A lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric seems to come from the right, but I find it kind of ironic regarding immigrants considering:
-Immigrants, due to limitations from not being citizens, tend to start their own businesses. Rather than swindle banks/taxpayers for bad business investments, they pool money from their families to start up businesses.
-Their businessess operate within communities where people actively care about the quality of the business. You’re not going to get ripped off on that landscaping job, because every one of his peers is gonna find out and he’ll be out of a job.
-Immigrants pay into taxes but they cannot collect from them because whatever SSN they use is not valid. So essentially, they are paying into the system but not actually mooching off of it.
-Immigrants (Hispanic immigrants) tend to be culturally self-reliant. Even a lot of families that are citizens and would qualify for government aid often pass it up because to receive it is an embarassment. They rarely, if ever, panhandle. Their mindset often parallels the ‘bootstraps!’ mindset of conservatives; if they don’t have a job, they feel they are not trying hard enough.
-Immigrants are willing to work harder for less money. In workplaces they tend to complain much less about working conditions than their resident counterparts (possibly out of fear of being discovered to be a noncitizen).
In short, you have a demographic of people who have a strong ethic of working hard, complain little, are willing to put a lot into the system and ask for very little out of it. They can also be pretty socially conservative themselves (Catholic). You would think conservatives would be more friendly to this demographic, since they and their children are one of the fastest growing demographics in the US. But they dont; why?
Conservatives do love immigrants, it is illegal immigrants that we do not like. Part of conservatism is respect for law and order. Immigrants who disregard our laws and are like any other lawbreakers. They should be deported. Universal application of existing laws regardless of ethnicity should be something all parties agree on.
Why are you mixing illegal immigrants with immigration?
As for conservatives, you will find a variety of attitudes:
The libertarians that would happily let in cheap workers, while killing the minimum wage and finishing off the private sector unions.
The Pat Buchanan types who will accept English speaking Christian (especially Catholic for Pat) immigrants, preferable from Western Europe who have a shared culture with the US.
The isolationist types who have seen their pure white town (except for the blacks that are kept in a specific area “purely by choice”) turn brown over the years, with workers who don’t speak their language.
The lower class conservatives who feel that their job prospects have been hurt by the addition of people willing to do the same work for less, often for cash under the table.
The Law-and-Order Conservatives who don’t like people benefitting from people doing things illegally.
Yes, screaming about illegal immigrants streaming over the border is a rallying cry. Add in some drugs, gangs, and other hot button issues and you make some people agitated.
As others have pointed out, you really need to distinguish between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants.
To ad to some of the reasons stated, conservatives are in favor of immigration that serves the U.S., and part of that means that immigrants assimilate. The more that happens, the happier conservatives are.
This must explain the constant call from conservatives to enforce jaywalking laws. I do wish they’d give it a rest, with all the protesting and haranguing me to sign petitions about it.
Oh, wait. Sorry - they don’t do that. Which means they pick and choose which laws and what sort of order is important to them. Which brings us back to the brown and poor thing.
I’m relatively conservative by Canadian standards and I think immigration is great. As a matter of fact, if I were in charge I’d find ways to increase it.
Not because I want cheap labour. Expensive labour’s fine, too. I just think immigration’s great for the country. People create jobs, drive innovation, and add to the country’s strengths. Canada’s high immigrant population is a considerable asset and I think we should increase it.
My views in this regard are not at all uncommon amongst Canadian conservatives. The Conservative government has set higher immigration targets for this year, and will likely raise them against next year; the strategic target is 1% of the nation’s population every year (which they currently can’t get enough people to fill.)
Why do call for immigrant amnesties and such cause conservatives to object, if it’s only that some immigrants are in the U.S. illegally that concerns them? So change the laws and make them legal, QED.
Your article is about immigration, it makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
A study done by the National Research Council found that about half of illegal immigrants were high school droupouts and those received about 89,000 dollars more in government services than they contributed. A quarter of the illegal immigrants completed some college and those contributed 105,000 more in taxes than they received in services. The other quarter of illegal immigrants were a wash financially. This means that illegal immigrants as a whole are a burden on local governments and by extension the taxpayers that support those governments.
The other argument in the article is that immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than natives. The problem with this is that if there were no illlegal immigrants than none of the criminal illegals would be here.
Amnesties incentive future illegal immigrants. Why would anyone take the time and effort to come to this country legally if they could come to this country illegally and then be made legal?
You’ll have to do better than a quick google search to support your ridiculous analogy. Your article is talking about the effects legal immigrants have had on the US since the relaxation of rules in 1965. No wonder you didn’t actually quote anything from it.
The authors come to that opinion on the basis that immigration as a whole has been beneficial. You’re correct that they didn’t make a distinction between illegal and legal immigration, which is part of why I used it. Immigration as a whole is a good thing. People like Puddleglum seem to be claiming that if no illegal immigrants were here then we wouldn’t have illegal immigration. I can play that game too - make them all legal. Poof! And this article gives good reason to believe that those people would make a positive contribution.
However, I will take responsibility for using the word “illegal” in my cite, which I shouldn’t have.
In the end though, all this is a bit beside the point of my original analogy. Puddleglum said conservatives are interested in law and order. I say they’re cherry picking. If the ideology or philosophy is that law and order are good, then enforce all of them, including jaywalking and ripping the tags off mattresses. You can say illegal immigration is important to you - no problem there. But don’t say it’s purely about law and order when it’s really just about your pet cause.