The last immigration reform bill was a path to citizenship for illegals here today… and promises of more enforcement, along with any illegals coming here after 2012 or so being SOL, which we all know is a lie. Why should we support a bill that’s a “compromise” in that it only does one thing in reality(amnesty) while making the same false promises about enforcement that we’ve been hearing for 40 years?
Come up with a real policy. If Democrats don’t actually want enforcement, and business friendly Republicans don’t actually want enforcement, then have the balls to pass an amnesty bill + making it easier to enter this country legally and stand by your principles.
Almost everyone is a patient, so everyone who is ever prescribed pain medication will go into this database. It’s pretty much as universal as e-verify, and every article I’ve read on it says that doctors are not happy with the idea at all, on privacy and compliance concerns.
One thing I think we can agree on is what the dairy farmer McMahon implies. It’s the Democrats who are looking for solution; the GOP just seizes on foreign labor as another way to inflame their base with hatred and fear. If adaher wants to push for rational policy …
… he needs to denounce the Pavlov reflex that unites him to the Party of hypocrites and demagogues.
Your Boy Trump is the one who is fooling the rubes. I don’t agree that getting rid of “nearly all unauthorized immigrants” will solve every problem we have. Oh, “Make America Great Again”–isn’t that your slogan? (At one time, you had the intelligence to express disdain at The Donald; no more.)
Obama doesn’t want to deport immigrants, and he’s been trying to stop. The law is the law though. However, even at the levels Obama and Bush deported, more can still be done. That is, if we’re serious about the laws we’ve duly passed in our democratic system.
My issue is that on this particular policy, we have rule of men, not rule of law. The law says one thing, the men in charge do the opposite.
"But I’m still stuck on the idea that we can’t find workers to do these jobs. As one of the farmers interviewed in the article states, he’s been paying the dairy workers in his employ an average of** $2K per month plus housing on the farm with all utilities paid for. **(Also meals in some cases.) Particularly in a tough economy, we can’t find citizens to take that deal? I worked on family farms in the summer growing up doing exactly that sort of work from time to time. It’s hard, no doubt about it. But it’s an honest job, and a lot better than starving. Perhaps the farmers need to raise their milk prices slightly and bump up the wages a bit? I don’t know, but it really seems like this could all be accomplished without being “forced” to hire illegal aliens.
I’m less concerned about illegal immigrants than I am concerned about a culture where able bodied people refuse to work. Nobody is advocating that people in their 50s and 60s climb roofs. When there is a 50% Black teenage unemployment rate, I question why they aren’t utilized to fill these labor needs.
And apparently, we prefer stagnant wages. Economics 101: wages cannot go up unless labor supply gets tight. Which will never happen if we just import enough workers to keep wages down every time they threaten to rise.
The illegal immigrants being brought in to work on upstate dairy farms aren’t commuting from Mexico, or even from New York City. They are living in upstate New York, on or very near the farms.
You are asking teenagers to move from urban New York City to rural upstate New York. I would submit that’s probably a bigger cultural change than moving from rural Mexico.
There are only a handful of places (outside of the federal government and federal contractors) where E-verify is legally mandated for most or all businesses, and even most of those jurisdictions have weak enforcement efforts.
In Mississippi, e.g., the state requires that most employers use e-verify for new hires (but not existing workers). However, no one state agency has the lead role in enforcement, and funding for such enforcement is basically non-existent. The Attorney General’s office, for example, says they will investigate any complaints received, but they only rarely receive any and they don’t go seeking out companies to audit. Moreover, the law imposes no criminal penalties for non-compliance on employers.
That’s what I’ve been bitching about. Why don’t we do environmental and safety regulations that way? They put these laws on the books to make it look like they are doing something, then just pretend they aren’t even there.
As I said, it’s not a question of whether we can get rid of illegal immigration, it’s about whether we want to. And we’re not exactly having an honest national discussion on the issue.
From page 20: “While the majority of SNAP households contained children, elderly individuals, or individuals with disabilities, in fiscal year 2014, **24 percent (5.5 million households) consisted solely of one or more non-elderly adults without disabilities with no children **(Table 3.2).”