Replies

My general view as regards employers is that they should in most cases have the right to assume that those whom they hire are here legally.

Why? We already make employers responsible for knowing about criminal history and drug use. And they have to know SSNs and report to the IRS. If they were doing that correctly, they'd know who was legal (and I suspect most do know)

Regardless of whether or not we engage in employer sanctions, we still should not be encouraging aliens to enter illegally,

We agree on that.

and that's exactly what happens every time a proposal is floated to give them any kind of legal status.

We disagree on that. I think we encourage them to come illegally as long as there is no legal way to do so.

We could build a fence along the entire Mexican border, and it would do no good. Boats can land on any of our coasts. And people could come here with tourist or student visas, and just never go home (a lot of people from other countries do just that. The 9/11 terrorists did.)
We are cracking down on the student visa violators, but we're doing that by making the schools track students. So why not make employers at least that responsible?

[and that's exactly what happens every time a proposal is floated to give them any kind of legal status.]

We disagree on that. I think we encourage them to come illegally as long as there is no legal way to do so.

That's an argument for a guest-worker program that people in other countries can take advantage of. It's not an argument for making the program available to illegals here. That does nothing to stem the tide of illegal entry, and the mere proposing of it does plenty to encourage it.

It's a question of numbers. If we closed off the entire land border to unauthorized crossing, the number of illegal entrants would go way down. There's just nothing that can compete with a long, unsecured border when it comes to entering a country illegally.

If you really think that securing the land border would be ineffective at doing anything about the problem, does this mean you'd favor eliminating the Border Patrol altogether?