[livius]

I hadn't read your summary before. It's very good.

One thing people seem to ignore is that the birth rate of native born Americans (of any color) is not sufficient to keep up with our future employment needs or to contribute to Social Security. It's higher than the European birth rate, certainly, but will not generate either enough workers or enough consumers to keep the engine running. We need immigrants - we've just got to rationalize immigration and try to achieve the greatest benefit from it.

Bush's plan is not perfect and will probably get a lot of tinkering, which I'm sure he expects. But I think Bush deserves praise for at least making an attempt to deal with immigration, something that nobody else has dared to even try. Even Reagan simply granted an amnesty but made no changes, and now the situation has become even more complicated (particularly since we also have to assume that some of these people are coming here not to make a better life for themselves, but to ruin our life through terrorist acts). So I think Bush should get lots of credit for grappling with the problem.

It's not going to win him any Hispanic votes, and he knows that - they're in the pockets of the Dems, who've already got their propaganda machines running. But I think he's doing it because he thinks it's the right thing to do and knows that it is a problem urgently in need of fixing.

[Beck_isright]

" One thing people seem to ignore is that the birth rate of native born Americans (of any color) is not sufficient to keep up with our future employment needs or to contribute to Social Security. It's higher than the European birth rate, certainly, but will not generate either enough workers or enough consumers to keep the engine running. We need immigrants - we've just got to rationalize immigration and try to achieve the greatest benefit from it."

So what you are saying that the U.S. economic system is incapable of the technological innovations to overcome the lower birth rate. We must maintain a quasi-slavery quota to keep the lawns cut and the fruits picked instead of innovating which is the nature of capitalism.