is no way to make her legal outside of a sham marriage (cousin is female).
Like a good Social Democrat, I’m agin’ it, because it drives down wages for unskilled labor, however imperceptably.*
Like a good Social Democrat, on the other hand, I believe that the only real way to make the global marketplace truly fair is to allow labor to move across national boundaries with the same freedom that capital currently enjoys.
Actually, that, and a mild desire to more closely monitor who is and isn’t in the country, for security purposes, are the only two real negatives I see. A liberal immigration policy appeals to my notion of social justice. The compromise I’ve made with myself is something close to what (gasp!) Bush has proposed - basically, making it really, really easy for any immigrant to get a work permit or permanent residency/citizenship.
On the one hand, they drive down wages and benefits for everyone and take jobs away from those who are least able to find other jobs. That’s bad.
On the other hand, so many of the people who are against some sort of amnesty for them are really against cultural diversity or cultural change- they want their communities to be free of people who don’t speak English or who do whatever objectionable things they associate with illegal immigrants. They want everybody to look and act the same, and as a perpetual misfit I’ve always been against that and always will be. This is true of people who want to limit immigration in many countries, not just in the US.
I’d feel a lot better about limiting the number of immigrants if it were done in a nationality-blind, race-blind, and religion-blind way. We should let in a certain number of people every year, but not try to control the racial, religious, or ethnic makeup of the group of immigrants.
And then there’s the arbitrariness of the immigration laws. I read an article about a man who had, since immigrating illegally from Mexico as a child, married and had children in the US.
That sort of thing shouldn’t happen- it just isn’t right.
I’m definitely a member of the “muddled middle”. I understand why poor people want to leave Mexico - there is very little opportunity to improve their lot in life there. I do worry about the drain on our resources - hospitals and the like.
I really worry about a general “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. If they give an amnesty for being an illegal immigrant, can my friend get one for illegal possession of pot? Can I get one for a speeding ticket? No? Why not?
When I read about the security checkpoints at airports and such, I wonder why they bother. The fact is, any terrorist who wanted to get into the country could just come in throught Mexico with no problem. What does the Department of Homeland Security do, other than make the lives of honest, legal Americans miserable?
They make the lives of honest, legal foreign nationals miserable
I too have conflicting opinions, although I’m less conflicted on the “they take jobs away from people who can least afford it” angle. Simply put, I don’t see either side having the moral authority. If the potential illegal immigrant stays home he is not taking a job when he can least afford it. The counterpoint is that the local person is not illegal but that distinction doesn’t seem like a moral one to me, it is hard for me to justify that one person should have more oppurtunities than another simply because of location.
I’m closer to buying the argument from an economic point of view, namely if the economy cannot support the additional people than the elected officials have a duty to their electorate to keep things stable. However, I am not completely convinced that immigration is such a big economic deal.
One thing I do have to add: while the march the other day may have raised the number of discussions of the issue it certainly didn’t do anything to make me more favorable. You’re illegal aliens… demanding the rights of citizenship… okay, there must be one hell of a language barrier there, amigos, because that’s kind of flawed for a number of reasons.
1- You’re not blacks under Jim Crow laws. They were people who had civil rights and the right to full benefits of citizenship by law but whose rights were being denied, often violently. You are people who do not now, never have and, for quite good reasons, are ineligible for said rights.
2- You honestly think that marching and yelling about the fact that there are 20 million of you is a way to win friends and allies? Nobody seemed to say "you know, maybe a ‘show of force and numbers’, however unintentional, just mike backfire like a $200 Dodge?
3- What’s with the Mexican and Guatemalan and Colombian and Chinese and etc etc etc flags? I thought you wanted to be American. We have our own flag, you know. There’s a line about “renouncing all allegiances to foreign powers” or something close to it in the whole citizenship oath.
