I can't believe you mean to legalize the currently illegal wages and conditions - but isn't that the argument employers make when they say without these "illegal" options, their businesses would suffer - perhaps fail - and hence the economy would also suffer? Do they really need tomato-picking to stay at 1.5 cents per pound rather than the 2.5 cents per pound that would be required if they paid minimum wage to legal immigrants?
I won't speak for Phil, but I doubt that anyone here wants to legalize the current wages and conditions. What I'm talking about is decriminalizing the people, not the employers.
Or maybe you mean amnesty - would you suggest the people who broke the law by immigrating illegally, knowingly, should be given preferential treatment over those that have applied and are waiting, some for years, for LEGAL immigration?
The fact that they are alreaedy in the country and we can't afford to deport them all is not preferential treatment - it's a matter of time and space. If person A is in, say, Copenhagen, filling out forms, and person B is in Denver in a meat-packing plant, person B has already got here faster. But them I'm talking about those who are here, now -- I try to work with the idea that the law might be enforced in future (although frankly I doubt it.)
I realize that I am coming late to this discussion, and don't understand everything (or hardly anything, for that matter!) about it... it just seems to me that if we said "NO MORE", PERIOD, to illegal immigration workers (and employers!), that legal immigration would have to increase, and those that have been patiently observing the law would be the new *legal* immigrant workers, and for that matter a lot of the currently illegal workers could become legal as they filter through the line... but the main benefit is that there would be far fewer illegal jobs to draw the immigrants to the dangerous illegal path, and that once here there would be much less immigrant worker abuse, since they would have no reason to help hide it.
This seems so obvious to me, what am I missing??
For one thing, those who have been patiently observing the law ARE the new *legal* immigrant workers, and always have been. That hasn't changed, nor will it.
Unfortunately, the only way to get employers to stop breaking the law is to enforce it, and until the corporations can be guaranteed continued profitability at an acceptable level, I don't believe that will not happen.
This is not by way of argumentation, it's just a response to your comments.
