That's because of the perverse incentive we have in place. No it's not. Come on..., give this more thought.
I lived through the last amnesty and this is what happened:
Illegal immigrants who were granted amnesty were made into lawful permanent residents and as such were bared from leaving to US for a period of more than 90 days. A departure greater than 90 days showed that they had abandoned their lawful status.
Aliens who had been coming and going for seasonal work where FORCED through our stupid policy to maintain a year round residence.
Three and a half million illegal immigrants signed up for legal status and their pathway to citizenship. They had just been given the right to stay here. Why would you surmise this caused every future llegal immigrant to stay permanantly? It doesn't even make sense. We have between 20 and 40 million illegals here today. We gave legal status to 3.5 million illegals, and that caused ten times as many to come and stay here? Well, not for the reason you stated. I think that's clearly evident.
The reason they came and stayed was because the politicians started talking up another amnesty. When Bush did it, a massive wave of illegals flooded across our borders.
This forced them to find work outside of agg or other seasonal professions. They moved into construction and displaced many citizens with their reduced wages. Because they could no longer travel home for the winter they had no choice but to eventually smuggle their familys up. The hole in your theory is this. The new illegal immigrants didn't have anything to lose by going back to Mexico as often as they wanted. Their "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT" status wasn't suddenly going to be revoked. Think about it.
It was the flood of illegals that displaced the American construction workers. The original 3.5 million weren't forced to find other work that wasn't seasonal. That 3.5 million had come over druing the period from roughly 1956 to 1986. They had assimilated along the way. Remember, they never had to go home anymore. It was the tens of millions of others who flooded in that replaced the U. S. citizens. The trades used to be great jobs that could be handed down generation to generation. In a short ten to fifteen year span, those jobs were no longer offered to U. S. citizens. Their ability to earn a living in those trades was gone, and many of them fled the state. This was a problem of lax immigration enforcement, not too strick enforcement. Almost all work-site raids ceased. Business owners could hire illegals openly.
Since many could still only get seasonal work but had rent and bills to pay year round, it was only a matter of time before they started taking advantage of out government hand outs. The dems were and remain all to eager to accommodate them.
Once again you are operating under a false premise. The massive influx of people from roughly 1990 to the present, were not forced to stay here. They stayed here because they hoped for another amnesty, and they also found ways to tap into our government give-away programs. They also accessed our schools. They accessed our medical care. They displaced U. S. workers. They could most of the time get paid under the table and suck our system dry at the same time.
This was good for housing costs and the chamber of commerce types but left agg with a gaping labor shortage into which a new generation of illegals would soon flow.
Wow, you really are making this up as you go aren't you. What happens when you have a massive tsunami of people arrive in twenty years? Quite naturually they need jobs. And there were enough unscrupulous employers out there who were pleased to fire citizens and hire cheap replacements. There was nothing at all related to their status legal vs illegal, that forced these new arrivals to refrain from going back across the border. Many of them did so all the time, going back and forth at will.
So here we are today right back where we started. It was our stupid policies that created this mess and a good policy can help mitigate it.
Boy, you've rally been sucking down the Leftist swill haven't you. I'm not sure where you got this theory, but it falls under the weight of it's own illogic. Our immigration fix in the late 80s didn't force all future illegals to stay here. It forced the 3.5 million who filed and asked to be fast tracked to citizenship to stay. It had no affect whatsoever on the tens of millions of illegal who came subsequent to this. Our polices put in place, did not encourage illegals to stay. One policy that was only talked about did. That policy was a proposed second amnesty that was never enacted.
Most Mexicans who come here illegally just want to make money and take it back to Mexico where it is worth a great deal more. They do not want to maintain a year round residence here because it is expensive and its hard to get year round work. If they could see their families in Mexico they would not bring them here in the first place.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but the current illegals can go home any time they like, no penalty whatsoever. They can come back when they want, as long as they can sneak in again. The fact is, they choose to stay because they are treated so well here, freebies and crooked business owners only too willing to sell our nation out for a buck.
A down side to our increased border security is that illegal aliens don't want to risks going home anymore. I think that is a logical conclusion. One couldn't help but wonder what your fix to that would be. Open the border and allow half of Mexico to hot-foot it up here in the next six months?
Yet another perverse incentive of our current policy. So trying to protect our borders is a perverse policy? Wow... So I guess no border security at all would be good reasoned policy right?
The real difference here is that their must be a clear line between a non-immigrant guest worker and an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence LAPR.
Cut the freebies, education, medical, government handouts. Provide busses to take folks back to the border no questions asked. Start arresting business owners who sell our nation out for a profit. Confiscate businesses.
Let it be known, that any foreign nationals that are caught on our soil after this will be placed in prison for a full year for each offense.
Then let any citizen who thinks this is unfair move to the nation of their choice, that allows their borders to be over-run as they want ours to be. Problem with that is that there isn't a nation on earth that allows what some of our folks want us to do here.