Then tell us what the legal procedure is for an average Mexican to immigrate to America.
You claim it exists; tell us what it is.
Put up or shut up.
The most common path is via family reunification - that is where 2/3rds of the legal immigrants come from. You get sponsored by a family member, with the wait time dependent on how close you are related.
The second path is typically a work related visa - a company sponsors you.
After that, it is the asylum game (not really an avenue for most out of Mexico), and the diversity slots.
I was tempted to say, “If they didn’t hate immigrants, they wouldn’t be (cultural) conservatives.” But that’s unfair. Still, opposition to immigration is categorizable as a kind of conservatism in itself, and a major first principle for many self-described conservatives. It’s far more important and central to political conservatism than the “conservative values” stuff in your OP.
Don’t get me wrong; there are pro-immigration righties (and I grew up as one).
Letting people live where they want is a liberal (libertarian) value, and appeals to rightie classical liberals (like, say, my mom).
Keeping one’s territory for a one’s own culture, a certain culture, or a certain mix of cultures is by definition a conservative impulse (even if not all “conservatives” share it). It’s about resistance to change.
Yeah, it is. At least to an open-borders classical liberal. Sorry, I don’t think you mean to be evil, but you sound like some kind of a silly nationalist, and the business conservatives (multi-national, pro-growth, classical liberals) are just biting their tongues around you to preserve the coalition.
**
This.**
Funny, that’s what some of us are arguing for. So why again should we keep the quota system?
The sad thing is, most people against “illegal immigration” don’t even know there’s a quota system, they assume that illegals broke some law in some other sense. And while they are opposed to criminals, if they were to design the law, it would look more like my illegal-loving proposal to abolish quotas and have a “shall issue” resident alien visa.
The law is really far to the right of most Americans’ opinions, but they don’t know that.
So you admit that you know nothing about the present quotas set. Good to know you’re just talking in pure theory without reference to present law. OK, so if present law is too strict, what then?
You talk about principle, but ostensible conservatives have changed immigration law and tightened the borders. My home state can now get me on felony charges if I hire an undocumented alien or provide aid to him. That’s new law in the last ten years. Is that conservative principle or creeping fascism?
If a city council instituted $10,000 fines for jaywalking, would you really recommend that we not vote to replace them, void the convictions of those punished under that rule, and reimburse the poor schlemazels? Because that’s the sort of response I would recommend for what’s going on in US immigration law today. People being deported twenty years after coming here because of some bureaucratic quota. Blah.
Good point. Why don’t we have that in the US?
I know the answer, actually. It’s because the xenophobes (conservatives) went against the business conservatives (classical liberals) back in the GWBush era, and torpedoed it. And the Democrats have largely punted on it, because they aren’t sure their organized-labor base are OK with immigration even enough to roll back excessive penalties (though some “blue” localities have adopted safe haven policies, so there’s hope on that side in the long term).
A hard time? Not really. If the principle is obey the law, with no consideration that the law must be just, necessary and rational, then that’s not something I’d readily call a virtue.
Anyway, illegal immigrants don’t go to the U.S. for the satisfaction of breaking U.S. immigration law - they go to find work. They want to work despite the risks and penalties. I don’t understand the need to slather on the barriers, or to not recognize that if someone’s been in the U.S. for a number of years, kicking them out just because they entered rudely is foolish.
The only conservatives who might be against this are those who feel it’s fine to exploit people just to maintain a stead stream of cheap labor that can’t push back and causes raises to rise for business industries that make up their constituency. In other words, not true conservatives at all.
But you are correct in that it is because of the unspoken agreement between dems and reps to keep the issue under the rug that nothing sensible has been done.
Magellan, I don’t understand who you’re calling, “not true conservatives.” Is it those who want a guest worker program; or those who are keeping undocumented aliens “illegal” so they can’t push back against abusive employers and participate above ground in society?
And that kind of No True Scotsman talk is part of the problem in conservative politics. There are those on either side of the split that will insist that they are the “real conservatives” and the others are “fake conservatives.” But it’s self-delusion. The movement is a coalition of people who disagree with each other.
(Of course, as a cynic with leftie influences, I would argue that using nationalism to drive a wedge between different sectors of the labor market is “true conservatism” in an insulting sense.)
So you think every immigrant is “paperless”? Really? So what are those dudes in embassies doing all day, if nobody has a valid immigrant Visa (and a valid SSN)?
I’d tell you what to do with that notion, but this is GQ.
As I noted, Carter and Ford both decreed amnesties for Vietnam-era draft-dodgers. If you think that somehow only the Carter amnesty conflicts with the alleged “law-abiding conservative mentality”, or if you’re deliberately ignoring the Ford amnesty because he was a Republican and Carter was a Democrat, that doesn’t say much for your vaunted conservative “principles”.
It seems clear that what actually happened here is that you were trying to claim that American conservative opposition to illegal immigrants has nothing to do with their being “poor and brown”. But you couldn’t think of an example where American conservatives were objecting to non-poor-brown illegal immigrants.
So you confusedly tried to argue that conservative opposition to the Carter draft-dodger amnesty (but not the Ford amnesty) somehow was relevant to conservative positions on illegal immigration, because some of the draft-dodgers went to Canada.
Your argument, as I explained, was silly. And the assertion you were trying to support by it is false: it’s simply not true that none of the opposition to illegal immigration that American conservatives are rallying for is motivated by prejudice against “poor and brown” people. (Social psychology studies have shown, for example, that white Americans are more hostile toward illegal immigration when the study’s hypothetical illegal immigrant is Mexican than when he’s Anglo-Canadian.)
There are lots of reasons that conservatives object to illegal immigration, and one of those reasons, for many conservatives, is racism.
Of course, that fact doesn’t automatically invalidate any other reasons to oppose illegal immigration, but it’s absurd to pretend that it doesn’t exist. And it’s ridiculous to try to argue that conservative opposition to Carter’s (but apparently not Ford’s!) draft-evasion amnesty somehow constitutes any kind of evidence that it doesn’t exist.
I seem to recall Ford also being involved in some other high-profile pardon of a lawbreaker…hang on, the name will come to me in a minute…
What always bothers me about the GOP approach is the emphasis on the workers. ISTM that if you don’t want the workers here you need to hit the employers harder as they’re the ones incentivising the workers to come to the US in the first place. One might be tempted to suspect that there’s a reason the focus is on poor brown people rather than the rich white guys who hire them, but that might be considered churlish.
Same with me. I’m relatively conservative by British standards and see the UK’s relatively relaxed attitude to immigration as one of our key advantages over our nearest rivals (e.g. the Polish and other Eastern Europeans who were locked out of immigration to Germany but were welcomed in massive numbers by the UK, to our advantage).
Sure, it does. To the extent Ford favored amnesty for the draft dodgers, I would have been opposed to that too. I had merely forgotten, and still do to this day, that Ford had ever favored amnesty for them.
Oh, get off it. We’re surrounded by a couple of oceans, you know. Where else are we likely to experience illegal immigration in anything like significant numbers except from countries with “poor, brown” people? So, yeah, American draft-dodgers were and are about the only other example to draw from to illustrate that amnesty for law-breakers is unpopular with conservatives even when the law-breakers in question are also white. They weren’t chosen because they were the only “non-poor-brown” illegal immigrants I could think of, but because they were the only other example that exists.
It may exist to some degree, as I have observed plenty of racism amongst even my own liberal friends. No one is free of it. But to say that racism is the basis for conservative objections to illegal immigration and efforts to halt it is not even close to being accurate.
I used to think you people said this kind of stuff as a ploy to persuade the ignorant and gullilble to align with yourselves politically. It came as something of a shock to discover this board and find out you really do believe it after all. :rolleyes:
Mooching? The people who get Social Security checks have paid into Social Security all their lives. Getting something you have paid for is NOT “mooching.” You have either fallen for the right wing meme about Social Security (that it’s a government handout) or you are actively promoting it. In either event, shame on you.
There is a misconception among some (many, actually) that someone can just sneak into the country and start collecting all these benefits just by being north of the border. The truth of the matter is that while they pay into it, they don’t get these benefits.
I was primarily referring to undocumented immigrants; I thought that was implicit in the OP. I’m not talking about folks that work in embassies and whatnot, I’m talking about people who come to the US and work but lack documentation. There is this mindset in the country that they are ‘stealing’ something, but like I said, most work here for jobs and wages most ‘legal’ americans wouldn’t be willing to work for.
Whats Ron Paul’s stance on immigration? I’m wondering what Ronulans stances on immigration are.
You mean those who somehow found themselves wandering the countryside with no idea how they got here and therefore understandably lacking documentation?
Hmm, so apparently conservatives can’t be bothered to muster up any remotely memorable united opposition to “amnesty for law-breakers” unless the amnesty was proposed by a Democrat. Very principled of you.
Nonsense. There are plenty of situations where “non-poor-brown” illegal immigrants violate the immigration laws of countries other than the US. Vietnam-era Canada is far from the only such example.
What this thread is supposedly about, though, is the reactions of American conservatives to illegal immigrants violating US immigration law, and the reasons for those reactions.
The opposition of American conservatives half a century ago to Presidential amnesty for American draft-dodgers (but only if the President is a Democrat) is, as I’ve explained, not really relevant. (It’s also really not helping your attempted argument any, because it’s hardly a shining example of principled consistency on the part of conservatives.)
Not at all. It’s just that in light of the catastrophe that was Jimmy Carter, the Ford presidency seems but an inconsequential blip, scarcely remembered.
Well, to be fair, I was operating on the assumption that it was American conservatives we were talking about. Don’t you think it’s just a tad ridiculous to expect American conservatives, to be in keeping with their philosophical beliefs, to have to walk around outraged over illegal immigration from one country to another halfway around the globe? And if you’ll recall, we’re also big on individual responsibility. We would tend to view it as the responsibility of those other countries to contend with whatever problems they may be having with illegal immigration, and so we’d tend to get less het up about it than when it’s happening here.
Actually, the comments in regard to amnesty were in regard to conservative disdain for giving lawbreakers a free pass, regardless of the nature of their crime.
It is within the context in which it was raised, as I just explained.
No more ridiculous than arguing that American conservatives were outraged over illegal immigration from the US to Canada:
What US conservatives were “objecting” to was draft-dodging by Americans, not violations of Canadian immigration law, and it was silly of you to pretend that it had any significant relation to US conservative positions on illegal immigration in general.
As long as the “free pass” happens to be proposed by a Democrat, of course.
He’s an immigration hawk. Sealed borders, zero-tolerance enforcement and deportation. (How he thinks a demographic-control task of that magnitude is going to be handled by the small government he espouses is not explained.) He also wants to abolish jus soli or birthright citizenship for the children of non-Americans born on US territory.
Well, you won’t get Ron Paul on board with that. The elimination of jus soli would remove any possibility of equivalence between current immigration policy and the laws to which most of us owe our American ancestry.