[stopem]

"All over America, U.S. citizens will flip hamburgers in fast-food shops, wash dishes in restaurants, change sheets in hotels, mow lawns, trim shrubs, pick produce, drive taxis, replace roofs on houses, and do all kinds of construction work. Americans are quite willing to work unpleasant, menial, tiresome and risky jobs, but not for Third World wages.

As Americans have been doing for decades and proud of it!!

[R. Scott]

I drove a taxi for years – and visitors to Hampton Roads preferred Yellow Cab (they refused to hire illegals) because the drivers could actually speak and understand English. My late wife worked several years as a landscaper. Customers liked having people who spoke English. Her boss (owned the company) refused to hire illegals.

[defenderSD]

I think the truth about what jobs Americans will do lies somewhere between Schaffly's view and Bush's view. If Phyllis thinks she's going to find tens of thousands of people who want to live in dusty Central Valley towns in California for half the year and pick fruit and produce all day, she's simply mistaken. I've read that growers are having trouble finding enough Mexicans to pick fruit and produce because Mexicans would rather do construction and hotel work. The truth is more like this: illegal Mexican immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won't do in sufficient numbers to keep the agriculture, construction, and hotel/motel industries running at the current size of these industries.

If we deported all illegal immigrants in 2-3 years, we would rapidly fall into a severe economic recession because of major labor shortages in construction, hotels, agriculture, and restaurants. Deportation of all those people is out of the question economically. But I do believe it's time to close down the border and stop letting more illegal immigrants into the country. Those who are already here should be required to register for a guest worker program.

The economic analysis that Phyllis quotes is also faulty because in a correct analysis you have to count all the additional taxes paid by the owners and other workers in all the industries supported by illegal immigrant labor: for example, owners of construction companies make more income because of abundant illegal immigrant labor and so do all kinds of workers in construction engineering, real estate sales, building subcontractors, and all kinds of building material supply companies that make lumber, pipes, wiring, drywall, concrete, electrical fixtures, HVAC equipment, etc. The analysis she quotes is a faulty analysis that doesn't look at two cases for the entire US economy. A correct economic analysis looks at the entire economy, not just the taxes paid by illegals and the benefits they recieve. There are also future benefits in the education of illegal immigrant children that are not counted here. Mexicans who are educated here do assimilate into our culture. We had some Mexican immigrants who did yard work for my parents and while the Mexican parents didn't speak English too well (but not too badly), their 11 year-old daughter was competely fluent in English and she served as their translator.