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To: Oshkalaboomboom

****Our country is a magnet. Our way of life, our freedoms, our opportunities … all a magnet; a magnet much more powerful than giving some long-time illegal (but otherwise law-abiding) residents a break.****

OK Boortz, lets compromise. All illegal aliens who have used our freedoms and opportunities to enrich themselves and their families and have done so in a manner true to the American dream can stay. Any illegal who has taken other peoples money to sponge off that other persons American dream can be deported back from whence they came. How many do you think would qualify to stay Neal? 3% sound reasonable? 6%? You might be surprised by how low that number is. We should do what we did in the beginning again, take the best and deport the rest.


16 posted on 11/29/2011 3:44:20 AM PST by ResponseAbility (Islam...Imperialism in a turban.)
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To: ResponseAbility

Neither 3% nor 6% sounds in the least bit reasonable because you have absolutely no reliable data to back those numbers up - unless, of course, you’re smarter, and more informed, than the Kaiser Foundation, the RAND Corporation, the CBO (under GWB), and on and on and ...etc, etc, etc, all of whom have made serious efforts to quantify the costs and benefits of illegal immigrants and have found that it is almost impossible to do so reliably and without making assumptions about core issues that, if changed slightly, dramatically change the results.

About the only really reliable conclusions seem to be that there is a mismatch between costs incurred and revenues received because the states tend to bear more of the costs, and the federal government to receive more of the revenues, but that the additional revenues to the federal government are not fed back to the states to cover the additional costs the states incur. For example, every year the Social Security Administration holds several billion dollars in a suspense account that represents payroll taxes that cannot be associated with a valid social security number. Those funds are not currently used to reimburse states for the costs they incur; if those funds were so used, then the current imbalance would be rectified, at least to some degree.

That issue is aggravated by the fact that even though federal law prohibits the provision of federal benefits to illegal immigrants, federal law mandates that the states provide various types of benefits to people without regard to any recipient’s immigration status.

So, the only conclusions that can be drawn are, basically, (a) no one knows, and the data have not heretofor been collected to test, whether illegal immigrants pose a net cost or a net benefit to the country, (b) there is a significant mismatch between which level of government incurs expenses and which receives the revenues associated with illegal immigrants, which obscures the issue and makes it much harder to derive any meaningful conclusions about whether illegal immigrants are a net cost or a net benefit to the country as a whole, and (c) the apparent costs of illegal immigrants to state and local governments are aggravated by federal immigration and social entitlements policy, which prohibit illegals from receiving federal benefits but mandate that states provide benefits without regard to immigration status.

A more sensible place to start fixing things, then, has very little to do with draconian, “heartless” policies like thuggish roundups of anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant or Quixotic, idiotic policies like building some trillion-dollar wall along the entire border with Mexico, and has a lot to do with aligning those costs and benefits that do occur and by changing federal law regarding the benefits that states are required to provide and by using excess social security funds that cannot be associated with a social security number to offset the costs that the states incur for providing those services (of course, that would also have the effect of bringing the social security ponzi scheme even closer to bankruptcy than it already is, but that’s a different discussion for a different thread).


21 posted on 11/29/2011 4:24:01 AM PST by Oceander (TINSTAAFL - Mother Nature Abhors a Free Lunch almost as much as She Abhors a Vacuum)
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To: ResponseAbility

We should secure the border first. Then cut off federal funding to any sanctuary cities second. Then- work on getting rid of the anchor baby bill. That is the true magnet of illegal immigration. Born here, you are automatically a citizen of the US.


33 posted on 11/29/2011 7:35:53 AM PST by Engedi (Hec)
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