Would open borders really get us more immigration? I’m skeptical. Given the unlikelihood of getting caught and actually deported, there doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.
Wrong. In Arizona those same brown people can’t stand when other brown people abuse the law.
To make that clearer for you, Mexican people hate illegal Mexican people(sans the whacked out California liberals who openly encourage it, but they’re a special breed we just ignore).
And if it’s ok with you we’ll stop the play on words which is borderline demonizing.
They are Americans of Mexican decent who were fortunate enough to be born here, and are God damn proud to have the rights they do. They work very hard to show that respect to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile Paco crawls under a fence with his forty brothers.
Find me a Constitutionalist that supports open immigration? Why is a Constitutionalist the benchmark? Because America is based off it’s Constitution and as per the Constitution, if you find a strong reason(s) for open immigration, then you present those reasons and convince people to vote, pass legislation and enact the law pertaining to those decisions. That comes first.
You don’t wait until an issue has exploded and then say ‘oh well, they’re here now, maybe best we just give in and relax the law.’
Even for liberals, that’s ass backwards and completely unhelpful to Americans of all walks of life.
What the fuck is a “Constitutionalist”?
That’s not an immigration problem. It’s a local law enforcement problem. Trepassing on private land has nothing to do with immigration.
“Paco”?
And this is nonsense. Regardless of how “Mexican people” feel about illegal immigration, they don’t like being constantly harassed and threatened for being “Mexican people”. Which is why huge numbers of them left despite being legal residents.
What the hell is that?
Oh please; the present situation has been engineered by America for its own profit. This demonizing of immigrants (and yes, it is aimed at immigrants in general, not just illegal ones) is partly a manifestation of American racism, and partly about making our victims out to be monsters so we can feel self righteous while we exploit them. We are the ones exploiting “Paco and his forty brothers”; not the other way around.
Do you live in New Mexico, Arizona or Texas, and are you of Mexican or hispanic descent? No? Well, then you should probably stop expounding on stuff you know nothing about, especially since it’s a fairly complex subject not subject to your usual ridiculous black and white caricatures. I’d say that Saraya is actually closer to the mark on the actual feelings of many (not all) Americans of Mexican descent in those states than you are. A lot of us (not me, but certainly my dad’s generation…and many of my other family members…feel that way about illegals. Ironic (to me) since my grandfather/grandmother (and many of my other relatives) did immigrate here under less than legal circumstances. But they all went through the effort to become American citizens…and that’s a key difference. To them anyway (never mind that not all illegals CAN become citizens, even among the subset that want to, as opposed to those who have no intention of ever becoming US citizens).
As for the rest I’ll let you fight it out. But you are once again trying to paint everything in black and white, with a huge broad brush about ‘brown people’ and American racism, because, well, that’s how you always roll. No ability to see that complex issues are, well, complex, and don’t always conform to your ridiculous and over the top rhetoric. Sheesh, and I’m sort of on your side on this one. :smack:
OK, let’s talk Constitutionalism:
Note that legal rights are conferred by residence. We can stipulate that those who live in a country are generally subject to its laws. So citizenship is matter of “naturalization.”
The harder it is to naturalize a person, the more open to abuse the system becomes. We could end up with long-term resident “aliens” who are denied legal status. Better to keep the rules on the relatively liberal side than to disenfranchise people who haven’t lived anywhere else in over a decade, or we’d have great numbers of effectively stateless persons. Which would deny to some persons “the equal protection of the laws.”
We have a constitution which sees citizenship as a matter of residency. It used to be modified by racialist laws that tried to keep the USA “northern European” (however silly that is)–but those were removed. The Constitution is not exactly a strong ally to those who want to deport long-time resident aliens.
Open borders would certainly increase return migration: crossing the border is costly, so restrictions ironically keep certain illegal immigrants bottled in the US. If borders were opened, they wouldn’t be afraid to go to and from their home country as economic conditions sway.
This guy seems to think that open borders wouldn’t cause a flood of immigration, though the evidence presented in the book review appears qualitative and impressionistic. J Kennan (2012) “Open Borders” notes that US wages are 2.5 times that of Mexico. Now much of that is due to productivity and educational differences. But these guys control for such differences and still find wage differentials, suggesting that “…the wage gaps caused by barriers to movement across international borders are among the largest known forms of wage discrimination;”
So while evidence is mixed, I gather that immigration restrictions matter, in particular the ones associated with employment.
This strikes me as a bit disingenuous. If your property is on the border and a significant portion of trespassing is done by people illegally crossing the border then it’s not just a local law enforcement problem.
Would you support completely open EU borders to any and all residents of Africa? Morocco is only 19 miles from Spain, after all. I read about things like this and I wonder. What is Spain concerned about? Open the borders!
Ignoring politics, and silly assertions by Der Trihs that there is some sort of “racist” element involved, the immigration dilemma comes down to a very practical problem: Immigration is destabilizing to any society when it surpasses a critical volume. Every society has only a certain maximum capacity to absorb an influx of new citizens.
We have a wealthy country with living conditions that are substantially better than most. You can walk into my emergency department without a dime to your name and you will be taken care of better than many other countries. You can mow my lawn and I will pay you better than you will be paid elsewhere.
But there is an upper limit to this. My ED can’t take care of a hundred new patients a day; I don’t have 100 lawns to mow.
As a nation we have to decide how many new folks we can absorb, and at what rate. Given that our borders have been “closed” and we still have a lot of illegal immigrants, I suspect that opening the borders will be overwhelming. Crappy living here in the US is still better than crappy living elsewhere, on average, and the general promise of a brighter tomorrow is more reassuring here than it is elsewhere.
So says one of the primary defenders of racism on this board; someone who has made it clear again and again that he thinks “race” determines intelligence and has an active thread named “SCOTUS should preserve race-based AA because we are not created equal”.
No of course racism is not involved.
Sounds logical, but falls down on the facts. We had more lax enforcement in the past without being overrun.
The nature of present penalties is what I really want to see reformed. An undocumented alien should not be treated as a felon, and someone who’s been here for years and has children here has–wait for it–already been here for years. In what way is that person a future threat?
“You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”
Milton Friedman
In the ideal I already mention I know to be utopic, yes or course.
Ideally, people should be able to live where they want to, so long as they can afford to (i.e., only because you want to buy John Lennon’s old apartment overlooking Central Park, that doesn’t mean you can live there - among other things, I think Yoko Ono might object) and don’t have other, very-specific restrictions such as the aforementioned being on parole. Nobody should be forced to leave their homeland because of hunger or persecution, nobody should be refrained from moving to a place they’re interested in moving to because they’re from the wrong place, nobody should be stopped from going back home because doing so will cause trouble.
Then again, in an ideal world, the gent from Morocco I met in line at tax time wouldn’t have “I have a daughter!” as his main reason for not going home if it eventually became logical for other reasons.
I find it curious (for lack of a better word) that first you point out but rapidly forget that the borders between Morocco and Spain are manned by Spanish guardia civiles but restricted by EU-level policies.
Why thanks, DT!
Not many times you come to my defense. Much appreciated.
It’s nice to have someone recognize that, just because I think mother nature hasn’t doled out genes the way the Creationists think she has, we still need to give all groups an equal helping hand up.
So some kid who came here when they were 2 years old. He is now 20. Romney wants to make life so unlivable for him here that he will choose to leave and live in a country he might have no real connection with.
Remember this was brought up in the same debate where the Dream act was discussed.
Trying to round up all the illegal aliens is costly and not very effective.
Perhaps but I don’t think anyone would be OK with people dying of hunger or lack of emergency medical care.
When? Where? How? IOW Cite.
Well, sometimes they make for better soundbites.
I don’t think he’s being coy about calling these people racists. Just ask him, he’ll tell you that he thinks they are racists.
Yes they have to work even harder because of their association with those dirty illegal Mexicans.
This is called shutting the door of opportunity behind you.
Yeah, not even a touch of racism.
America did not restrict immigration for the first hundred years. IOW open immigration. Can we assume the people who wrote the constitution were constitutionalists?
You will note the focus on race that a lot of our immigration and naturalization laws had throughout our history.
This is called closing the door of opportunity behind you.
Sure Der Trihs uses a very broad brush but there is certainly an element of racism there, isn’t there?
I don’t think you are talking about giving everyone an equal hand up in that thread, or even levelling the playing field, you seem to want o tilt the playing field in favor of one group that you perceive to be genetically inferior.
Part of the problem is that illegal immigrants have over taxed our ability to provide healthcare and education to the poor who are citizens of the U.S… California is beyond broke financialy yet if you go to one of Los Angeles counties health care facilities you will find a 72 hour wait for emergency care. Close to 70% of those in the waiting room are illegals. Kind of like having a neigbor that wants to stop by for dinner every night and bring along 6 kids, the brother in law, a few nephews, etc. We simply cannot afford to be nice anymore.
We need immigration laws for legitimate reasons, the problem is a lot of racism and other incentives have gotten rolled into them and we’ve ended up with the incoherent mess we have. For instance, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to check immigrants for criminal history. I also think it’s reasonable to pay more attention to immigrants from countries that aren’t on friendly terms with the US. But neither of those has anything to do with race and everything to do with legitimate threats to national security.
I don’t really understand explicit quotas on immigration other than what immigration services can reasonably process given their budget. If the choice is between 10,000 well screen immigrants, or 20,000 poorly screened ones, I think it makes sense. If it’s a choice between 10,000 well screened ones and 20,000 well screen ones, it’s dumb.
I also don’t understand the idea of people being afraid of them taking our jobs. When people immigrate here and live here for any substantial period of time, they’re Americans. Besides, as it seems, most immigrants who come here are either unskilled, and take the crappy jobs we don’t want, or they’re highly skilled, and thus bring valuable skills to this country. If a modern day Einstein were to want to immigrate here, I don’t think anyone would object. The point is, immigration generally complements our workforce rather than detracting from it.
So I’ve always felt, as long as we can be reasonably sure they’re not a criminal or a terrorist, let them in. As long as they work, they’re only helping us out. Yeah, there’s probably some they come over and try to find ways to take advantage of the system, but there’s plenty of people who aren’t immigrants who do that too. If that’s happening, the answer isn’t to blame immigrants but to fix loopholes in the system that allow it. Then, natural born citizens can’t take advantage of it either, and immigrants who only want to take advantage of the system won’t have incentive to come here to do so. It really just seems like most of the talking points on immigration is based on misinformation at best or racism at worst.
Yeah, under the Schengen treaty, enforcement of Europe’s borders becomes the problem, not of the EU core, but of countries on the edge like Greece and Spain. I get the impression that this has caused a little resentment. That said, I’m not sure having the Benelux pay Spain and Greece to keep out the Muslim hordes is a better idea; that could become too corruptly conservative of present treaty zone borders. I don’t know what a better answer would look like.
Similarly, US immigration policies don’t bother Indiana so much, but even with federal funding can be a burden on business in border states. Anti-immigration groups like to invoke the southwestern cowboy defending English-speaking civilization from the unwashed brown horde, but it goes for restrictive immigration policy as well. New Mexico and Vermont get stuck with a law written in the interior, even if they would let more migrant workers in.
Simplistic. We can have more open immigration than we do and more of a welfare state. The Shengen area includes countries like Denmark that are far more communitarian than the USA. It’s not that hard to be both more redistributionist and more xenophilic than we are at present. We could tie benefits to citizenship, say, and allow more visas for resident aliens.