[farmfriend]

Short list.

[At _War_With_Liberals]

The poor poor Mexicans...

I wish I had a far richer country to sneak into and live off the dole there!

[gubamyster]

ping

[dougherty]

Oh yes, we've got the 'cream of the crop' alright. They are here bankrupting our hospitals, receiving 'free' taxpayer funded education, collecting WIC and welfare, taking away jobs from citzens and lowering wages for citizens, and the list goes on. Gee, we're lucky we have the cream of the crop, just imagine what the rest of their countrymen would be like here.

[glorgau]

I really like the term "legamorons" even though it isn't a word - yet.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

"1) Anyone who is not a terror suspect or criminal is eligible."

They are all CRIMINAL INVADERS.

[traditionalist]

He's working from a false premise: that strict immigration laws cannot be enforced. They can, and the way to do it is to go after employers of illegals so that it becomes impossible for an illegal to get a job.

How is that possible? Simple. Every time you hire someone you have to check their papers. In the case of a US citizen, it must be a passport. In the case of a foriegner, it must be a greencard plus a federally issued id. In both cases a social security card must also be presented. To eliminate fraud, you require the employer to call into the Department of Homeland Security to verify that the passport or greencard is valid, and you must call into the social security office to make sure the SS card is valid. If the passport, greencard, and/or social security card do not check out against the federal databases, the would-be employee is placed under immediate arrest, charged with document fraud and immigration law violations if he turns out to be an illegal. Failure to cross-check a prospective employee's papers should land an employer 10 years in Federal Prison.

Oh, and another thing. We should not simply deport illegals when we find them. We should make them suffer for their violation of our laws. I say make them do a couple years of hard labor in Federal Prison, and then ship them back to where they came from. I'd prefer to drive them to the border, have them caned or flogged, and then deported, but we've become too squeemish as a nation for such a common-sense solution.

This system will require all citizens to have passports, and some Freepers won't like that. I say tough. You cannot have effective homeland security with 50 different forms of identification floating around. The lack of a standard ID makes forgery by terrorists, invaders, and crooks far too easy. We must rely on passports, which should become the national standard ID to get a job, open a bank account, get on a plane, etc. When you have one standard, it is much easier to minimize forgery and therefore much easier to crack down on crooks, terrorists, and invaders.

[Regulator]

Tariffs are generally more efficient than quotas

Whooo boy, that statement will bring out the Free Trade Cult foaming at the mouth.

"Guest Worker" programs are an abject failure. They simply invite more illegal immigration (gotta bring the wifey and kids up, ya know?). Employers will hire guest workers over citizens because guest workers can't vote to change their conditions.

In modern America, court mandated political redistricting based on ethnicity uses the Census of illegals and guest workers to gerrymander districts that guarantee someone of like ethnicity to be voted into office (unless you have a Caucasian ethnicity such as Polish, German, Italian, etc, which apparently count for nothing).

So the presence of Guest Workers and their (usually) illegal families skew the politics of the country and strip citizens of their civil rights in the form of proportionate representation (why else would the Sanchez sisters be in the Congress of the United States?).

Guest worker programs are a bad, bad idea that benefit only one group: employers who don't want to play the game by the rules.

No more "Guest Worker" programs, ever. America for Americans.

[Ohioan]

I think this writer means well, but begs the key questions, and apparently does not have a clear perception of the qualities which make traditional America unique, nor those which make other peoples unique. Humanity is not even potentially, just one big happy family, whose parts are interchangeable. Liberal immigration laws effectively show disrespect both for us and others.

I would suggest that the quote from Hanson, which the writer starts with, also shows a fundamental flaw. While those Mexican mestizos and Indians who come here may indeed have an admirable work ethic--in many individual cases--those people whom he refers to disparagingly as elites, would be far more able to fit in to traditional American society. Their cultural background is European, as is ours. It is not a matter of subjective judgments of worth; it is a matter of what cultural heritage you want to pass on, and what you want to leave to others.

But America is already more populated than an ideal--although one suspects that no matter what we do, nature will take care of that--albeit not in a way that any of us would wish for. We need to preserve what we have for our own coming generations. It was not passed down to us to solve the world's problems, and we are but intermediaries in the progression of generations. We need to conduct ourselves accordingly.

For a focused approach to immigration, see Immigration & The American Future.

William Flax

[FITZ]

We don't need a guest worker program, we need to deport any illegal committing felony document fraud, DWI, deport them when they are found driving without insurance or seeking free health care or education. Deport them as they are found to be committing crimes like shoplifting, B&E, drug use, cut them off from all government programs. They didn't choose legal immigration in the first place --- many are informal guest workers now --- they plan to return home and if left illegal with no hope of government handouts, going home is more likely. Keeping them illegal is better because you can get rid of them more easily if they become nuisances.

[international american]

You present some interesting arguments. Unfortunately, there is no political will to stop this flood, so any rational proposal will be ignored. Besides, we need to keep the Los Angeles County Jail bursting at the seams will illegals.

[Sabertooth]

I have two issues on which I feel strongly. One is that this country must continue to be a haven for the oppressed. The other is that we should not rely on unenforceable laws.

My ancestors were driven from Europe by ethnic violence. Today, there is ethnic violence in Africa and elsewhere. If victims in those countries can escape, and they choose to come to America to make a new life, then I feel that they should have such an opportunity.

< -snip- >

My other big issue is to get rid of what I have called legamorons, meaning any law that could not stand up under widespread enforcement. As it stands, our immigration laws are not going to be enforced. Keeping them on the books is hypocritical and only serves to keep us in a state of denial and evasion over the fact that we need to re-think immigration policy.

Guest Workers

The immigrants that I want in this country are people who would be tortured or killed if they remained in their native lands. Simply wanting to improve your economic opportunities does not entitle you to become a U.S. citizen, in my way of thinking.

However, there is nothing wrong with someone wanting to improve their economic lot in life. I think that we can accommodate guest workers on a win-win basis.

What I propose is that we have a guest worker program with the following characteristics.

1) Anyone who is not a terror suspect or criminal is eligible.

Our laws are unenforceable only to the degrees of cowardice posessed by politicians on both sides of the aisle, which constrain them from fulfilling their oaths of office.

Then those very cowards recommend endless volleys of their trifling malfeasances to solve the problems created by their own lacks of courage.

What Arnold Kling and anyone who agrees with him are advocating are all-but-open borders, and the dissolution of American sovereignty.

In return, they hope to parlay their lack of ethical fortitude into a brief command of a ship of state sinking by their own cannon shot.