It’s not needed, and it’s a stupid waste of resources.
Assuming we succeeded in keeping the illegal immigrants out, we’d only screw ourselves by doing so.
And this won’t keep a single terrorist out; I doubt it’ll even inconvienence them. If it did, the Republicans would hardly support a fence; terrorism is to their political benefit.
What “legitimate uses”? What, really, is the Rio Grande good for? Isn’t it dry or mud most of the year? Can anyone use it for fishing, boating, or irrigation?
Lake Amistad, Big Bend National Park, birding, wild life refuge, irrigation
http://water.usgs.gov/nasqan/progdocs/factsheets/riogfact/engl.html
http://www.worldbirdingcenter.org/
http://www.cerc.usgs.gov/pubs/riogrande/content2.htm
http://www.awra.org/news/0603drought_watch.pdf *PDF
And of course, it’s Mexico’s Rio Bravo as well and subject to various treaties.
And would a fence interfere with any of these?
http://www.riograndeadventures.com/ a little more recreation.
Does a bear shit in the woods? Of course.
I think he meant the treaties, rather than the activities.
-Joe
We’ve all seen the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
It doesn’t say:
We want your doctors, your educated workforce, your rich folk too,
Your people come into our country on our terms alone.
If we don’t want em, they’ll sit in line for-seemingly-ever.
Poor people that don’t speak our language are icky:
Build walls to keep us safe from “them”.
Long story short, if someone wants to be here, they have the right to be here. If they want to come to this country to pursue the American way of life, they have all the right in the world to. Who are we to refuse people that want to come to our home to make life better for themselves and their families?
If your complaint is with how “they” tax the system, isn’t that an indicator that the system needs to change? If your complaint is about how they don’t speak English, shouldn’t you and your church groups volunteer to spread English literacy and work to make their children bilingual products of a rapidly improving public school system?
If your problem is that they’re brown, then you’re simply a bigot. Of course, you’ve got all the right to do/say/feel such things, but you are wrong for doing so. Such feelings run contrary to the purpose of a Liberal Democracy, something that we (supposedly) are.
Well, as a strict constructionalist, I’m confident that’s what they MEANT.
-Joe
I’m not.
And debate rages as normal!
But seriously, though. That’s speaking for the Constitution, not for something that isn’t a “living document” and isn’t supposed to change. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty is something like a mission statement, a declaration of who we are as a people and society, and what we’re like to people coming into this country or people that want to come in. In all that time, it hasn’t changed one bit. You cut out the immigration or make it less than completely open, you lose who we are as asociety. You lose our history. You take us down a path that, looking at our history as a guide, we weren’t supposed to go down.
At the end of that path could lie xenophobia, nationalism, and fear.
I prefer the path that we were founded upon.
Ermm . . . Look, you really need to take a closer look at the kind of country this was in 1789 and for a long time after.
– Benjamin Franklin. http://bc.barnard.columbia.edu/~lgordis/earlyAC/documents/observations.html
What can you say about a man for whom Swedes aren’t white enough? And compared with the other Founding Fathers, Franklin was a liberal.
Who says the sentiment on the statue isn’t supposed to change? That’s ridiculous. Don’t you think it was written that it took into accout the times in which it was writtten? A time when America was booming and the western US was just beginning to be populated? Don’t you think all that affected the thinking having to do with immigration?
Oh, come on. This is just nonsense. Any country has the right—make that, obligation—to craft their immigration policy in a way that it would most benefit them. And that will change over time. There will be times when they benefit from a very open (encouraging) policy, and times when it will behoove them to curtail immigration. And numbers alone aren’t the only way for them to tweak things. There are times we might want engineers and highly skilled workers, and times when we want less skilled workers for more menial labor.
Followiing your thinking, we would NEVER be able to change our immigration policy. So 100 years from now when we are overcrowded, we still have to let the teeming masses in. And if unenployment is 12%, so what keep 'em coming. Emma Lazarus said so.
Ah, the old slippery slope dodge…
What does a poem by The New Colossus have to do with the Founders? Or the Founding documents?
I too prefer the path of allowing a reasonable number of folks to immigrate into the US. My formula would be to allow a quota based on the racial makeup of the current legal population of the US. I think that would be a fair way of allocating the limited slots.
:dubious: We had such a system from 1924 to 1965. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
It was flatly and frankly racist legislation. Its avowed purpose was to preserve America’s character as a white and predominantly Northwest-European country. It was abolished in 1965 in recognition of this. What reason do you see to revisit that decision now?
Racial makeup?
You should have started there and saved us a lot of time and effort.
You are aware that Middle Easterners, East Asians, North Africans and other “races” are considered part of the “white race”, right?
Or do you mean skin color, when you refer to “race”?
You forgot the biggest bugaboo, Mexicans.
Yeah, but I figured our OP would consider them part of the “hispanic” race…
This is utterly repulsive.
The sentiment hasn’t changed. We want more people in this country. Even the most super-Neocon would admit to this. The methods used to get into this country are what they care about. It’s about controlling who/what comes into this country to them. I heard Charles Krauthammer on NPR a couple days ago say that if/when they seal up the border, they’d look to admit more people in through the “legal” methods. Additionally, the ones that got into this country through the border (I’d assume he’s talking about Mexican people that got in, not anyone that got in illegally) would, from that point forward, be legal US citizens.
Our position in this country is an odd and unique one. I can’t say that other countries would do the same thing in regards to illegal immigration. No other country seems to have a situation quite like ours (to my knowledge). Even though the world population is growing, people can’t just be manufactured. We need people. Every country needs people. If people want to be here no matter what, who are we to say they can’t come in?
Yes, I’m aware that if we were to suddenly get a million extra third-world people come into the country tomorrow, that means that they’re stereotypically of low education and unskilled. This means that jobs get a little harder to find for our unskilled and low educated people. To ruminate about such a situation is almost useless, for nothing like it would ever realistically happen. But if it did, it would suck for the people in our country to get better jobs/skills, but that’s why our education system should be able to tackle it. Of course, that’s all nice and hypothetical.
We’re also not an overcrowded country. We’ve got a decent amount of room left, but I don’t know if it’s concievable to say that it’s possible to suffer from overcrowding. I know there are a whole lot of people in India and that it’s a smaller country than the US. Would that be our model of an overcrowded country?
In order to have this scenario, there’d have to be an inordinant amount of people that would want to pick up everything and come here. Forgive the rambling, I’m just trying to grasp what the world would be like in this way.
It’s not necessarily a slippery slope dodge I was trying to commit. That way, taken to its extreme would lead to those things. If that’s the definition of a slippery slope scenario, then so be it. If it is, then we can take it away and rework it so it’s at least not as slippery.
Part of the immigration problem is how easy it is for illegal people to come in through Mexico if they want to and how (relatively) hard it is for people who want to get in. This is a bad thing and, if anything, should be the opposite way. I think people should be able to come into this country if they want to, but ideally, they’d have their presence known (through a border station, a website, a phone number, etc.). 100 years from now, if our system still has the same flaws it has now, the flaws that are being exploited and exposed for everyone to see and for nobody to do anything about, then we’d deserve to have 12% unemployment. As it stands now, the people in charge have the berth to get this fixed, although there is an uncercurrent of bigotry and racism that pollutes this problem, like most immigration problems (I’d think) would have.
I believe that the Founders wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with immigration. You can point to the fact that they had the wilderness to populate in our country’s early stages and how we needed people to tame it, but even now, I have a hard time thinking that most of them wouldn’t be for at least fixing the immigration to make it easier for all people to get in.
For the record, I hate the quota idea. Quotas, especially for things of this nature, never turn out good.
Would the obligation to stem immigration, in your mind magellan01, be kind of like a protective tariff on people? I’m not trying to marginalize your position, just understand it.
gotta throw that caveat in there to make sure nobody gets the war paint on