The existence of entitlements makes the question important.
Why?
I hope that doesn’t sound too confrontational . . I am genuinely interested in your reply.
mc
Whether they would have been welcomed is irrelevant. The question is whether they would have been permitted to enter. Until the 1880s there were no restrictions on Chinese immigration. There were no restrictions on Indian immigration until 1965.
Whether immigrants (legal or not) are eligible for particular entitlements is a separate issue from whether they are eligible to enter the country at all.
Chinese and Indians, landing on the Pacific Coast? The government would probably have insisted they learn to speak Spanish.
Because if we as a society are required to pay through taxes to fund entitlements, it’s reasonable for those that are paying to have a say (through their elected representatives) in who should be recipients of those funds. We don’t provide assistance to the world in the same way we provide assistance to those within the country.
I wanted to elaborate further on this - Both of these are important, though they can be addressed either together or separately. Focusing on the first does not mean pretending the second doesn’t exist. Shutting off the gas during a house fire first doesn’t mean pretending that the means to ultimately extinguish the fire don’t exist.
Is this where we quote Calhoun’s “Slavery as a Positive Good”?
What entitlements are you talking about?
In my opinion. Anyone who wants to come here should be allowed.
As for what to do with those who are currently here “without permission” . . . that should be decided on a case by case basis. Due process and all, and that is something that is grossly inadequate in our current system.
As for the OP’s orig question. I think that the Supreme Court said it best in Arizona vs. United States;
mc
What we do have right now (if we continue the analogy) are people saying “That damn gas should never have got out of its pipe, and because of that I’m not going to dignify its presence by responding to it.”
All of them. It doesn’t really matter the specific one - the concept that there is a cost therefore there is scrutiny holds for any.
I tend to agree. I think our immigration policy should be such that many many more people are permitted entry. I also think as long as we have the current system it should be enforced.
Who says that? What I see more often is that we should stop the flow first, then deal with the existing population second - in that order.
The reason I ask about entitlements is because undocumented aliens are not eligible for most federally funded programs, and the ones they are eligible for (school meal programs, WIC, and emergency Medicaid) have already been voted on and directly include them. Not to mention that the undocumented account for less than 3% of those budgets, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
mc
Bone upon rereading your posts you may have been talking about “legal” immigrants with regards to entitlements. so I still don’t understand your point. Are you saying that under-educated, unskilled persons should be excluded from immigration because they are more likely to end up on welfare?
My knee jerk reaction to this is “that’s ridiculous.” As I’ve mentioned before; the vast majority of my family came here with little or no education, and I imagine that many others could say the same about their families.
And it doesn’t seem to be a problem anyway. Except for Hispanics; immigrants have a higher academic achievement than their native counterparts.
mc
The point goes back to the question that spawned this line of discussion. The question was why was it important who should be allowed in the country, to which I responded saying entitlements make the question important. Essentially, it’s important because those paying the bill have a say in how the money should be used.
If there is to be a limit at all, then we should have a selection criteria that promotes those that have the highest potential contribution to the country by whatever metric that is determined.
As for the comparison in academic achievement - it’s not surprising since those that immigrate in the current environment self select for higher achievers. It’s not indicative of how things may play out if policy became more open.
Don’t get me wrong, I would be in favor of more liberalized immigration - the more the merrier as long as everyone follows the rules as established. But rules that exist should be enforced.
It’s actually the law that you can’t come here if you’re likely to become a public charge.
I would personally rather have open borders than a system that turns the law abiding into suckers and rewards those who jump the line. If you won’t enforce the line, get rid of the line. Let’s have 50 million Asians and 25 million Africans come here. No fair that Latinos get a special advantage from sharing a land border with us. Let’s see how much Latino voters support liberal immigration policies when they find themselves swamped by immigrants that don’t speak their language and diminish their political power.
I agree. But didn’t we already say? The entitlement programs didn’t just appear out of thin air. The were enacted by legislators, both national and local. And those legislators were elected by the people. And these programs have clear, defined terms about who is and is not eligible.
Is there some way to tell which immigrants will end up on welfare and which wont?
I have absolutely no clue how anyone would be able to determine potential contribution. Does a doctor contribute more than a field hand? In a one-on-one comparison, maybe. But we need more field hands than we do doctors, so how does that factor in?
Do you have reason to believe that they are not? If so, how do we remedy that?
I dont mean to pick on just you Bone, others have brought up similar arguments you just happened to be the one I chose to answer to.
mc
Or, we could not do that, and pretend that we did. Or better still, lets go with that we figured out that promoting tensions and conflict between groups of people is not a very good idea, and we didn’t even think of it seriously. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with. The proposition is that who is allowed in the country is an important question - do you disagree with that? And yes, entitlement programs were enacted by legislators, etc. But the question and answer isn’t static.
As for which immigrants will be more productive than others - I don’t think there is a surefire way to make that determination. There are probably factors that contribute to the answer and those can be evaluated, much like a job interview. The details aren’t critical to the determination whether the principle of filtering based on some criteria should exist.
Do you have reason to believe they are? I would say the existence of a great number of people not authorized to be in the country is evidence that the laws and rules governing entry and authorization are not being enforced optimally.
The solution is to change the rules to make them more permissive, or enforce them more stringently to deter continued violations.
I’d agree. The problem is that you have to do the former first, then you can do the latter, and many who are concerned about immigration want to do that latter first, and the former never.
I’ve known undocumented immigrants. They didn’t just traipse over the border. They walked for days through deserts. They climbed mountains. If they were female, they were probably raped and were risking being sold into sex slavery. If they were male, they watched their female family members and companions get raped and possibly sold into sex slavery.
Then they get to the border wall, and we think that if we make it tall enough, it’ll keep them from crossing it.
These are determined people, trying desperately to escape violence and poverty. What is behind them is misery and death. That’s motivation for you. (There’s a motivational poster in there somewhere; Escaped from central american drug gangs, paid thousands of dollars to coyotes, walked across the desert for a week, watched his sister get raped and sold into sex slavery, climbed over the border wall, evaded border patrol agents: Now mows your lawn.)
If we think that better border security is going to prevent people from coming here illegally, then we probably also think that going through airport security theater keeps weapons off of planes. It is simply not going to happen.
There are three ways that we can actually prevent illegal immigration.
The first is to widen the doors to let more people in. The reason that people are going around the doors is because we only have it open the tiniest crack. If people immigrating here come through controlled border crossings, then we get a chance to tell if there is a reason they shouldn’t be here, we can make sure they aren’t smuggling, we can ensure that no one is being sold into slavery, and we can prevent quite a bit of the misery and deaths of immigrants who make their way through other, less official crossings.
The second is to increase the standard of living in the countries these people are coming from. If South and Central America were full of really nice places to live, and less full of poverty, violence, and drug cartels, then fewer people would be clambering at our gates, seeking to escape the dangerous environment that they and their families are living in.
The third is to mess up our own country enough that no one wants to come here.
I personally rank the propositions in that order of preference. Others have different priorities.
Open borders would promote tensions between groups of people? Perhaps, but at least open borders is fair. What we have right now is basically an open land border but restricted sea borders. Only the most educated and skilled Asians and Africans can come here, but Latinos of any economic and educational status can come here. There’s nothing about that that is fair and it does actually create a lot of resentment.
How unfair is geography!