Bullshit. If you want more immigrants, increase lawful immigration. Bring in people who demonstrate by their actions that they respect our laws, and who permit our government to check on them to make sure they’re acceptable, not those whose very first act in our country is to violate our laws.
Right. Because when I think of people who oppose the executive running interference for criminals, I think of Richard Nixon, a man whose vice-president pardoned him for his crimes against the United States. :smack:
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws and three-strikes your out laws that take discretion away from judges and law enforcement inevitably cause overcrowding of prisons, which create all sorts of unintended consequences. We’ve just now achieved bi-partisan agreement on the need to reduce the prison population, and laws like this almost certainly have the opposite effect. There are other ways to deal with the thug who murdered this poor victim.
They should have called it the Jamiel Shaw Law after the African American teen who killed by an illegal alien with convictions for violent crimes and was never deported so that anyone who opposes the law could be called racist.
You do realize his point is that it is profitable for some moneyed interests to allow illegal immigration to continue while cowing the subjects thereof with harsh penal sanctions upon the *individual *illegal immigrant, who will likely be replaced with another one anyway by the unscrupulous employer – and therefore some policy that really effectively controls it without abusing those involved will not garner support from said moneyed interests. There’s precious little being done to address the *demand *side.
(Which ISTM is sort of besides the point for the case of someone who IS a habitual street criminal, that person will ignore the threats and seek to fool whatever the safeguards and you DO want to punish them accordingly. The reservation here is that automatically swamping the corrections system with a load of mandatory hard time sentences may not be the wisest approach, be it about immigration or drugs.)
Sure. And the GOP will be leading the effort to make sure that lawful immigration from, say, Mexico can be done in less than an adult lifetime? Because right now, the barriers are such that lawful immigration is effectively impossible for a lot of folks who need or want to do it.
As for the OP, no. I generally oppose stupid, racist laws that single out groups for unequal punishment based on things unrelated to their actual crime, like national origin.
I don’t disagree with the idea of increasing lawful immigration if we as a society want more immigrants. But what I think septimus is talking about is the various employers who prefer to hire illegal immigrants because they work cheaper and can be more easily exploited. Sometimes it’s businesses who know they can get away with paying less than minimum wage and not covering them for workers comp and unemployment or contributing to Social Security as they would have do for who someone who is here legally. Sometimes it’s individuals who know who they can pay less to an illegal immigrant hired off the street to mow their lawn than a legit business with all those expenses would charge. You want to stop illegal immigration? Start putting the people who hire them in jail for long enough that the jobs dry up and they’ll stop coming. But that will never happen.
First off, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm these days for building private prisons out among the investor crowd. It turned out there’s not a lot of profit to be made in for-profit prisons. Most investors are looking for other better opportunities.
Second, even if you find willing investors, you still have to pay them. Which means if you want to build prisons you have to raise taxes. And how much enthusiasm do you think there is for that?
No, I feel that if this law gets enacted and a large population gets dumped on the penal system, the burden will fall on the prisons that already exist.
There are already some fairly robust penalties for reentry after deportation, and the existing legislative framework already distinguishes between simple deportation and deportation for such reasons as having been convicted of a violent felony. IMHO the proposal is a colossal piece of legislative masturbation.
Bullshit? What in the comment you quoted is incorrect?
I don’t disagree that legal immigration is also good for the U.S. economy, and preferable to illegal immigration, but the sentence you quoted is correct, not “Bullshit.”
Political demagogues score points by instilling false fears of an “Other” — and you’ve fallen for it.
… And weren’t you the same one who earlier in the thread insisted that these illegal immigrants were by definition “criminal” and should thus be lumped with armed robbers, murderers and rapists?
“Criminal” is a scare word used to suppress debate. I’m reminded of another right-wing usage, though this time reversed. Forbes magazine wrote that the Federal government should stop going after tax evaders and spend its resources going after criminals instead. What’s your reaction to that, Mr. Grumman ?
Those are two very different situations. You can credibly argue that the former should be prosecuted - and they should, for violating various employee protection laws even if you’re not prosecuting them specifically for employing an illegal immigrant. But the latter is not a reasonable basis for prosecution. It fails the “reasonable person” test, because a reasonable person is not automatically going to know how much it costs to run a groundskeeping business or what hourly rate is required to sustain it. Unless you run a groundskeeping business yourself, it is outside your area of expertise.
My reaction is that it’s fucking stupid to act like I need to answer for an argument made in a magazine I don’t even read. But if they actually said that the government shouldn’t go after people committing tax evasion (as opposed to tax avoidance), they are wrong.
So … just nastiness. But unwilling or unable to answer the first more substantive comment in my post, calling you out on your false claim of “Bullshit” ?
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough about what I was talking about. I’m not talking about people who respond to an ad or a flyer offering cheaper than usual rates or who hire an actual business that itself employs illegal immigrants. I’m talking about people who go to a location where it is known that illegal immigrants congregate hoping to be hired for day labor. It might be difficult or impossible to actually prosecute them, but they absolutely know that they are hiring illegal immigrants- that’s precisely why they go to these locations to “hire a Mexican” (and that’s a direct quote from more than one of them). It may be that such locations don’t exist where you live- but they do here.
This is why I thought it relevant to probe the meaning of “criminal.” The six-year old Mexican who crosses the border with his parents is a criminal, I guess, but the man who hires his father knowing it’s illegal? Innocent until convicted by a jury of his peers?
How on earth do they plan to pay for this? These are the same people who are unhappy that money may be spent on healthcare and food for illegal immigrants and they’re passing a law that requires that we pay for healthcare and food and shelter for illegal immigrants.
Among all of its other problems, this is not a fiscally sound idea.
More important to me, than the passage of laws like this one, is the problem that it is extremely rare that politically inspired and targeted laws are passed along with the additional things required to make use of them.
Such as funding for the expansion of prisons; or the funding of the expansion of the legal system, including additional enforcement officers, to make it possible to enforce the law effectively.
And it is especially rare, that an intelligently written enabling act is passed to make it LEGAL to enforce such laws as written.
This is why laws like this become political footballs. The majority of the reporting about them, ignores the political games being played by both their adherents, and their opponents.
Many “supporters” of such laws, are only posturing in front of the public about them, in order to gain the votes of the earnest people who think the laws are needed, even though they know full well that the laws as written, either wont pass Supreme Court Challenge, or will become just another add-on charge in cases where the criminal has already been caught and convicted of crimes that will result in the same punishments anyway.
Many opponents have nasty things said about them, even though most opponents completely support the IDEA behind the proposed law, they just recognize that it’s either useless or dangerous to innocent peoples’ liberty, as proposed.
Can you provide a citation or two for this? I’m not seeing it. Why wouldn’t it be profitable to run prisons in the atmosphere of “law-and-order,” “cut regulations” Trump? No one will be complaining if the prisoners are fed gruel and housed a dozen to a 10’ x 10’ room–or if someone does, they’ll be accused of wanting to Coddle the prisoners.
It doesn’t matter if working people aren’t enthusiastic about taxes on them being raised–it’s going to happen.