What is wrong with them wanting citizenship so that they are no longer here illegally?
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: and :smack:!
The same thing that would be wrong with my breaking into your house and then wanting you to make me a member of your family so that I’ll no longer be there illegally.
They are a threat to the American Culture and will change everything - the “culture” that is really bits and pieces of other cultures. Society will break down. The end of civilization. Crime in the streets. Rioting. Foreign allegiances. Funny languages. The wrong color. Zombies eating our brains. The end of all life on this planet.
Ya know, the usual stuff. :rolleyes:
I think the point is that the illegality itself is initially cited as the problem but when probed it is the other issues (usually pertaining to using public resources) that seem to be the actual problem.
Strangely I almost agree with you.
Frankly I’d rather we had a group of legal immigrant workers who were both eligible for public services and covered by employment law (specifically minimum wage and health and safety laws) and also paid income taxes and were a part of the communities, rather than a bunch of illegals bussed in, housed separately, exploited to the hilt and then shipped back home. The best way to avoid the problem of illegal migrant workers is for them not to have any jobs - but then we’d have to prosecute the businesses hiring them rather than the funny dark-skinned people themselves.
Which is not to say I want indiscriminate immigration, blanket amnesties and no deportation. I just want a sensible migrant worker visa system and the employers of illegals hit harder to reduce the demand. Illegal migrant workers are like drugs - we blame the suppliers but if we weren’t buying them they wouldn’t be coming into the country.
As for granting some of them citizenship - whether you agree with it in principle it might nevertheless be a pragmatic solution. We need the cheap labor and they’re already here. Let’s draft 'em and shut the door behind them.
You’re fuckin with me, right?
One of these things is not like the other.
How do you personally feel about loosening up the restrictions on coming to the country lawfully so as to accommodate the number of people already coming into the country? If the laws were changed so that we had just as many aliens coming into the country, but they were actually coming in legally, would that be OK with you?
*spell check changed OK to uppercase. I am not trying to stress the term in any way.
Missed the edit window…Upon rereading my post the underline portion sounds unnecessarily condescending. Please disregard.
I would appreciate you answering the rest of the post though.
If they were here legally on work visas, paying taxes on their earnings, and subject to the same conditions and limitations as any other immigrant, I would have no problem with that. I would not support a wholesale restructuring of the law to make them suddenly legal because they knowingly broke the law to get here in the first place.
P.S. - Thanks for the apology, though it wasn’t needed as I didn’t find the underlined comments condescending at all. They struck me as pretty much the standard type of reponse one can expect when talking with someone who has a completely different way of looking at things than they do.
But anyway, thanks again. I do appreciate it. 
I had to escape the civil war in El Salvador and be an illegal for some years in the USA. Thanks to the amnesty (and the current immigration changes proposed lately are not amnesty) of the 80’s I became a legal resident and now I’m a US Citizen, as a guy who still had to pay taxes and never filed to get a refund when I was an illegal, I have to say that you are just a certified ignorant with inhuman ideals regarding this subject.
SA,
So assuming that we have exactly the same number and type of aliens in America, only they were here on work visas, that would be acceptable. No decline in the number who didn’t speak english, didn’t have insurance, and had government welfare programs more readily available to them…that would suit you just fine?
I just want to be clear that as long as they were here legally and paying taxes that it wouldn’t matter the number (even if that number were to increase), or their ability or willingness to acclimate to our customs and language, in your view? If all that our current bunch of illegal immigrants needed to do was walk back across the border, get a work visa and then come back to the U.S. legally, that would be OK? If the price of products, whose manufacturers rely on illegal immigration for cost effective production were to go up due to the increase in pay needed to cover the taxation of these immigrants, that would be agreeable to you?
If so, I may not agree with that view but I can’t really claim hypocrisy on your part.
That is not how LP’s posts read though (which is how we got started on this). He spoke to the downfall of white, Christian culture. That sounds like a totally different kettle of fish to me.
On Preview: GIGO, I had no idea that illegal immigrant wages are still taxed. Ignorance fought…But how do illegals continue to stay under the federal radar if they are being taxed? Or does the federal government simply have more important things to worry about besides an illegal immigrant who works hard and breaks no other laws besides immigration laws?
Right, because America is privately owned, just like his house. Makes perfect sense.
I can’t believe you haven’t heard this before, but it should be pretty freaking obvious by now that restricting illegal immigration with the usual policy of “guard the borders and deport” doesn’t work.
If you have a problem with bears getting into your trash, you can deal with it two ways: 1) shoot the bears (guess what? there are always more bears!), or 2) Keep your trash out of the bears’ reach. Similarly, you can either 1) keep spending money rounding up illegals, or you can 2) start working with the other people who benefit from illegal immigration - employers.
Since 1) doesn’t work, and Republicans will never allow 2) - wonder why - illegal immigrants are here to stay - so us filthy hippie liberals will continue to work to get these people protected and educated.
This was circa 1981, it was easier to use a false number and the company still deduced federal and local taxes from your pay, never saw a penny of a return since I did not dare to file a return then, I do not think the government had or has any priority in investigating why some people do not request refunds. Now I’m a citizen but before I never had even a parking ticket, the only direct encounter with the law was after becoming a citizen, I had to serve twice on jury duty and had to take a bastard US native roommate to court to evict him from my apartment. That has remained a worse crime to me than what anything the anti immigrant people assume the current illegals are committing just by being here.
Illegal immigrants usually apply for jobs using false Social Security numbers. The IRS doesn’t bother investigating why they’re getting payroll taxes for people who don’t exist - they just investigate when they’re getting less than they should.
Plus, the IRS and USCIS don’t share information. Ever.
ETA: What GIGO said.
For the record, as a white American man, I consent to it. And my solution to the illegal immigration issue is to make it legal. Forget work visas; let everyone in except criminals and terrorists. Let them all settle here and become naturalized citizens as long as they obey the law and pay their taxes. And let them speak their own languages as much as they please, just like the Italians and the Pennsylvania Dutch and my father’s ancestors who probably showed up here speaking some weird combination of Russian and Yiddish, and my brother-in-law’s ancestors who came here speaking Chinese. They’ll all learn English within a few generations, because English is the international language anyway.
Anyone who thinks that American “white culture” is somehow in danger of dying out is hallucinating.
Edit: To answer the OP, yes, Starving Artist is bonkers. I am thinking of a thread where he mentioned that based on his own observations, it was evident that blacks were happier in the 50s.
As a white American, I consent to it too. Of course, I’m a white American female, which the founding fathers never assumed would have equal rights with men, but, hey, accident of birth, you know? In fact, accident of birth is why I consent. I was born in America though no doing of my own. I wouldn’t exist had not white immigrants from Ireland and Germany decided that they wanted to live in America, came here, forged a union, and one of their ancestors popped me out. I think I’m lucky to have been born here. I don’t claim any superiority because of something I had nothing to do with. People who were not born here, if they want to be here bad enough that they would go through the physical, financial, psychological hoops to get here as an illegal alien, more power to them!
Descendants. Sorry, that’s a pet peeve of mine. They are your ancestors. You are their descendant.
Ooops, sorry. Thanks.
Look, just because time travel hasn’t been invented yet doesn’t mean she can’t be her own grandma.
I loved my grandpa, but…ew, not like that!
Starving Artist, you’re not stupid. So how is it you can continue to refuse to understand that this is the gist of what’s wrong with your worldview? You seem to have decided that solipsism is a virtue; that anything that hasn’t happened right in front of you hasn’t happened at all. Is that, for you, the essence of conservatism? refusal to educate oneself? Insistence on drawing your own conclusions from the limited world immediately around you, without any attempt at validation? Like, for instance, observing the changing of the days and assuming, quite logically, that the sun travels around the earth? Do you really believe that you, as an individual human being, are capable of–not only understanding everything in the universe–but of understanding it all from scratch, without context?
How can that possibly make sense to you?
I’m afraid you’ve taken mhendo’s assessment, born of long-standing animosity between us, too much to heart. Of course I don’t think that the only answer to the questions that arise around here can only be found if I personally experienced/witnessed them. I read CNN, Fox and Drudge daily, I read a variety of magazines, plus, when the notion strikes me, various local and big city newspapers online. I have pretty much done this since early adulthood. I feel that I am probably good deal more well-read and tuned in to politics and the issues of the day than probably 90% of the populace, and my opinions about things can be and sometimes are formed or altered by what I learn.
I have also had a fair amount of experience over the years with people in different parts of the country and a wide variety of work experience and income levels. These experiences also have taught me much.
Now, occasionally people around here, if they are being sincere and I trust them enought to believe what they say, can alter the beliefs I’ve developed. A rather minor example but one which comes quickly to mind is the question of whether Democratic politicians should be referred to a ‘Democratic’ or ‘Democrat’. Based on my mistrust of liberal politicians and liberal politics in general, I came to hold the belief that politicians who were Democrats referred to themselves as Democratic because they were trying to subliminally portray themselves as being more democratic (in a founding fathers sense) than their opponents, that their way was the democratic way, and I said so.
This lead to the predictable accusations of dittoheadism, stupidity, ignorance, moronity and most of the other buzzwords that liberal posters around here fling at every conservative poster on this board who expresses a political opinion.
Finally, someone (it may have been tomndebb, he’s one of the posters around here who can occasionally get me to take a second look at something I believe) convinced me with persuasive evidence that ‘Democratic Party’ and ‘Democratic politician’ was indeed the correct term and had been since the party was born. I immediately acknowledged this, and I have referred to Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party in that way ever since.
The real problem isn’t that I believe my own opinion to be infallible or my own experiences to be unquestionably definitive; the problem is that most of the so-called evidence I’m presented with to the contrary is first of all presented in an insulting way, and then offers virtually nothing in the way of proof that I am wrong.
Take for example my recent criticism of the 25% STD rate among American teenagers. I pointed out that for some reason this wasn’t going on fifty years ago and stated my belief that liberal influence on society since that time was responsible.
Amid the predictable howls protesting liberal innocence came information that Manhattan had high STD rates at the beginning of the 20th century; that people had STDs in the fifties; and finally, the brilliant observation that people fuck. This was all met with great approval and accepted as proof that I was as full of shit as everyone said and high-fives abounded. It was further considered to be evidence of my intractibility because this information did not cause me to change my mind. (This is quite typical around here, anyway. Time after time I’ve seen a conservative poster’s intelligence or stupidity measured by his willingness or unwillingness to change his mind and come around to the liberal POV. :rolleyes: But I digress.)
The problem was, none of that meant anything with regard to what I said. The fact that people fuck proved nothing. High STD rates in Manhattan fifty years before proved nothing. And the fact that STDs existed in the fifties proved nothing. The fact remains that STD rates have gone through the roof over the last fifty years, and someone is going to have to come up with some pretty persuasive proof to convince me that it hasn’t been the result of liberal permissiveness which has come to pervade society since that time.
So, what is the result of all this? I’m accused of provincialism, of being a stodgy old asshole who doesn’t want people to fuck (I would elaborate on how wrong that is but I have relatives who read this board :p), and that I’m someone who’s mind is made up and doesn’t want to be bothered with ‘facts’.
Hopefully you can see that the problem wasn’t that I turned a blind eye to the facts, but that the so-called facts presented didn’t prove anything.
Then there are the cases where the alleged proof I encounter has lots of room for error. Take the question of crime today as opposed to fifty years ago. I say it’s worse and place the blame on liberal permissiveness which has led to drug problems and their concomitant criminality; liberal abhorrence for condemning rap music and movies that glamorize gangs and the thug life; and liberal judiciaries and corrections systems that can’t seem to turn criminals out on the streets quickly enough. Along with the predictable insults, I get presented with facts and statistics that say the crime rate is down compared with some point in the past. So, bearing in mind that while figures don’t lie, liars still figure and that things can be and often are presented in such a way as to make them appear different than they really are. (Perhaps you remember Democrats and liberals wailing about a potential incoming administration’s proposed budget cuts which turned out to be really just a reduction in the amount benefits were going up.) Maybe someone is saying crime is down since the eighties, but that doesn’t take into account that it could still be higher than it was before the eighties; maybe things counted in the crime statistics have changed; maybe the study that came up with the statistics was biased and had an agenda which influenced the results they came up with; etc., etc.
Then we have the numerous cases where people misunderstand or misrepresent what I said, or extrapolate from it things that are erroneous, and then become incensed when I either don’t respond to the facts they present to counter their own misconceptions, or find fault with the facts themselves. I get really tired of having to deal with things around here that I’m alleged to say or think that are not so.
Now these are just a few of the ways in which the so-called facts around here have failed to persuade me to change my mind and resulted in my being called stupid, blind, ignorant, refusing to acknowledge reality, etc., and while I really don’t expect much good to come of it, your post seemed sincere so I thought I’d take the time to respond in kind.