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Hi, Rus!

It's amazing how fast kids pick up a new language!
I played with the Mexican kids, and I could speak Spanish as well as they did by the time I was eight.
The kids who came with their parents to pull cotton stayed about three months, and by the time they left they could speak English better than most immigrant workers today who have been here for years.

One thing that has been bandied about on the forum is the immigrant workers taking work away from Americans.
It's been said many times that if the pay scale were high enough Americans would do any work.
I'm sure that's true. If someone would pay me $50. an hour to collect garbage, I'd change occupations.
The fact is that it would be a short term employment.
When homeowners had to pay $400. a month for garbage collection, they'd start hauling their own.

On the cotton farm, of which my dad was foreman, there was no way to find the number of workers needed to chop the cotton and pull the cotton.
Working in the fields was hard work for very little pay because farming cotton was not real profitable.
I'm sure it's the same on any farming project.

The demand for higher wages for these menial jobs smacks of unionization and socialism to me.
If temporary immigrant workers can do these jobs and keep the cost of the final product down, it benefits everyone.

I speak from a unique position of coming from a migrant worker family.
For most of my younger life we were chasing crops in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California.
I know what kind of life these people live - it's tough.
I understand GW's compassion.
I think he's got a good plan for starters.
I hope the implementation is as good as the plan.

I lived in Arizona for 8 years, I know the effect of illegals and what they do to the labor market.

I worked on framing many apartment complexes, we were all paid piece work. I use to have to work 7 days a week and got paid 390.00 a week that was before taxes. I/we could not live on that kind of money. You were told that if you don't want to do the job for that $$ there was plenty of illegals that would. If we wanted to eat we had no choice.
All ya had to do was to look and soon there was a van full of illegals unloading and starting work. The General Contractor wanted to do the job as cheap as they could, and they did. The only one that made out was the Gen Contractor and the mexicans. The mexicans went home and lived very well off our money in their poor country.