Pinging President Bush to this thread. Read and heed, please!ping
ping
'bout sums it up, I'd say. Take the freebies away from able bodied Americans and they'll pick lettuce or whatever.......
Pinging President Bush to this thread. Read and heed, please!If the temp visa is convertable to permanent status and ultimatly citizenship then there is no temp program it is an outright amnesty program.
It would then have all the sincerity of clintons "contributions" vs "tax increases."
Non convertability is not negotiable.
Nonsense. We're all temporary workers. No one gets out of here alive.
A wonderful article on the failures of past programs.
It doesn't even bother to look at how the new proposed programs address these issues.
It doesn't even bother to consider reality.
We are at 5% unemployment in this country even with the huge number of illegal immigrants working here.
We need to fix our illegal immigration problem, but we also need to fix our legal immigration problem. If we succeed at reducing the number of illegal immigrants without fixing legal immigration we will seriously cripple parts of our economy.
We need to fix immigration policy. We need to cut off entitlements to people here on any form of work visa and their families.
However, we do have more jobs than legal workers in the US. We have a need for workers.
This article is one great big straw man argument.
It argues against our past immigration policy failures, and doen't even compare the new plans to the old.
All I seem to see are articles that complain about our current policies and mistakes made in the past, and then suggest that any new plans are bad because the past plans were bad without making any real comparison.
If we keep up this approach we will never have successful immigration reform in this country.
We will never get laws passed that deal with illegal immigration, but don't address valid needs for legal immigration. Even if we do, they won't be enforced because what local law enforcement is going to shut down local businesses and ruin the local economy and watch lots of legal citizens lose their jobs in order to enforce a law that does them more harm than good.
They'll go after the illegal immigrants that are unemployed or ones they arrest for other things, but they aren't going to go after the ones working for a living if the employer doesn't have another choice for workers.
At the same time, we don't need to increase legal immigration unless we enforce our immigration laws.
However, the real key is addressing how our entitlement programs are bleeding us dry. Immigration is supposed to meet our needs as a country, not import the problems of other countries.
We need to be selective and only allow people to come here that can provide a benefit to our country and if they cease to do that, we need to deport them and replace them with someone that can provide a benefit to our country.
This article doesn't address fixing that. This article complains that since immigration policy has failed in the past, new policies will fail also.
That's an attitude that results in inaction.
It's an attitude that will continuously blame others and offer no real solutions.
We need to dump that attitude and start working to fix the problem, because the effects of our immigration policy are doing serious damage to this country and it's getting worse.
This is bull. A worker through the guest worker program is going to cost an employer more than they are paying an illegal immigrant now.
The employer will have to cooperate in a program to match their jobs will potential workers. They'll have to show that they tried to hire an American citizen first.
It's a lot easier and cheaper to simply hire someone who provides a SSN that may not be their and not ask too many question.
The only way such a program benefits employers is if we are able to strat effectively enforce immigration laws. Then it allows those companies to continue to find people to work if we significantly reduce the current pool of workers by removing a large portion of the illegal immigrants.
Why don't the employers just hire American citizens? Our unemployment rate is at 5% even with all the illegal immigrants working. Sustaining much lower unemployment rates for long doesn't happen. There is always some turn over in the workplace.
We have more jobs in this country than we have legal workers.
You reduce the number of workers, some businesses have to go under or find a way to survive with significantly fewer workers.
Some companies can survive with fewer workers, but it drives up costs. A large percentage of the businesses that rely on cheap labor are already under serious competitive pressuers from imported goods. They can't raise their prices, they will simply go under and our trade deficit will go up even more.
There's a benefit to American workers to have a tight labor market, but only to point where unemployment is low. Our unemployment levels are already low, fruther tightening of the labor market is just going to harm our economy and hurt everyone in the long run.
Right now I see little hope for reall immigration reform in this country.
There are too many special interest groups involved that aren't interested in a program that meets the needs of the country.
Unions wanting to protect labor markets. Isolationists who are just anti-immigrant. Liberals who are pro-immigrant regardless of the costs.
We need to get rid of the burdens being placed on our country through immigrant's use of entitlement programs. No one here on a work visa should be benefiting from such programs. They are here to provide a possitive benefit to our country by being here. If they aren't doing so, they must be deported.
However, our economy does benefit from people comming here on work visas, and we need such programs or our economy will suffer.
The cheap labor lobby, as did the ante-bellum slaveholders, represent a "peculiar interest", that defend their source of cheap labor though it proves the ruination of the country.
bttt