First off, not a Republican, I’m a Libertarian. Second, how is supporting allowing people to move and settle as they wish inhuman? Is there any doubt that permitting them to move to where they wish and pursue jobs on equal footing will raise their standing of living? You’re right, they would be better off with no job at all.
There are a lot of Russians at the university where I work. They all work minimum wage jobs, some are here to stay, others may just be here on student visas. I don’t see too many south american or mexican immigrants, illegal or otherwise up here. But did see quite a few in CA and TX.
I’ve not had enough experience with either to expound on all of the social issue, but just speaking on casual observation, the russian students/immigrants seem to make more of an effort to fit in and become quickly educated.
I’ve never, in my 8 years at the univ seen a Russian student who hadn’t, within only a few months obtained a good reasonably understandable command of the english language. This allows them to get easier, higher paying jobs such as work study jobs, clerking, waitressing, that sort of thing, pretty quickly upon getting settled in here.
And it makes it MUCH less frustrating for Americans who try to communicate with them. If a person is going to hire someone, it’s my guess that they’re going to make it as efficient as possible, and struggling to make your needs known with every sentence seems as if it would be too much of an obstacle, especially if you weren’t some huge mega-corporation, but merely a single family hiring a part time gardener, or snow shoveler.
And like haj said, I am NOT offering an opinion good or bad on this, merely imparting observations and possible reasons.
If TJHAT’s the criteria for whether a person gets to live here, or get a decent job, then it’s not just those hiring and exploiting illegals that need to change their ways, there are many many of our fellow Americans not being treated “like human beings” at their jobs.
Oh, they’re getting the legal wage alright, but it pretty much ends there. Hmmm…wasn’t Tyson Chicken Factory the one that made the little old ladies on their assembly line work all day with no bathroom break? Or was that a UL??
I know that I’v certainly had jobs when I was young and naive where I was exploited and treated like crap. I’ll bet there are more than a few dopers that have stories of heinous bosses taking advantage of their young impresionalbe selves.
Which explains why you are so ignorant of the concept of “coersion” when it is divorced from the word “taxes”.
IMO this is the crux of the matter. If the government is deliberately not going to enforce a law because it would lead to undesirable consequences, then that law should not BE a law at all. If there are a substantial number of “illegals” that are actually necessary to the local economy, they should be made LEGAL. It’s absolutely unconscionable for the government to be saying both “we need you so we’re not going to make you leave” and “but it’s illegal for you to be here at all”. That’s simply a recipe for abuse.
ISTR that in fact there are moves afoot to make a large number of illegals legal for excatly that reason. And that it’s garnered some fairly stiff opposition from people who find the current situation quite convenient.
By the way, I’m with threemae … if someone wants to travel somewhere to get a job, and someone there wants to employ them, then they ought to be allowed to get on with it in peace. And I’m in no way a right-winger (especially by American standards!)
I think you are onto something here. Do you see where this line of reasoning takes you? Sounds like the foundations of our middle class lifestyles are a bit shaky.
The I-9 may be a dandy form, but as it stands now employers are not responsible for becoming forensic document experts - if a document is valid on its face, the employer is required to accept it. And an employer who selectively verifies documents presented for I-9 purposes risks being accused of employment discrimination based on foreign appearance.
Last year, my former employer did a comprehensive I-9 audit of an employer with tens of thousands of U.S. employees. I think I audited a couple thousand I-9s for that audit alone; the vast majority had at least one technical error in their completion, and most of those had several errors each. This was a Fortune 500 company which is very compliance-oriented, and they would have been on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in fines if they’d been audited.
Not really. The reason that I support this so much is because it can bring these people out in the open and give them a voice without fear of having the INS called on them by their former employer. Beleive me, Mexicans have no problem getting into the country as it is right now, but if somebody commits unethical business practices like not paying promised wages, then the balance of power lies with the employer exploiting the immigrant’s situation. There’s nothing un-Libertarian about believeing that people should be held liable for the contracts they make.
Frankly, it’s just stupid to assume that becuase I’m a Libertarian that I don’t care about people. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people are sitting around heming ang hawing about the motivations of the right when we have a chance to move forward with what we both perceive to be needed reforms.
Complete, absolute agreement.
Jobs I Won’t Do
- Scrub Toilets
- Mow the Lawn
- Wipe my Ass.
You can imagine how Pedro, Teresa and Jose fight to not have to do #3.
The notion that illegal immigration is good for the economy as a whole has been mentioned several times in this thread, but it just isn’t so. The public services consumed by illegal immigrants and their families - even in their current status of reduced eligibility for such benefits- far outweigh the wealth they create and the taxes they pay, as determined by study after study .
Illegal immigration is good for illegal immigrants and great for employers of unskilled labor, but bad for everyone else, especially unskilled natives. It’s bad for the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, America is ruled by a corporatocracy that answers only to itself and serves its own interests. The multicultural left doesn’t help matters either - somehow a guy who voluntarily jumps the Rio Grande so he can make a few bucks mowing lawns is grouped in the same “disadvantaged minority” bin, with all its entitlements, as descendants of slaves, who obviously had no choice about their status.
Libertarians who are pro-open borders ought to consider that illegal immigration is essentially government-subsidized cheap labor. You can hire landscapers for $8 an hour, but you more than make up the difference in increased taxes because the government has to pay for their and their families’ medical care, police and fire, education, and incarceration. Personally, if I am going to be forced to subsidize a population of unskilled workers (and I do not necessarily oppose such things) I have the right to decide that those workers ought to be American, not foreign.
Among the icky jobs that Americans won’t do: cowboy.
That category was added to the list of occupations that were eligible for importing labor a couple of years ago because the ranchers claimed (probably correctly) that they could not find help.
And for every biased study produced by a single issue “think-tank” against immigration, I can produce even more studies from unbiased sources that say that even brand new-immigrants have a neutral economic impact at worst and an overall positive impact on the economy.
See:
http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/pas/tpa-019es.html
And:
http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/uscir/binational/ex-summary.pdf
Among other things we learn that:
-Immigrants, legal or illegal, are actually less likely to be on “Welfare”
-Immigrants tend to be much younger than native populations
-Immigrants have a number of positive effects on our economy
Again, considering that we’re facing a looming demographic crisis in regards to retiring baby boomers such that we might have only two workers supporting an entire retiree, it makes sense to me that we might want to take on what Mexico has too much of: young people.
More sober economic analysis of the effects of Mexican immigration just don’t bear out the wild claims of groups created by people with their decision already in-mind.
If your location is correct (Alaska), that’s part of the explanation. Latin american migrant workers will have great difficulty migrating up to you, where Russians will find it much easier. I’d guess you have more Eastern Russians (or whatever state is in the east now) than Muscovites or Georgians or Ukranians.
Second, you talk of Russian students. Most Russians are bilingual; it is almost a lock that any Russian reaching university level has studied at least one other language. From my experience, learning a third language is easier than a second. The Russian immigrants (and to all from the area who are not Russian, I apologize; when I say Russian, I mean former Soviet) I encounter tend to have a higher education level than the Latin American immigrants, even though they end up doing the same jobs sometimes.
Yes, that’s all true. And yes, most of the Russians I’ve dealt with were students. Though I have some experience having lived on the Kenai, with Russian orthodox, although, they’re Americans, so though they are their own community for the most part, that probably doesn’t count.
I spent 9 months in Texas, and met many hispanic speaking people there, though since I don’t speak spanish, I have no way of knowing their immigration status or even their proper nationality.
The only thing that stood out to me, was the difference in language. If I were to decide I wanted to move to France, I’d certainly start learning the language, and would, I hope, be able to make myself reasonably understood without too much delay. From my short experience in the states, it doesn’t seem as if “our” immigrants, illegal or otherwise, make that effort.
And where in the areas in which I worked in Texas (Dallas, Waco…), and the areas in which my mom lived in CA, there were all sorts of free ESL classes to teach english.
I think it has more to do with economic level and level of education. Generally speaking, the Russian immigrants are more educated and have a higher economic standing than the Latin American immigrants.
You, too, are of a higher economic and educational level than the Latin American immigrants. You would give much greater thought about a move to France, versus moving simply because “anything must be better than this!”
Lastly, coupled with lower education, is a belief among many illegals that signing up for anything puts them “in the system” and INS will be on them like brown on rice. The ‘mules’, facilitators of illegal immigrants, perpetuate the stories (I can’t vouch for how true they are - for all I know, INS does wait outside of ESL classes and deport all illegals), as keeping the illegals in country and paying is in the mules best interest.
It’s a complicated situation. I’m not siding with any side, and no one is coming up with solutions fair to all involved. I certainly have no answers.
This report says illegal immigrants cost each native-headed California household $1,178 a year back in 1997. Of course, it came from that hotbed of partisan rhetoric ** the National Academy of Sciences**, so I guess you can dismiss that one, too.
From your first cite, “Because low-skilled immigrants earn lower-than-average incomes, they and their households do tend to pay less in taxes and to use means-tested programs more frequently than do American households on average.”
Of course - but the positive doesn’t outweigh the negative.
Are you talking about the phony Social Security crisis that Bush and his pals are peddling? According to the CBO, the Social Security trust fund won’t run out until 2052, and even then it’ll be able to cover 81% of promised benefits in a pay-as-you-go mode. The trust fund could be extended until 2100 by repealing one quarter of the Bush tax cuts. Social Security doesn’t even have to start drawing from the Trust Fund until 2018.
Oh, that makes perfect sense, you’re right, having grown up “in the system” so to speak, it wouldn’t even occur to me to worry about where my name got put down.
And what you said about having been already educated enough to have planned something like that out, you’re right, that’s a good point too. I wish I knew the answer too. It’s frustrating on both ends. On one side, you are frustrated with the abuses on the welfare and social services end of things, on the other, these ARE human beings and like…(dang, sorry, forgot which poster it was) said, if they want to pack up and try for a better life, why shouldn’t they have that chance?
Shit sorry! I created the OP and then never came back (bad timing and all that).
Just for the record I wasn’t slagging off America or Americans, just the Bush creature. I don’t think there is a single country in the “west” that hasn’t gained from immigrants who are willing to do jobs that the locals won’t.
NZ had a large (encouraged) influx from the Pacific in the 60’s. Aussie recieved many Greeks and Italians. Britain had Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Carribbean Islanders.
My OP was not about how or why such waves of immigration happen, or how they are plainly benficial to all involved, but about how there is only one person who would use the language he did.
For someone to stand up and loudly proclaim “there are jobs Americans wont do” in 2004, when we are all (supposedly) more attentive to the feelings of others (PC?)… to have the “leader of the free world :D” talk about people who are already there in his country, in such a dismissive way, bothered me. Does the man not have the brains to realise that he ended up sounding like a bigoted wanker?
What was he trying to do?
a) remind newcomers to the US that they just ain’t worth that much?
b) let the general population know that newcomers just aint worth that much…but they will clean your loo?
c) Show himself up as an arrogant waste of space?
He doesn’t even have the brains to repeat a speech written FOR him correctly, or pronounce something the same way, or even the correct way three tiems in the same speech. So yeah, he’s pretty brainless.
I only voted for the buffoon because I trusted and believed the other one’s lies less, refused to relinquish ANWR to his promises to close it down forever, and believe that bush’s “handlers” will make sure he’s not too much of a screw up while they continue the admin with him as a mere figurehead.