Capitol Hill Blue Forums Life and Moral Issues Crime & Punishment Illegal Immigration and Appropriate Penalties

Awwwwwwwwwwww...

Great Rant Roger!



When I've spoken about following the law, I literally meant it. It's matters not to me one's nationality in migrating to the U.S. - just do it legally is was my only issue.

At this very point-in-time, I can not honestly say how I feel about the issue anymore - I am extremely conflicted.

I don't think anyone here has suggested that the borders (all of them) be opened completely, although I may have missed that.

I do think everyone agrees that
1) what's happening now isn't working, and
2) that employers as much a part of the problem, if not more, than any of the illegals they hire

On the issue of deportation, I think we can agree that
1) Deporting all illegal immigrants to the border would cause serious problems with Canada and Mexico, and is not an option
2) Deporting them all to their homes would be very expensive, and probably not a practical solution (if only because it would be an administrative nightmare), and
3) Removing them all from their jobs and NOT deporting them would give us 12,000,000 new homeless people - also not acceptable.

It seems to me that if a person is in this country and working steadily, then we can come up with an immigration visa specifically for that purpose - for work. It should expire after a certain amount of time if not renewed, and renewal should require proof of steady employment. And yes, I think there should be a path to citizenship - a difficult one, perhaps, for those who entered illegally - but for those who really want to become Americans, for those who are hardworking and for whom illegal entry is their only crime, there should be a way.

I have no idea how to control the greedy employers; the government, so far, has been on their side and that's pretty much all they need. We can elect whoever we like (in theory) and pass whatever laws we like; if the government is sympathetic to the employers, nothing will change.

Currently, or at least last time I looked, in order to get a work visa your prospective employer had to file the paperwork for you and prove they need YOU, specifically, rather than an American citizen. Clearly this isn't happening for labor and factory workers, nor is it going to. It's a difficult and expensive process.

I think the only solution is a temporary worker visa. The workers are here, they are working, they are certainly contributing to the economy. Let's reduce the huge advantages businesses get from hiring illegals, and make sure they have a reason to obey the law. It has to be cheaper to follow the law than to break it.

In order to make a new system work, it has to benefit business somehow; otherwise it's not going to happen. But we can't just recreate the sweatshops of the early 20th century and call it legal, either.

Roger
Excellent post.
I wanted to use your post a s basis to respond to a few issues, But also want to make it clear that I am only clarifying my own views and not saying anything about your intentions in respect to your posting.


Every rich country has illegal immigration problems. My wife lived for a while on Cyprus. They have an illegal immigration problem. One would be hard pressed to connect that reality to their foreign policy or their corporate multinationals.
I fully agree that the current law is horrible. When I speak of enforcing the law, I do it with the assumption that the current law is fatally flawed and some new law would have to be passed and enforced. BUT, what ever that new law is, it should be enforced or changed so it is enforceable.

Yes, but when people use US foreign policy as a justification to support illegal immigration, then I see no basis to distinguish one undocumented immigrant from any other. And in this context, it seems that the argument is indistinguishable from proposing open borders.

Some people may be saying that, I certainly am not.

one would not be pressed at all, its a gateway into the rest of the EU for one, and for two Europe has been exploiting africa for generations in the exact same manner as the US companies. its pretty similar ardy.


i dont follow. could you please explain this?



Whats the worst that could happen?

Pardon my ignorance, but I don't see how it is irrefutable that our economy needs *illegal* workers... perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "legalize their presence"?

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?

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?


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??

Schlack...
the argument proposed by others (as I understand it) is that nations (particularly the USA) have acted as international economic predators and for this reason poverty was caused; and for this reason illegal immigration is caused into the predator countries. (Correct my statement of the argument if I have it wrong)

I do agree that various rich countries have had economically predatory policies. But, it think it is not self evident that ALL poverty in the world emerges only from such policies.

Further, I say that poor people tend to want to migrate to rich countries regardless of their history of economic predation. Cyprus is only one of many possible examples. And I can assure you that there are a great number of poor people that will be very happy to move to Cyprus and never use it as a gateway to anywhere else. In particular, there are people trying to get to Cyprus from Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. In each case there are "gateways to Europe " that are much more convenient than Cyprus. Among other things, the fact that Cyprus is an Island makes "gateway" travel much more difficult than is the case with a geographically contiguous country.


If you read other posting in this thread, you will see that various posters have referred to US foreign policy as somehow connected with the topic of illegal immigration. And the inferential tone of these posting is that since we have ruined their countries and made them poor, then the very least we can do in fairness is to accept them as immigrants so that they can attempt to reclaim their lives.

I am saying that once you start down this path of justification, I can see no means by which to reject any immigrant. And for this reason, to advocate this argument seem to me to be advocating unlimited immigration.


Perhaps someone else who has opposed open borders could take up a response to this question. For my part, I was simply explaining my previous remarks about the subject. Remarks which prompted some posters to deny that anyone had supported such a policy. I was explaining that I feel that indirectly they had in fact implicitly supported open borders. And now it seems that you explicitly support that policy.

What ever the virtues any of us may see in the open border policy, it seems to have vanishingly small political support and in that sense is only tangentially relevant to the discussion.

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.


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.)


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.

All those with the ability to do only the most menial of work in the United States of America should stay at home -- we'll export the jobs to them, given time.

For the menial work that must be done onsite, like painting and cleaning and gardening and the like, we will still be required to find some likely individuals. If American citizens cannot be found to do this work at a reasonable rate of compensation, then a system of recruiting, maintaining and controlling guest workers would need to be implemented.

Individuals who enter the country outside of a recognized program should be dealt with to the furthest measure of the law. Those who should violate the conditions of their temporary stay in this great country should receive similar punishment.

This has been the traditional role of spouses, to try get the other to do these tasks.



I love that euphemism, "guest worker". Like you invite a guest over to clean your toilet.

Its too expensive to export them, and incarceration costs even more, but yard "chain gang" crews might work.