One of the problems is that we need a comprehensive immigration overhaul, not just little stabs at fixing individual problems.
We need to create short-term visas and many more legal slots for Latin Americans, who are most logically the ones who will come here to work, and do away with things like “humanitarian refugees,” virtually all of whom now are Muslims brought in from Africa or the ME. The latter group also uses the “family unification” dodge to bring in their elderly and just about anybody related to them, so we end up with a large group of immigrants who may be legal, but are totally useless and go directly onto various forms of state aid.
At the same time, we have stupid situations such as the one that affects one of my neighbors. She’s German and was married to an American. She has 2 (now adult) children who were born here and are thus US citizens and she owns property here. However, when she and her husband got divorced, she lost her green card and is prohibited from coming back into the US now for more than 90 days at a time. She has been to immigration attorneys and struggled with immigration rules for years, with no success. This is clearly unfair, idiotic and actually deprives us of somebody who would be a great citizen or even legal resident of the US.
As for non-emergency (long term) medical expenses for illegal immigrants, I have always thought that the governments of those countries should be billed. And if they don’t pay it, take it out of their foreign aid. This would give those countries some incentive to come up with ways of dealing with this and also some incentive to do better on controling the flow of immigrants.
But as long as we hack away at it piecemeal, we’re not going to solve the problem. However, every time anybody (such as Bush) suggests that we need reform and suggests even the glimmering of a plan, he is reviled and shot down without even giving the plan any discussion. So this, to me, means that so-called conservatives are happy with the chaotic state of affairs now and really don’t want to deal with the issue.
There is an obvious solution for long-term-care of these illegals...DEPORTATION!
There can be NO reform or workable plan without first securing the border. That has been proven over and over, no point in doing the same thing and expecting different results. Any “plan” that in any way helps illegals causes more illegals to pour into this country and as long as the border is not secure even speaking of such solutions only creates more problems. The only “plan” we ever hear boils down to amnesty and amnesty should NEVER be considered in any way without a secure border.