Posted on 05/23/2006 8:25:20 AM PDT by Gordongekko909
The immigration bill before Congress has some of the most serious consequences for the future of this country. Yet it is not being discussed seriously by most politicians or most of the media. Instead, it is being discussed in a series of glib talking points that insult our intelligence.
Some of the most momentous consequences -- a major increase in the number of immigrants admitted legally -- are not even being discussed at all by those who wrote the Senate bill, though Senator Jeff Sessions has uncovered those provisions in the bill and brought them out into the light of day.
How many times have we heard that illegal aliens are taking "jobs that Americans won't do"? Just what specifically are those jobs?
Even in occupations where illegals are concentrated, such as agriculture, cleaning, construction, and food preparation, the great majority of the work is still being done by people who are not illegal aliens.
The highest concentration of illegals is in agriculture, where they are 24 percent of the people employed. That means three-quarters of the people are not illegal aliens. But when will the glib phrase-mongers stop telling us that the illegals are simply taking "jobs that Americans won't do"?
Another insult to our intelligence is that amnesty is not amnesty if you call it something else. The fact that illegals will have to fulfill certain requirements to become American citizens is supposed to mean that this is not amnesty.
But let's do what the spinmeisters hope we will never do -- stop and think. Amnesty is overlooking ("forgetting," as in amnesia) the violation of the law committed by those who have crossed our borders illegally.
The fact that there are requirements for getting American citizenship is a separate issue entirely. Illegal aliens who do not choose to seek American citizenship are under no more jeopardy than before. They have de facto amnesty.
Yet another insult to our intelligence is saying that, since we cannot find and deport 12 million people, the only choice left is to find some way to make them legal.
There is probably no category of law-breakers -- from counterfeiters to burglars or from jay-walkers to murderers -- who can all be found and arrested. But no one suggests that we must therefore make what they have done legal.
Such an argument would suggest that there is nothing in between 100 percent effective law enforcement and zero percent effective law enforcement.
The reverse twist on this argument is that suddenly taking 12 million people out of the labor force would disrupt the economy. No one has ever said -- or probably even dreamed -- that we could suddenly find all 12 million illegal immigrants at once and send them all home immediately. This is another straw man argument.
The real question is what we do with whatever illegal aliens we do find. Right now, there are various communities around the country where local officials have a policy of forbidding the police from reporting illegal immigrants to federal authorities.
Why are people who are so gung ho for punishing employers so utterly silent about needing to punish government officials who openly and deliberately violate federal laws?
Employers, after all, are not in the business of law enforcement.
If some guy who runs a hardware store or a dry cleaning business hires someone who shows some forged documents, why should the employer be fined for not being able to tell the difference, when government officials who can tell the difference are not doing anything -- or are even actively obstructing federal laws?
Putting unarmed national guardsmen on the border is another cosmetic move, a placebo instead of real medicine. The excuse is that it is not possible to train more than 1,500 border patrol agents a year. Meanwhile, we have trained well over 200,000 Iraqi security forces while guerilla warfare raged around them.
You can put a million people on the border and it will mean nothing if those who are caught are simply turned loose and sent back to try again tomorrow -- or perhaps later the same day.
Who said anything about Savage? I asked you a direct question about one of the most prominent conservative economists/political philosophers of our time, Thomas Sowell. I'll repeat the question: Do you believe Thomas Sowell to be a "pseudo Conservative DNC mouthpiece"?
Mike Savage is not on in my area, that I know of. I actually came to my conclusions on my own.
bttt
It just seemed apt to you because you're ignorant. Is that name calling to you?
It just makes the Michael Moore comparison even more apt.
How in the world did you get that from what I wrote?
The impact, in descending order of primacy, is apparent:
1. The breach of our national perimeter is a breach of our sovereignty as a nation and as a people.
2. The breach of our national perimeter, and the rewarding of those who do so, is a breach of the mainstay of our society, ie, the rule of law.
3. The breach of our national perimeter is a potentially disastrous breach of our national security and an actual breach in the personal security of our people.
4. The breach of our national perimeter is a breach of our national social fabric at a certain point; a point that many of us believe has been passed.
5. The breach of our national perimeter is a breach of our economic life. The costs of the current invasion are huge, affecting wage levels, housing costs, transportation costs, taxes, and the survival of our schools and hospitals, among others.
""NO ONE gets only 100% of what they want the second they want it in politics. Adults understand this and understand why 60% of something is better then 100% of nothing. Only political frauds lying about their real agenda or spoiled children throw a temper tantrum about it.
So which is it, bratty fools or lying frauds?""
I just want to see how many names you can call people (for no apparent reason) in one post . You called me every slimy name in the book a few days ago, and for no reason whatsoever. I neither posted to you, nor criticized you. You have been doing this to a number of FReepers almost every day, even when they don't post to you.
The myth of "Incrementalism" is nothing more than an elaborate excuse for elected Republicans to do nothing.
I have a question for all of you. What happens when the economy (as it inevitably always does) goes in the crapper for a while? When the economic boom that stimulates the demand for the cheap labor dries up, I think one of two things will happen. Either the companies out there will cut loose all of their illegals (no paying unemployment or those other messy results of lay offs), or companies will ramp up the hiring of illegals so they can maximize their margins at the expense of the citizens who they paid a decent wage. I think either scenario could result in some serious social unrest.
In the first scenario, you will have a whole bunch of pi$$ed off poor folks in the country who can't speak the language and have no marketable skills beyond a strong back and a tolerance for bad working conditions. They have already demonstrated a lack of respect for the laws of the country by sneaking in and then demonstrating for and demanding their "rights". This seems like a recipe for riots and unrest.
In the second scenario, you will have a whole bunch of pi$$ed off folks who are legal, taxpaying, citizens losing out to illegals who have taken their jobs. Their resentment of this situation and memories of the aforementioned demands and demonstrations could result in a big backlash against the illegals.
Either situation seems like it has the possibility to cause a real problem in the country. What do all of you think?
By the way. I've never heard Michael Savage's program.
What is your opinion of Dr. Thomas Sowell?
Illegal workers distort the market; I'm amazed that anyone even casually familiar with econonics doesn't weigh this. The wages paid to illegals do not represent the costs of employing them. The public subsidizes these wages through indigent health care and public school load, along with increased crime rates.
Employment in agriculture as a % of workforce has been moving downward for decades. Illegals are slowing (not reversing) this trend. There's not a job that can't be done by an American, mechanized, or eliminated.
Those who say they are doing jobs "Americans won't do," ignored the article. "Jobs Americans won't do at the pay that is being offered," is factually correct. Mow your own freakin lawns, hire the neighbor kid, and pay market rate for child care.
I see. The same tactics for dealing with spoiled brat children need to be applied to the spoiled brat 100%er Freepers . One can either ignore them or swat them. Attempting to reason with them is a waste of time. They simply ignore, or scream at, any one who points out the factual realities to them. So be it then.
For them, my analogy is spot on. In the 30s they'd have been yelling about the kind of precedent it would set to make alcohol legal again.
Oh good grief! Your analogy to Prohibition is a joke! You still don't grasp the issue, do you "professor"...? They resolved the issue/dilemma of Prohibition in the '30's not by deciding not to punish all the people who had been consuming alcohol but, realizing that laws against the consumption and sale of alcohol were just not practical (and actually counterproductive), they suspended all the national anti-alcohol statutes altogether. They simply allowed everyone to go back to drinking drinking alcoholic beverages.
So, if we were to actually handle the illegal immigration dilemma in the same way that they handled the problems with Prohibition in the 1930's, we would basically suspend the laws against illegal entry by immigrants into our country and allow virtually anyone and everyone throughout the world who wanted to come here to do so ( open boders ).
I really don't think that is what even you actually want and that is why your analogy ( obviously ) fails.
Sad, isn't it? Like you, I'm worrying more about myself and less about others. Let them learn on their own hide.
You're both the dumbest and craziest guy on this website. Nice Twofer.
AMEN!
susie
So you don't like Mexicans coming here legally, and you'd prefer not to have low wage worker Mexicans coming here legally either?
What Sowell seemed to be saying was that it would be some kind of "insult" to say we couldn't "enforce the law," i.e., deport all the illegals if we really wanted to. I'm sure that America could do this, if it had the collective will to pay the cost of doing so. But because we do not have the collective will to do this (just as we lacked the will to enforce Prohibition), it does not seem like "an insult," to me at least, to consider some other ways of dealing with the problem.
I support border security, but not any sort of massive security fence. And I also think that I'm not as worried about the impact of Mexican immigration on our national security and social fabric as you and others seem to be.
The only thing you can see from your cranial position is your own intestinal epithelium. I reiterate post #51
Speaking of ingore, I've asked you the same question twice now. I'll try again:
Do you believe Thomas Sowell to be a "pseudo Conservative DNC mouthpiece"? Considering your mental deficiencies, I'll accept a "yes" or "no" answer.
And this time try not to rant about Michael Savage -- no one mentioned him, and he's completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Wow. Is that what passes for debate these days?
susie
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