Texas business: Pass immigration reform

The Dallas Morning News ^ | 8/28/06 | Henry Cisneros, Kent Hance, et. al.

[Wallace T.]

Often, in the middle of a heated debate, people forget exactly what they're arguing about. But we employers on the front lines of American business cannot forget - we know why the nation must come to grips with illegal immigration. We know that Americans must face up to the reality of the foreign workers we need to keep the economy growing and bring them under the rule of law, for their sake and ours.

[VOA]

...illegals...(snip)...receive educational, health care, and other
benefits far superior to what they would have had in their native lands.

For illegals from Mexico and points south, I've always presumed making
it into the USA was a no-loser proposition.
Just make an anchor baby and mind your own bidness.

But, if you do get caught doing crime, it's probably an easier living
in a prison than on the street back home.
And you can always sneak back in even if you're deported after
jail/detention time.

[Wallace T.]

Were low paid foreign workers so crucial to national prosperity, how did America enjoy the strong economy we did from the end of World War II to the recession of 1973-74, a period during which immigration into the United States was relatively small? Granted that the post-World War II economy was largely industrial driven, as opposed to the more service oriented and high tech economy of our time, strict enforcement of existing immigration laws would benefit native-born workers and possibly stimulate additional labor saving technology. As an example, when large numbers of blacks left the segregated South of the early and mid-20th Century for industrial employment in Northern cities, mechanized cotton planting and stripping equipment and chemical control of weeds replaced manual field labor.

[ckilmer]

you can't go into any place in the country these days for any public service from drivers lisence to public health without finding that you're the only american there. everyone else is foreign. the US 1960's built system is being totally gamed by foreigners.

[Wallace T.]

What is particularly scary is the fact that what you describe is not only found in the Southwestern states, but in other parts of the country. I understand that illegals are a major source of farm labor in Appalachia and the rural Northeast, as well as the Pacific Northwest. For their sake, I hope Canada does a better job of preventing illegal immigration from Latin America than we do. Someone who picks apples in Washington or Virginia can do the same in British Columbia or Ontario.

[american spirit]

Well.......who's been behind mandated health care and education for illegals, creating a welfare benefit plan that most illegals (and employers) in their wildest of dreams would've never thought possible, anchor baby/chain migration policies, failed to oversee these executive branch "working groups" creating this Bush led-SPP to totally eradicate our sovereignty, etc.? Then, all they do at townhall meetings is hold their hands up saying there's not a lot they can do to solve this mess (they created).......pretty evident where the problem lies......they were named aptly....CONgressMEN.

[gubamyster]

ping

[Wallace T.]

Obviously, illegal migration is a low risk and low cost decision for many Mexicans and Central Americans, with the potential of reward through honest labor, welfare benefits, or crime.

[VOA]

I think one radio host said it well:
"They all got the message: the treasure is just north of the border
and nobody is really guarding it."

[Fiddlstix]

Memo To Henry Cisneros:

Click the Pic

One other thing Henry...you washed up, has been hack...go suck an egg!

[Wallace T.]

One disappointing fact is the number of supposedly conservative public figures that endorsed this call for illegal aliens: former Congressmen Kent Hance and Tom Loeffler and poultry magnate Bo Pilgrim, for example. OTOH, Henry Cisneros has always been a liberal Democrat who pandered to minority bloc voters while holding elective office. You would expect him to endorse such a measure, but not so-called conservatives or Republicans.

[Fiddlstix]

.......You would expect him to endorse such a measure, but not so-called conservatives or Republicans.

Yes. Sad but true.

[Wuli]

Illegal immigration and massive legal immigration begin as economic crutches in a dysfunctional economy or a dysfunctional segment of the economy and metastasize into economic addictions.

Both capital and the consumers dollar are diverted to businesses and segments of the economy that are using cheap imported labor, legal and illegal.

The financial benefits accrue to those businesses, and industry segments, in disproportion to what is accruing in the economy to businesses and industry segments not using cheap imported labor - but accrue to them they do, and to the economy as a whole.

Those accruals of income, become revenue means for the benefiting companies for further capital investment in their preferred business model; advancing the role of imported cheap labor in their segment of business and the economy.

Those same accruals show up as simply "positive" in the total national economic statistics, in spite of the businesses and business segments that are fighting with legal domestic labor to compete in the same industries, or to compete against those industries. Slowly, more of them lose and convert to the imported cheap labor model of their competitors.

Demand for more imported cheap labor rises, the longer it is allowed to go unchecked, because the longer it goes unchecked the more revenue from consumers and capital investment flows to those segments of the economy benefitting from it.

At some point, as we are apparently in already, it becomes an addiction, needing further infusions of more cheap labor to sustain the model the economy has been building on.

It is not a measure of success, it is bubble wrapped in a social time bomb. At some point that social time bomb is going to explode and take the economy - modeled on the expectation of continued infusions of cheap imported labor - with it. Of course the crony capitalists - not the truly "free" enterprises - who built and benefitted from the cheap imported labor model - will declare the fallen economy on "protectionism".

So, let's accept the label and say yes, "protectionism" as in protecting the standard of living our parents were accustomed to, the wages and the jobs that infused that standard and the social environment that underpinned the values that system required to sustain our government and way of life.

The global corporation cares not one twit for those things, for our democracy, our soverignty, our values and our way of life. Their greed will sell us into the mercantilist structure of the Middle East kingdoms and the new fascism represented by the state-capitalism of China and other rising Asian economic centers.

Immigration, massive legal or illegal is the key that globalists are using to unlock us from our own soeverignty and its protections. They know only one freedom, the freedom of capital; whether that capital is a U.S. public company, the capital of a Middle East kingdom-state-corporation (Dubai) or the capital of a communist dictatorship owned and operated company. We and our democratic freedoms are expendable and irrelevant in that pursuit.

[Ben Ficklin]

Your analogy between Mexico and Switzerland omits capitol. It takes both labor and capitol.

This the basis of the relationship between the US and Mexico. The US has plenty of capitol but a shortage of labor. Mexico has plenty of labor but a shortage capitol.

So, US capitol flows into Mexico to use Mexican labor and Mexican labor flows into the US to combine with US capitol.

[Ben Ficklin]

capital

[Wallace T.]

Preventing or at least greatly reducing the influx of illegals into this country should be a lot easier than attempts to control the narcotics trade. Hiding and moving human beings is far more difficult than a few kilos of a controlled substance. Not only the current Administration but also its predecessors as far back as that of Richard Nixon have simply not taken serious efforts in this regard. Any law is only as effective as the ability and willingness of the Executive Branch to enforce that law is enforced.

The "fix" has been in for decades now. The greatest hope we have is a loud and large public reaction to any and all amnesty proposals. As an example, increasing leniency toward criminals after World War II led to a massive crime wave in the 1960s. While both the Democrats and the Rockefeller Republicans, as well as the MSM, promoted leniency and "understanding" the criminals, citing sociological babble about their being "socially deprived," public reaction increasingly favored tougher sentencing. George Wallace's electoral successes in 1968 and the election of "law 'n' order" mayors even in liberal cities like Minneapolis and Philadelphia started a turning of the tide away from permissiveness. Nixon and Reagan appointees to the Supreme Court gradually chipped away at the anti-police and prosecution decisions of the Warren Supreme Court. By the early 1990s, liberal governors like Mario Cuomo in New York and Ann Richards in Texas were being defeated for re-election, in part due to their persistent opposition to the death penalty and to private ownership of firearms.

Turning around the current posture of non-enforcement of immigration laws may take a couple of decades. However, it is necessary if we have any chance of keeping the United States American in the customary sense.

[Wuli]

I have no argument against what you said.

I do question that we, the people, have the will to succeed, through democratic means, in stemming and reversing the tide of illegal immigration and excessive legal immigration before (1)illegal immigrants become majorities in some localities in the nation, (2)the "North American" project continues unabated and continues to undermine our legal abilities to stem the tide and (3)the people's democratic means for changing course becomes limited beyond the means needed to change it (via the courts + treaties + sheepish legislators, etc.)

We are heading down a slippery slope and the longer we keep sliding the economic addiction to current conditions, the will to change current conditions and the democratic means to changing current conditions keep eroding. I fear that at some point every democratic and legal lever will be forcefully in place against change, before "we the people" act, in which "we the people" will be at a 1776 point in history.

The only thing that will slow this train, a bit, in the immediate sense is that if no "immigration reform" bill escapes the legislature for quite a number of sessions, until current law, as is, begins to be actually and forcefully enforced.

I repeatedly described in these posts how current law, as is, needs nothing additional to stop the use of phony or stolen social securty numbers. It is a crime to use such numbers and it is a crime to knowingly participate in their use.

The IRS knows every single use of phony social security numbers (numbers never issued by social security) and every social security number used by fraud (a number is newly showing up in a new location (another employer's quarterly tax payments) while it is still be reported from the same location its been used from for many years. The IRS separates the FICA and income tax payments for those numbers. In fact, it knows today exactly how much it has in a separate social security account for the "unassigned" payments.

By an executive order to the Director of the IRS, the President can instruct that the law be enforced, in the following steps.

When the IRS recieves a tax payment and that payment includes payment of FICA and or income tax for phony social security numbers or numbers suspected of being used fraudulently:

Step one - the IRS refuses (does not cash) the payment, and informs the payee (employer or self-employed individual) of the error and that any payments that include payments for the bad social security will not be accepted.

Step two (next quarter) - the IRS re-issues the notice in step one, if the problem continues, and adds a notice of last quarter's unpaid taxes; or issues a "thank you" note if the bad social security number is no longer part of the payment.

Step three (next quarter)- as/if the problem continues the IRS notifies the employer/individual of all previous related notices and pending legal action to go after the payee for back uncollected taxes.

Step four (next quarter) - as/if the problem continues, the notice comes from the IRS legal department and notifies the payee that legal action has begun to collect the back taxes and legal action is pending to attach the payee's assets to obtain those payments.

"Legal" hiring and employing of illegal immigrants operating on phony and fraudulent social security numbers will end within one year; with no change in existing law, no "special" national worker ID cards and no manhunt for illegal immigrants. Companies and even small employers would rather survive than ruin their own companies and their own credit-worthiness to protect their use of illegal immigrants.

It would not matter how many "illegals" tried to come on a tourist visa and then stay, if legal employers could and would not hire them. They would be no more than the marginal, small "underground" workforce they always were before their numbers mushroomed and enforcement went into the tank.

[Republicus2001]

I just want to know why can't the phony immigrants and criminal aliens just use their Mexican ID's and be done with it? Perfectly legal here!